One story was told in the headlines last week following the release of data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Stunning jobs report,” said Politico. CNBC said the report showed a “surprisingly powerful gain.” And CNN added this take: “Here’s what makes the jobs report ‘shocking.’”
Even President Joe Biden had a good time. “This morning’s report caps off my first year as president,” he said. “And over that period, our economy created 6.6 million jobs — 6.6 million jobs. If you can’t remember another year when so many people went to work in this country, there’s a reason: It never happened.”
According to a Brookings Institution report, the numbers for Indigenous people show that the labor market is leaving Indigenous people behind.
“While the nation’s topline unadjusted unemployment rate was 4.4% in January, the unemployment rate among Native American workers was an extraordinarily high 11.1%,” write Robert Maxim, Randall Akee and Gabriel R. Sanchez. “Nearly two years into the recovery, Native American workers are contending with a labor market that would be considered catastrophic if it was reflective of the full economy.”
The data are now readily available, so the report is equally striking.
“It was the first time, in my opinion, a historic data release,” said Maxim, a senior research associate at Brookings in Washington, D.C. and a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a report every month on labor, but it does not include any information about Native American workers. This means that there was a gap in the economy’s performance because it did not include Native Americans in general.
“I think that largely left us out of the discussion when it came to how the labor market was doing,” Maxim said.
The Brookings report shows that Native Americans had a higher unemployment rate than other racial groups before the pandemic, “with a 7.5% unemployment rate in February 2020. As the pandemic took hold, the Native American unemployment rate jumped to an astonishing 28.6% — a level comparable to national unemployment during the Great Depression.”
Even with the recovery, Native Americans have an unemployment rate “that’s two and a half times higher than the nation as a whole,” Maxim said. Those could be considered “crisis levels,” he said.
Maxim said one of the goals of the analysis was to highlight the problem of measuring unemployment and to show that “Native people have had a much more difficult time with this pandemic than the United States as a whole.”
Health disparities, made worse by the pandemic, can lead to worse economic outcomes. He said: “If you’re not healthy enough to work, if you’re just trying to stay alive, you can’t even think about your economic well being. You’re just trying to survive.”
It’s that very difficulty that shows up in the employment numbers.
Brookings also discusses improving economic reporting’s data quality, beyond January employment news.
“I mentioned in the piece that this data only identifies people that self- identify as American Indian or Alaskan Native alone. Why is this important? Well, 61 percent of Native people identify as two or more races, it’s the highest of any racial or ethnic group,” Maxim said. “You’re effectively excluding three out of every five Native people in the data about them.”
He said it’s a lot like skipping states and ignoring all of the data.
“People would say that that’s of course not representative,” he said.
This requires the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics both to rethink how they collect data. “Now it’s time to kind of ask this broader question about how we as a country think about Native people,” he said.
