The unemployment crisis is even worse than you think.

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There’s no positive interpretation of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report from Friday, which projected that the United States’ economy only added 22,000 jobs in August, the weakest labor-market gain in five years. The unemployment rate rose to 4.3 percent, reaching its highest level since 2021. (If we look to before the COVID recession, the last time we’d seen this much unemployment was in 2017.) About 25 percent of those unemployed workers have been job-hunting for six months or more—the highest proportion of long-term seekers in nearly a decade. This already frustrating task will not get easier: For the first time since 2021, there are more unemployed job-seekers than available openings.

The contributing trendlines have been deeply felt: soaring layoffs, caution in hiring, record levels of private debt, depressed consumer spending, a spike in jobless claims. In recent months, opportunity declines could be traced to certain sectors, but the employment crisis has bloated. Manufacturing is down, predictably hobbled by Trump’s slapdash tariffs; trade and transportation are shedding gigs for the same reason; health care, one of the year’s more resilient sources of job growth, is also buckling under the pressure, and it will struggle all the more once the federal Medicaid cuts hit and reduce services in lower-income and rural-area hospitals. The best that could be said for many other once thriving industries is that they didn’t lose much—but they didn’t grow substantively, either.

And within the data, there’s an especially dire indicator of where everyday Americans stand: the rise in the Black unemployment rate. The bureau’s demographic breakdowns unambiguously demonstrate that these stunted economic conditions have fallen hardest on Black Americans. Unemployment for the demographic group stood at 7.5 percent in August, up from 6 percent in May. In an analysis, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies pointed out that this is the worst Black unemployment rate since late 2021, and that unemployment for young Black workers shot up to 16.8 percent even as overall young-worker unemployment fell slightly. The record job gains that Black workers recorded in 2023 have been reverted.

“It’s very alarming,” Gabrielle Smith Finnie, a senior policy analyst with the Joint Center, told Slate. “Each jobs report since the summer shows an unsteady labor market and its disproportionate impact on Black workers.” Usually, Black unemployment may outpace the national average by 2 percentage points; right now, there’s a 3-point difference. “We know there is a grave disparity, and it has been increasing.”

This grim development reflects that the mass government firings carried out early in the year are finally showing up in the broader data, following the lawsuits, severance periods, and rehiring spurts that made employment statuses uncertain for so long. Black Americans make for a substantial share of federal labor, from department gigs in D.C. to on-the-ground postal work everywhere. Elon Musk’s DOGE crusade, which infamously singled out diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as a target and enlisted inexperienced lackeys with often explicitly racist views, thus hit Black federal workers and governmental contractors hardest. (The irony, as ProPublica reported, is that some of the Black women purged as part of “anti-DEI” efforts had onboarded DEI programs that were instated under the first Trump administration.)

It goes beyond Uncle Sam. The DEI rollbacks have also come for the private sector, inspiring the young Black workers affected most by the fallout to stage impassioned and effective boycotts of certain firms. The trade and transportation sectors—singled out by BLS as part of the employment decline—tend to hire many Black men in particular and have been hit by Trump administration attacks on those sectors, rattled by yawning tariffs on one end and left out to dry by a lack of federal transit funding on another. The adversity compounds as these unemployed workers pull back their spending, undercutting the bottom lines of many Black-owned small businesses, even those with affluent or diversified customer bases. (Last year, various surveys found that Black women are the fastest-growing demographic of entrepreneurs in the country.)

Other Trump moves that may not seem directly economic in nature have accentuated impacts on these workers. Black immigrants who lack permanent legal status tend to be rounded up and deported at an excessive rate; the suppressive environment engendered by immigration raids and Trump-directed troop invasions in cities like D.C. have chilled foot traffic at Black-owned businesses. This is made worse as Trump’s belligerence angers (or directly keeps out) foreign visitors who would otherwise visit places like New Orleans and New York and splurge on the local scene.

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However distanced you may feel from these effects, it’s worth pointing out that historically, what happens to Black workers comes to afflict all of America. In a Tuesday op-ed for Time, sociologist Marianne Cooper and economist Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman underlined the point that “Black women are overrepresented in precarious jobs characterized by low wages, little security, and few benefits and underrepresented in the highest paying careers.” To put it another way: These workers become a kind of “canary in the coal mine” during economic headwinds. Sometimes this manifests in even more alarming ways. “Before the financial crisis of 2008, Black women were already getting higher rates of subprime loans and people didn’t address it,” added Opoku-Agyeman, the author of The Double Tax: How Women of Color Are Overcharged and Underpaid. She pointed to analysis from the late economist William Spriggs, who’d stated in 2016 that “if the Fed had noticed in the latter half of 2007 that Latino and African-American unemployment rates were rising, it might have understood a significant problem was on the horizon.”

Another significant problem may be coming, as more Black women exit the workforce altogether. This time, Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley has sent a letter to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to warn him in advance.

During his pre-COVID congressional speeches, President Donald Trump would often cite record-low Black unemployment rates as a “proud” accomplishment of his. This term, he’ll certainly be to blame for the rising unemployment rates for Americans of all races.

This piece has been updated to clarify Marianne Cooper’s profession.

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