By Julianne Malveaux
(Trice Edney Wire) – Labor economists like me mark our calendars for the first Friday of each month, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases The Employment Situation. In February, that report did not arrive on schedule. According to BLS, a partial government shutdown temporarily suspended data processing and dissemination, delaying the January jobs report.
Many economists have built careers around these numbers, and we are right to rely on them. But moments like this also remind us that labor statistics are produced within institutions that are meant to be independent, but are not immune to political pressure. The Commissioner of Labor Statistics is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to a four-year term. While the position is designed to be apolitical, recent disruptions have underscored how fragile public trust in economic data can be.
Still, we do not need official numbers to know that many workers — especially Black workers — are living through an era of fragile employment. Federal layoffs, private-sector retrenchment, reduced hours, frozen hiring, and stalled mobility are being felt long before they are fully captured in headline data.
Recent job growth has been weak by historical standards. Gains have slowed markedly over the last several months, reinforcing a sense of economic brittleness despite political claims of strength. The official unemployment rate, 4.4 percent in December, appears low — but it does not tell the whole truth.
It excludes discouraged workers who have stopped looking for jobs. It excludes people working part time who want full-time hours. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ broader measure of labor underutilization — which captures these realities — stood at 8.4 percent in December.
Historically, Black unemployment runs well above the overall rate, and that relationship has been remarkably consistent across business cycles. Applying that same pattern to underutilization yields what I call the Malveaux Index: an estimated Black labor underutilization rate of approximately 14.3 percent. This is not an official statistic, but a way of amplifying what headline numbers obscure — that labor market “strength” looks very different depending on where one stands.
For Black workers, this level of underutilization is recession-level distress. But no index is required to recognize what many Black Americans are already living.
For generations, Black labor has functioned as an early warning system for economic distress. When jobs disappear, hours are cut, or wages stall, Black workers experience it first and most intensely — not because of individual failings, but because the structure of the labor market places them closest to its fault lines.
Today’s fragility is not always announced by mass layoffs. It shows up quietly: in shortened schedules, unpredictable shifts, frozen promotions, and the constant anxiety that accompanies each paycheck. A worker can be technically “employed” and still be economically insecure. A job can exist without providing dignity, stability, or a future.
This is where official statistics fall short — and where Black narrative steps in.
Black workers are disproportionately concentrated in retail, hospitality, caregiving, transportation, logistics, and public-facing service work. In these sectors, employers often cut hours before cutting jobs. A ten-hour reduction in a workweek does not register as unemployment, but it can mean the difference between rent and eviction, medication and delay, food and scarcity.
Data rarely captures fear. It does not measure exhaustion. It does not record the psychic toll of holding onto work that no longer pays enough to live, or the humiliation of being grateful for employment that offers no path forward.
This is why Black literature, Black journalism, and Black cultural institutions matter so profoundly in this moment. Long before economists spoke of “hidden unemployment” or “labor market slack,” Black writers documented the truth of work under constraint — jobs that damaged bodies, wages that never caught up, and systems designed to extract labor without offering security in return.
From early twentieth-century narratives of agricultural labor to contemporary writing on gig work, care labor, and economic survival, Black writers have chronicled labor not as abstraction but as lived condition. They have shown how race, class, gender, and geography shape who works, who waits, and who is discarded when conditions tighten.
A low unemployment rate does not signal a healthy labor market if workers cannot move, cannot bargain, and cannot survive on what they earn. A stable job count does not mean stability if wages lag inflation and savings have already been depleted. An economy that leaves Black workers anxious, immobile, and overworked is not strong — it is brittle.
Work has never been just work for Black Americans. It is bound up with dignity, citizenship, survival, and voice. When the jobs report misleads — or goes missing altogether — it is Black work, in all its forms, that tells the truth.
Dr. Julianne Malveaux is a DC based economist and author. Reach her at www..juliannemalveaux.com. Subscribe to her newsletter at [email protected]
