New York City Mayor Eric Adams touts all-time jobs record, but gap remains in Black community
NEW YORK CITY (WABC) -- New York City's mayor is touting another all-time high for the total number of jobs ever in city history - a major bounce back since the height of the pandemic, but there's still more work to be done, particularly in the Black community where the unemployment rate is still high.
There are now more people working in New York City than ever before. From bagel bakers to white collar office workers.
More people are using mass transit now than at any time since the pandemic. City officials say there are now 4.7 million jobs in the city-an all-time high.
"This is the highest number of jobs in New York City history," Mayor Eric Adams said. "More jobs than ever before! And nearly 300,000 of those jobs were created in the two years this administration has been in office."
The mayor credits his administration's efforts to empower small businesses and to spread the word about job openings, but he admits that unemployment in the city's minority communities-specifically the Black community-is still too high.
"The goal is to create the opportunities, utilize our workforce centers and other apparatus to go into those communities that have historically been ignored and show them a pathway to employment," Adams said.
He says outreach in neighborhoods like Harlem and the South Bronx are paying off, but not quickly enough.
Just last week, Rev. Al Sharpton called out the high employment rate for Black New Yorkers, demanding more contracts for minority-owned businesses at a news conference Thursday in East Elmhurst, Queens, one of the hardest hit areas by the pandemic.
Business analyst Greg David says the city needs to do more.
"It's been a problem in New York for more than a decade," said David of Newmark School of Journalism, CUNY. "And our programs don't work very well, and they know it and they're trying to change it."
He says the gap between the Black unemployment rate and the white unemployment rate is only five percentage points.
"It was nine percentage points at its peak more than a year ago," David said. "So that's still a big gap. But now we have deteriorating data on the employment situation for LatinX workers."
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