The Associated Press reports: “The Labor Department will report the latest figures on unemployment and payrolls on Friday, and analysts expect to hear more bad news. They forecast that the unemployment rate will remain unchanged from May at 9.1 percent. They also expect that employers added only 90,000 jobs last month, below the 100,000 threshold that economists say is needed to prevent the unemployment rate from increasing.”

ANDY KROLL, andykroll at gmail.com
Kroll just wrote the piece “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Jobs: How Racism, Global Economics, and the New Jim Crow Fuel Black America’s Crippling Jobs Crisis” which states: “Nationwide, the unemployment rate for black workers at 16.2 percent is almost double the 9.1 percent rate for the rest of the population. And it’s twice the 8 percent white jobless rate. … Since the 1940s, the jobless rate for blacks in America has held remarkably, if grimly, steady at twice the rate for whites. The question of why has vexed and divided economists, historians, and sociologists for nearly as long.”

Kroll is an associate editor at TomDispatch and a reporter at Mother Jones magazine based in Washington, D.C.

Last month the Department of Labor issued a report on “The Black Labor Force in the Recovery” which examined the high rate of unemployment among African-Americans.