Monica Vincent could perhaps be pardoned for not joining the politicians and media pundits in applauding the Bureau of Labor Statistics announcement earlier this month that the economy had added 143,000 payroll jobs in January.

She had to work.

It’s just as well though; her view of the U.S. economy is less sanguine than the talking heads in the newspapers and on the cable networks’ news programs. With two jobs—full-time as a medical technician at an assisted living facility in Gastonia, North Carolina, and a part-time gig at a local Little Caesars—the 34-year-old African American single mother still struggles to make ends meet, owing, she says, to the quality of the jobs available, not their number.

“These jobs are trash,” she told Black Voices Network. “I go to work every day of the week and me and my kids would be homeless if it wasn’t for my sister taking us in. I’m just barely getting by.”

She was evicted from her apartment in November when her landlord sold the property. The going rate for a two-bedroom apartment in Gastonia is about $1,300 and most landlords in the area require two months in advance, meaning that Monica would have to come up with $3,900 just to move in. That figure is roughly equivalent to her gross monthly pay.

Add to rent the cost of daycare, food, insurance, car repairs, gas and a light bill that typically sets her back about $300 a month.

“Everything is ridiculously high,” she says, noting that she does better than a lot of her neighbors because her children’s father is able to chip in. “But, at the end of the day, I’m just trying to survive.”

On the surface, the nation’s financial picture is somewhat rosy. Employers added 2.2 million jobs in 2024, an average 186,000 a month, down sharply from the 3 million jobs created in 2023 but surprisingly robust after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates 11 times between March 2022 and July 2023 to dry up inflation. Interest rate hikes also tend to discourage consumer and business borrowing, which kills jobs.

Despite the decline in jobs created in January, the official unemployment rate continues to hover near 4%, just slightly above the full-employment threshold of 3%. And the Black unemployment rate increased slightly from 6.1 to 6.2%, which is near historic lows, a statistical development that has been lauded by conservatives, including President Trump in his first term.

The government’s jobless figures, however, do not reflect what Vincent and many low-wage workers say is a profound economic crisis that began nearly 50 years ago with the restructuring of what was the most industrialized economy in history following World War II. With national Gross Domestic Product split evenly between employee wages and investor profits, Ronald Reagan’s corporate donors began pressuring him to lower their wage bills by busting workers’ unions and sending their jobs abroad, especially the decent-paying, full-time jobs on the factory floor.

Every president since Reagan has done his part to deindustrialize the economy with labor, banking and trade policies that favor speculation over production, and financiers over factory workers, creating a job market in which there are more fry cooks than millwrights and more Door Dash drivers than dockworkers.

“American workers are getting the short end of the stick, especially African American and Latino immigrant workers,” said Joe Guzzardi, an analyst at the Institute for Sound Public Policy and author of a syndicated financial column told the Black Voices Network. “And these CEOs are not being honest about their struggles to find workers. If you really want to hire workers, then the tried-and-true formula is to raise wages, pure and simple.”

That yawning chasm between bullish data and bedraggled employees is wholly attributable to a political class whose electoral fortunes are tied to the unemployment rate. As a result, politicians have been pressuring government statisticians to manipulate—some say corrupt—the methodology for calculating the official jobless rate since a deep recession cost President Jimmy Carter the White House in his reelection bid against Reagan.

As one example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment rate does not include discouraged workers, either long-term or short-term, who are not actively looking for work. As another, the BLS survey of employers’ payroll numbers does not differentiate between full-time work– such as Vincent’s job at the assisted living facility—and part-time work, such as her pizzeria job, or the millions of Uber or Door Dash drivers. By some measures, part-time jobs account for half of all jobs in the U.S., and nearly 30 million employees hold part-time jobs in the U.S., an all-time high number.

“It’s the gig economy,” said Desjon Yisrael, a 35-year-old African American who lives in High Point, North Carolina, just south of Greensboro. He works full-time selling work boots and part-time driving for Door Dash. He told the Black Voices Network:

“It really baffles me that people think that the economy is doing really well right now. The conditions here in the Black neighborhoods in High Point are (akin) to a slum. People are gathered around liquor stores in the middle of the day; I see a lot of homelessness, people are always asking me for change, and very little is being invested in our communities.”

Heterodox economists say that the media’s myopic fixation on the employment rate does not provide a complete snapshot. Some have compared it to a physician who only takes a patient’s temperature and declares him fit without scrutinizing his blood pressure, cholesterol, weight or breathing. Black homeownership for instance, is lower today than it was 25 years ago and the ratio and the labor force participation rate for adult men has dropped from 8 in 10 in 1970 to about two in three today.

There are alternative measures of unemployment that reflect Yisrael’s bleak view. Calculating the unemployment rate using both long-term and short-term discouraged workers, and part-time workers who want full-time positions, the economist John Williams estimated the jobless rate at 24.7 in June of 2023, nearly five times the Bureau of Labor Statistics official rate at that time, and only two-tenths of a percentage point less than the unemployment rate at the nadir of the Great Depression.

Williamson’s calculations are far more consistent with Monica’s economic outlook in Gastonia.

“It feels like we are in a recession, or at least the Black community is. My whole community is dealing with these financial issues.”

Moreover, the 60 hours Monica works each week cuts deeply into the time she would much rather spend raising her teenage daughter and 2-year-old son.

“If all you do is work, work, work, when do you get time to spend with your family?” she asked rhetorically. She has grown accustomed to telling her teenage daughter:

“I’m sorry that I can’t come to your play today, but Mom’s gotta work.”

She sighs and then:

“I thought a job was supposed to make your life better, not worse.”

Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. He is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama’s Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media.

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