Even before COVID-19, people of color experienced poverty and unemployment at disproportionately high rates. Now, people of color are experiencing devastating health and economic impacts because of the pandemic. The most recent data show nearly 17 percent unemployment among Black jobseekers and nearly 19 percent unemployment among Latinx jobseekers. Moreover, the data shows that people of color who are still employed are working in low-quality, underpaid jobs that increase their risk of contracting and dying of COVID-19. These racial inequities are unacceptable. Employment program stakeholders can and must do better—especially the public workforce system.
The public workforce system faces some external challenges to racial equity in employment that it cannot control, such as employer discrimination and public funding cuts. However, the system has also compounded racial inequities through its own policies and practices. For example, prohibiting children at American Job Centers, instituting restrictive program eligibility criteria, or under-resourcing supportive services can effectively exclude low-income jobseekers of color who are facing barriers to employment from engaging in services. The system is not serving these jobseekers at meaningful rates. In 2018, only 0.2 percent of people exiting WIOA programming were about to exhaust TANF benefits, only 3.5 percent were experiencing homelessness, and only 10.3 percent were justice-involved. These jobseekers are disproportionately Black, face significant barriers to employment, and are likely experiencing poverty. They are the very jobseekers the public workforce system is tasked with serving, and it is failing them.
Achieving racial equity in employment and economic opportunity will require large-scale investments, multi-level policy changes, structural transformation, and the work of numerous stakeholders. It will also require workforce leaders and staff to acknowledge and challenge their own implicit bias. As states and localities begin to address the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are steps the public workforce system can take now to center and advance racial equity. Doing so will help ensure that this system benefits the people who have been hardest hit by the pandemic and historically denied access to opportunity: people of color.
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- Center the voices of impacted populations. Achieving racial equity requires centering the voices of people of color with lived expertise. Local Workforce Development Boards should convene a diverse group of public workforce system stakeholders across various levels of leadership to participate in work to advance racial equity. This group should also include employment program participants of color with lived expertise of chronic unemployment. Including input of impacted groups in decisions about the design and delivery of employment programming and policies guiding local workforce systems is a critical step, but on its own does not ensure progress toward racial equity.
- Evaluate data and data-collection processes. Public workforce systems are required to collect certain data about the people they serve. These data should be used to answer questions about racial inequity in the types of employment services provided as well as the outcomes of those services. Workforce service providers must ensure that data are complete and accurate, and they must collect race-related data elements that may not be required such as history of incarceration or housing status. Workforce development systems should use these data to make the strongest possible case to stakeholders for the need to address racial inequity.
- Set racial equity goals and define key terms. Identifying goals and benchmarks explicitly related to redressing racial disparities within the public workforce development system is a way to hold the system accountable for change. The process of defining these goals will require that communities are on the same page about what racial equity would look like within their community and their system. It will also require stakeholders to collectively define key terms related to racial equity, such as implicit bias and anti-Blackness, among others. There are resources that can help define and differentiate among the terms that pertain to this work.
- Partner with employers to define and support their role in this work. Public workforce system leaders should support employers with tools to advance racial equity. This could include educating employer partners about training in racial equity and in trauma-informed care, promoting training as a requirement for partnership, and/or developing and implementing practices that will increase sustainable placement for workers of color, such as new-hire cohorts and trauma-informed management strategies. In other words, workforce development systems and providers should adopt approaches that “prepare jobs for people” rather than “prepare people for jobs,” and support employer partners in doing the same.
- Adopt an inclusive approach to service provision. Jobseekers of color and those who face significant barriers to work are disproportionately excluded from employment opportunities because public workforce agencies use subjective methods to determine “work-readiness” and because of policies and eligibility requirements that make it harder to access and stay engaged in programming. Instead, public workforce systems should adopt a zero-exclusion approach to service provision. This approach assumes employability and motivation; understands the impact that trauma and structural barriers can have on jobseeker behavior and performance; uses assessments to determine service needs rather than to screen out participants; and eliminates exclusionary policies, rules, and practices.
