A D E C E N T S TA N DA R D O F LIVING
As worrisome as the unemployment rate is the rate of marginally attached workers in California, the highest in the nation at 123.6 per 10,000.27 Marginally attached workers are adults who are available to work, but have stopped trying to find employment. These individuals, who have looked for work within the past year but not in the prior four weeks, are not included in standard unemployment counts. Including them paints a still bleaker picture of California’s labor market. Unemployment has spared no group of Californians; even Silicon Valley Shangri-La and Metro-Coastal Enclave California have relatively high (from a historical perspective) unemployment rates of about 8 percent. In the early days of the recession, in fact, job loss among the middle-class and affluent dominated the news coverage. Yet closer examination reveals a recession with employment impacts that diverged sharply by educational attainment as well as by race, age, and place. •
Education. In 2009, the statewide unemployment rate was 9.8 percent overall—but it was just 3.8 percent for those with graduate or professional degrees and 6.1 percent for those with a bachelor’s degree. Those whose highest degree was a high school diploma fared worse, with an unemployment rate of 12.2 percent, and adults who did not complete high school registered an unemployment rate of 17.3 percent.28
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Race. Race was also a hugely consequential factor in unemployment rates; in 2010, the unemployment rate for African American men stood at 22.2 percent, 10 percentage points higher than the statewide rate.29 Disproportionate rates of incarceration among African American men drive high unemployment rates for this group (See B OX 3 ).
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Age. Young job seekers have struggled to find a foothold in the labor market; for workers ages 16−19, a full third of those looking for work in 2010 did not find jobs.30
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Place. Unemployment rates vary significantly by place. In 2010, El Centro had the highest unemployment rate among California cities at an astonishing 28 percent; Fresno, Modesto, Stockton, and Yuba City registered rates above 17 percent. All the California metropolitan areas with unemployment rates below the state average, on the other hand, lay along the coast.31
A P O R T R A I T O F CA L I FO R N I A 2 0 1 1
Unemployment has spared no group of Californians.
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