New York City Job Losses Amid Coronavirus Pandemic Hitting Hispanic and Poorer Households Hardest: Survey
New York City's Hispanic and poor households are the worst hit by the massive job losses related to the coronavirus pandemic, a survey shows.
A weekly tracking survey from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy found that 29 percent of households in NYC reported at least one person had lost their job.
Of those households, 41 percent were of the Latinx/Hispanic community, 34 percent were making less than $50,000 annually, and 32 percent had no college degree.
By comparison, 24 percent of Caucasian and Asian survey respondents and 15 percent of African Americans reported a household job loss.
Moreover, 28 percent of survey respondents in households with an income of $50,000 to $100,000 and 16 percent earning more than $100,000 reported a job loss.
Emerson College Polling conducted the survey for CUNY, speaking to 1,000 New Yorkers between March 20-22.
The results have a 3 percentage point margin of error either way, though this is higher when broken down by subgroup, such as ethnicity.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has locked down the state in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, New York City has the largest number of deaths due to COVID-19—the disease caused by the new strain of coronavirus—of any locality in the U.S.
So far, 125 people have died in New York City. Second place is King County, Washington state, which includes the city of Seattle, at 87 deaths.
Nationwide, Johns Hopkins University has recorded 46,450 confirmed cases and 593 deaths.
That compares to more than 387,000 cases worldwide, with more than 16,760 deaths and nearly 102,000 recoveries.
Millions of Americans face losing their jobs as the pandemic upends the economy, evaporating demand and shuttering businesses.
An estimate from investment bank Goldman Sachs put the total job losses last week alone at 2.25 million.
Congress and the White House are negotiating on a stimulus package worth nearly $2 trillion to combat the economic damage inflicted by the new coronavirus.
The package will include checks for households and cash support such as grants and cheap loans for businesses struggling to stay afloat during the crisis.
In New York, the state's labor department website struggled to cope with a sudden surge in unemployment claims.
Last week, David Wilcox, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former director of the Federal Reserve's Division of Research and Statistics, told Newsweek the coming recession will be felt most acutely by the underprivileged.
"These individuals who will be catastrophically affected are and will be concentrated by area of residence, by race and ethnicity," Wilcox said.
"They will, of course, be concentrated in the bottom-half of the income distribution. They will be disproportionately exposed to having inadequate benefits packages from their employer or no benefits at all."
