Best-Ever Job Market for Hispanic Women Wiped Out by Covid
Since February, as the coronavirus wiped out tens of millions of jobs, the unemployment rate soar to 15.3% in June from 4.9%
(Bloomberg) -- At the start of the year, Cristabel Martinez was part of the best story in the U.S. labor market.
Today, she is part of the worst.
Since February, as the coronavirus pandemic wiped out tens of millions of jobs, Hispanic women like Martinez have watched the unemployment rate for their community soar to 15.3% in June from 4.9% in a matter of months.
The job losses punctuate the end of a historic run of prosperity for Latinos, who had seen a steady rise in employment since 2011. Hispanic women, a cohort of about 12 million, now have one of the highest unemployment rates among racial groups.
Their pain is part of the broader buckling of the American economy, which ground to a halt in March and is struggling to recover. The overall jobless rate in June lingered at 11.1%, higher than the peak in the financial crisis a decade ago. And households are trying to survive or rebuild with just months to go before the presidential election.
The virus outbreak shattered businesses where many Latinos, in particular, worked -- from restaurants powered by a once booming economy, to cleaning services for households with income to spare. Hispanics also make up roughly half of agricultural workers in the country and a third of those in food manufacturing, according to UnidosUS, a Hispanic civil-rights advocacy organization.
The July employment report due next week will show whether they’ve clawed back any ground or lost more. But either way, many fear the pandemic will set them back for years to come.
In a line for food donations in Manassas, Virginia, with dozens of other Hispanic women earlier this month, Martinez had little hope that her job would soon return.
“They haven’t called since March,” said Martinez, a mother of three who was a housekeeper for families in the Northern Virginia suburbs.
Another woman there, Adriana Morales, said she lost her job as a seamstress catering to events like baptisms and weddings.
Whether the recovery touches workers like Martinez and Morales -- and millions like them -- will figure heavily in America’s future.
At the beginning of the year, more Hispanic women were in the labor force than any time in more than four decades of record keeping -- and their earnings had picked up.
College degree attainment for their cohort was rising, offering them opportunities in more types of roles. And a record 128,000 Hispanic women received a PhD last year.
Women make up about 55% of the Culinary Union, which organizes labor in the Las Vegas casino and hotel industries, and more than half of its members are Hispanic.
Culinary Union members “are cleaning rooms, they are serving drinks, they are cleaning the casinos, and they are cleaning the bathrooms,” Geoconda Arguello-Kline, the union’s secretary-treasurer, said in an interview.
Those types of jobs have put them at increased risk of contracting the virus. The Culinary Union said it has lost 28 people or immediate family of members to the virus, and since the casinos reopened June 4 hospitalizations have increased to 43 from 5.
Virus Cases
In states like Nevada and California, where Hispanics make up a large percentage of the population, they account for the highest share of cases. In Virginia’s Prince William County health district, which includes Manassas, Latinos represent 61% of hospitalizations.
The disproportional impact is so notable that the health department and the CDC conducted a door-to-door neighborhood survey last month. Some 47% of those surveyed had lost a job, had hours reduced or had someone in their household who had lost a job, according to a Virginia Department of Health-CDC report seen by Bloomberg.
The CARES Act passed by the federal government to support Americans in the pandemic benefited Latino families in the form expanded unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and opportunities to defer mortgage and student loan payments.
However, it contained a clause that denied stimulus checks to families where one spouse didn’t have a Social Security number, which caused many Hispanic families to fall through the cracks, said Carlos Guevara, associate director for immigration initiatives at UnidosUS.
Many Latino families now rely on non-governmental support from churches and food banks like those staffing the distribution site at Manassas’s Georgetown South neighborhood, which on a sweltering July day looked like a Nascar pit stop. A crew of volunteers opened the trunk and passenger doors, filling them with bags containing rice, beans, peanut butter, green produce, milk and eggs within minutes before the next car rolled up.
“Overwhelmingly, we are seeing need and people in pretty desperate straits,” said Donnie Cohn, an associate pastor at McLean Bible Church, which is distributing food at 20 sites around the Washington DC area and helping 300 to 500 families at a time.
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.