Government Job Cuts Threaten Black Middle Class

This should not be surprising to anyone.  This is why it is so important that we understand what is happening not only in DC, but also locally.  I don't think some of us realize how the loss of government jobs has hit the African American community the hardest. Stay informed people!!!

The planned downsizing of the U.S. Postal Service, which wants to shed thousands of jobs and reduce hours at post offices, struck Baltimore native Eric Easter at his core.

For him, it will mark the end of an era in which a post office job has meant stability and a path to a better life, as it did for him and his six siblings living in public housing in the 1960s.

"You hate to see that disappear," says the 49-year-old Easter, now a documentary filmmaker and producer, who describes his mother's hiring at the post office as a defining moment in his childhood.

"It meant moving to a nicer neighborhood, sort of establishing that I have a place in the world," Easter says. "I remember my mom having cocktail parties, and she and her co-workers could hold their heads up among teachers and other folks as people who had taken solid positions in the middle class."

Rivaled only by the manufacturing industry, postal and other government jobs built the modern black middle class.

Blacks are 30 percent more likely than nonblacks to work in the public sector, according to the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education. And roughly 21 percent of black workers are public employees, compared with 16.3 percent of nonblacks.

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