Comedian Mort Saul is attributed with the classic line that, if the NYT were to report on a nuclear apocalypse, their headline would be: “World Ends: Woman and Minorities Hardest Hit.”
Enter the NYT with a piece actually titled “Public-Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard“.
Roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs. They are about 30 percent more likely to have a public sector job than non-Hispanic whites, and twice as likely as Hispanics.
Of public sector cutbacks:
Because blacks hold a disproportionate share of the jobs, relative to their share of the population, the cutbacks naturally hit them harder.
The NYT then provides ‘objective’ background history on how blacks came to be so overrepresented in the public sector workforce:
Thanks to a series of presidential executive orders and court decisions that began in the 1960s, a rapidly expanding public sector welcomed blacks and women who had been locked out of other corners of the labor market. With the federal government paving the way, state and local governments soon followed, and they continued to expand their work forces through the late 2000s even as the size of the federal government stabilized.
And, of course, we have our villains with their latent racism:
Supporters of curbs on the collective bargaining power of government employee unions like the one led by Mr. Walker, of Wisconsin, said they were aimed at saving taxpayer money and improving efficiency.
But some researchers and union officials also see a racial undercurrent in the campaigns.
“With public employment in general being under attack, it’s really an attack on these communities,” said Mr. Bodner of the Philadelphia transit workers union, referring to black people.
Sigh.
