Hispanics earn less than whites, African-Americans

Published April 01, 2011

Washington – Latinos earn less than whites or African Americans, the U.S. Labor Department says in a report released Thursday.

"There are 50.5 million Latinos in the country," Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said in a conference call to present The Hispanic Labor Force in the Recovery, the first study of Latino workers at the national level.

"At nearly 23 million, people of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity represented 15 percent of the United States' labor force in 2010. By 2018, Hispanics are expected to comprise 18 percent of the labor force," the report says.

The document said that while the recession officially ended in July 2009, overall unemployment peaked at 10.1 percent in October of that year, when joblessness among whites reached a high point of 9.4 percent.

Black unemployment peaked in April 2010 at 16.5 percent, while the Hispanic jobless rate topped out at 13.2 percent last November.

Last year, 59 percent of Hispanics 16 and older had jobs, compared with 59.4 percent among whites and 52.3 percent of blacks.

Black women, however, were more likely to be employed than their white or Latino counterparts.

A big disparity was seen in the educational level of the employed, with 36.1 percent of whites older than 25 holding a university degree in 2010 compared to 26 percent of blacks and 16.9 percent of Hispanics.

Those figures are significant because of the close link - across all racial and ethnic groups - between educational attainment and high employment levels

For example, while the average unemployment rate for Hispanics with at least a university degree was 6 percent, it rose to 11.5 percent for Latinos with only a high school diploma and to 13.2 percent for Hispanics who did not finish high school.

Boosting educational attainment is one of the "principal challenges" facing the Latino community, Solis said.

Hispanic workers earned an average of $535 a week in 2010, far below the average weekly earnings of whites and blacks - $765 and $611, respectively.

Surprisingly, however, gender inequality in wage earnings was much less among Hispanics than among whites.

On average, Hispanic women earn 10.2 percent less than Latino men, while white women are paid 24.8 percent less than their male counterparts.

The least gender inequality was seen among blacks, with women's salaries 6.9 percent lower than those of men.

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