Coping when jobs and budgets are slammed by the bad economy

New York Law Journal

Coping when jobs and budgets are slammed by the bad economy.
By Katherine Frink-Hamlett
December 08, 2008

Due to the ailing economy, all departmental budgets of our firm, including diversity, are required to make substantial cuts. I have played an integral role in formulating our firm's diversity activities and, as such, am deeply concerned that the reductions will severely undermine our diversity efforts. I would like to recommend to our Executive committee that our budget be left intact or that minimal cuts be made. Any suggestions?You may have an uphill battle. First, I would note that the cuts are being made on a firmwide basis so it's not as if diversity is being unfairly targeted. But also, you must remember that diversity has to be about the business, especially now, so that unless you can demonstrate that your "diversity activities" have a direct or indirect impact on the firm's bottom line, any appeal to maintain the budget is an untenable position. In order to achieve your goal and preserve your diversity efforts, you must be prepared to make a presentation that not only addresses the firm's diversity image but, as importantly, demonstrates the long-term impact on the firm's diversity numbers and bottom line. For example, if monies are being siphoned from a viable pipeline initiative, then your position is bolstered. Or, if expanded on-campus recruiting at law schools with significant numbers of students of color is being curtailed, then again, your position is completely justified. But if all that you can show is that you're seeking dollars for elaborate diversity events featuring pretty people in pretty places, with pretty smiles upon their faces, then you are on shaky ground. Sure, these functions can yield tremendous good will, but, dollar for dollar, they may not be a top priority, particularly in this tenuous economy. Remember, diversity dollars must make business cents (couldn't resist).

•Katherine Frink-Hamlett, a graduate of New York University School of Law, is president of Frink-Hamlett Legal Solutions, Inc. and can be reached at katherine@frinkhamlett.com.

http://www.law.com/jsp/nylj/PubArticleNY.jsp?id=1202426218106

Women Achieve Workplace Equality—Now as Likely to Lose Jobs as Men in Recession

Posted By Mike Hall On July 23, 2008 @ 5:40 pm

With the U.S. economy sputtering toward recession, working women and their families will feel more pain than in past downturns.
According to a report by the congressional Joint Economic Committee, women are now working in jobs and industries that are more likely to lay off workers than they were in most previous recessions:
In recessions prior to 2001, women could buffer family incomes against male unemployment because they did not experience sharp job losses. However, this changed in the 2001 recession as women lost jobs on par with men in the industries that lost the most jobs.
The report, [1] Equality in Job Loss, points to a change in the types of jobs women now hold versus some predominantly female occupations in which women workers traditionally were employed. It says women now hold a much wider range of jobs, especially in industries susceptible to layoffs.
Because of this, women may be more susceptible to the impact of the business cycle than they were when they were more highly concentrated in a smaller number of non-cyclical occupations like teaching and nursing.
Says Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who is vice chair of the committee:
Women have been striving for equality with men in jobs and wages. Unfortunately, what we’ve achieved is equality in losing jobs during recessions.
Today, with women accounting for a much larger share of family income—or the sole share for single mothers—losing a job will have a much greater impact on family budgets.
Families are more economically vulnerable as wives are no longer insulating families from economic hardship in times of higher unemployment and falling or stagnant real wages. Single-mother families are now especially vulnerable.
If the 2001 pattern holds true, women who lose their jobs in this downturn will have a harder time finding new work. According to the report, in the “jobless recovery” following the previous recession, women’s employment rates never returned to the pre-recession levels.
The report also says women’s job loss will be felt beyond the family, by the economy as a whole. It says the federal and state governments will have to be more aggressive than in the past.
Spurring consumer spending to boost economic growth and job creation may take far more government action, especially with respect to fiscal spending, than in previous recessions. Fiscal aid to the states is important to help states maintain programs—and keep workers—in the face of ensuing budget cuts. Ensuring that all workers—women and men—can access unemployment compensation when they lose their jobs is critical.
Click [2] here for the full report.
Article printed from AFL-CIO NOW BLOG: http://blog.aflcio.org

The American Dream, or a Nightmare for Black America?

AlterNet
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted December 17, 2007.

Thirty years after the civil rights era, middle-class African-American families face a grim reality: their kids are far more likely to experience downward mobility in today's economy than they are to move up.

For both black and white families, America's vaunted upward mobility is largely a myth, and research suggests that Americans actually enjoy less upward mobility than people in many other wealthy countries. (I discussed this phenomenon at some length in a recent article.) But the outlook is different for white and black families.
A new study by Julia Isaacs, a Fellow with the Brookings Institution, paints a dark picture for black families, and especially for the large group of African-Americans who moved up and into the middle class following the hard-fought gains of the 1950s and 1960s.
Isaacs looked at a unique set of data, one that allowed her to compare the incomes of people in their 30s in 2004 with their parents' generation in the mid-'70s (this allowed her to compare people at the same general stage in their careers -- apples and apples).
While white men's incomes have been stagnant for the past three decades -- for both white and black families, most of the increase in family income was a result of women entering the workforce rather than wages increasing -- the current generation of 30-something black men actually earn, on average, 12 percent less than their fathers did in the mid-1970s.
That trend toward downward mobility has an enormous impact on the black middle class. While children of middle-class whites tend to do better than their parents did at the same age, a majority of middle-class African American children do worse than theirs, both in income and in terms of their position on the nation's economic ladder. According to Isaacs, "only 31 percent of black children born to parents in the middle of the income distribution have family income greater than their parents, compared to 68 percent of white children from the same income bracket."
The key findings from the study are truly eye-opening:
Startlingly, almost half (45 percent) of black children whose parents were solidly middle class end up falling to the bottom of the income distribution, compared to only 16 percent of white children.
Achieving middle-income status does not appear to protect black children from future economic adversity the same way it protects white children.
Black children from poor families have poorer prospects than white children from such families. More than half (54 percent) of black children born to parents in the bottom quintile stay in the bottom, compared to 31 percent of white children.
Given these dynamics, it should come as no surprise that the black/white income gap has risen, not fallen, in the decades since legal, institutional racism ended in America. In 1974, black families earned, on average, almost two-thirds of what whites did; by 2004, that number had fallen to 58 percent.
But looking at income alone misses a crucial part of the story. The differences in accumulated wealth -- in net worth -- are far greater than the differences in income, and that impacts black families' prospects of moving up in a big way. In Being Black, Living in the Red, Dalton Conley, Director of NYU's Center for Advanced Social Science Research, showed that white families, on average, had eight times the accumulated wealth of black families who earned the same, and that remained true even when you adjust for education levels and savings rates. It is, as Conley told me in an interview last year, "the legacy of racial inequality from generations past."
Crucial to understanding how that impacts economic mobility is the concept of "intergenerational assistance." That's just a fancy way of saying that your chances to advance economically are very much impacted by whether your family can help with tuition payments, or a down payment on a house or with seed-money to start a business. Conley compares two hypothetical kids -- one from a family with some money and the other without. Both are born with the same level of intelligence, both are ambitious and both work hard in school. In a true meritocracy, the two would enjoy the same opportunity to get ahead. But the fact that one might graduate from college free and clear while the other is burdened with $50,000 in debt makes a huge difference in terms of their long-term earnings prospects.
[To read the entire story, go to: http://www.alternet.org/stories/70694/]