Surprising Job Gains Are Good News — But Not For Everyone
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2020
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
It looks like another weekend of protests across the country. And that means more people could be exposed to tear gas, pepper spray and other "chemical irritants" that trigger — among other things — coughing and sneezing. Two things people are trying to avoid during this pandemic.
Americans are skipping payments on mortgages, auto loans and other bills due to the economic impact of the pandemic. And as NPR's Chris Arnold reports, for some, catching up is going to be painful.
Plus, the coronavirus has hit people of color especially hard. As Harvard's David Williams writes in an article for the Washington Post, before COVID-19, Black Americans were already struggling with the health effects of everyday discrimination. The pandemic is only making it worse.
And NPR's Short Wave team takes us to San Francisco where Hispanics and Latinxs make up 46% of all coronavirus cases — but they make up just 15% of the population.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today, for some people, there was good news. |
| 0:03.2 | That economists did not expect. |
| 0:06.0 | Despite the pandemic and the protests and the pain of this moment, |
| 0:11.1 | about 2.5 million people went off unemployment in May. |
| 0:17.2 | A lot of those people work in restaurants and bars, |
| 0:19.8 | which are reopening all over. |
| 0:22.4 | But still, the unemployment rate is the highest it's been in generations. |
| 0:27.0 | And for black Americans, there was no improvement. |
| 0:29.8 | The way that I like to summarize what's going on in the COVID-19 economy |
| 0:33.8 | is that there are basically three main groups of workers. |
| 0:36.6 | Valerie Wilson, with the Economic Policy Institute, says there's one group |
| 0:40.9 | who have lost their jobs. |
| 0:42.6 | Then there are the essential workers to keep working, even though it puts them at risk of getting sick. |
| 0:48.5 | And then there's a third group, people who've been okay because they mostly are working from home. |
| 0:54.5 | Black workers are least likely to be in that last group. |
| 0:57.9 | So you're either facing elevated economic insecurity |
| 1:01.2 | or you're having to make difficult choices between economic security and health security. |
| 1:07.2 | Coming up, we know the virus has hit Latino and Hispanic Americans hard too. |
| 1:12.2 | But some simply can't afford to find out they are positive. |
| 1:16.0 | This is coronavirus daily from NPR. |
| 1:18.0 | I'm Kelly McEvers. |
| 1:19.4 | It's Friday, June 5th. |
... |
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