Black unemployment rate in Arkansas and U.S. unemployment rate jump to the highest level since pandemic; Black women bear brunt of job losses and federal DEI purge

Arkansas Black Vitality Staff

LITTLE Rock – Jan. 9, 2026 – As the Arkansas and U.S. workforce enters 2026, the fate of Black workers, and Black women in particular, is in dire straits.

After the Trump administration paused the nation’s monthly job report for October due to the government shutdown, the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that the Black unemployment rate has reached its highest level since the COVID-19 pandemic wiped out millions of jobs nationwide.

In December, the nation’s 35.9 million Black civilian labor pool is facing the worst job market since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when stay-at-home orders and mass layoffs sent millions of workers to the unemployment line.

At the end of November, the U.S. unemployment rate, at 4.6%, remained mostly unchanged from September. 8.8% in September from 8.1% the previous month. For teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19 seeking their first job, the unemployment rate is a dismal 19.8%, nearly five times the state average of 4.2% and almost double the average of their white and Hispanic peers at 11.4% and 11.5%, respectively.

The Arkansas Department of Commerce, in conjunction with the BLS, has not released year-end Black jobless data for December. The BLS suspended all data releases in October, including the monthly unemployment report and Consumer Price Index inflation barometer, due to the 43-day government shutdown – the longest in U.S. history. However, that pause didn’t slow the continued rise in the number of Black jobseekers in November, as the jobless rate for the nation’s Black labor pool rose sharply, spiking by 0.8 percentage points from 7.5% to8.3% between September and November.

In Arkansas, the employment situation for Black workers and jobseekers is much worse. According to BLS data, the jobless rate for Black workers aged 16 and older jumped to

Since Arkansas has not yet released its job rate for Black workers statewide for the past two months, it is expected to be much higher than the national and September rate, according to workforce analysts. Given the significant increase in the national jobless rate and recent mass layoffs across the U.S., the Black unemployment rate for December is likely to touch double digits.

Nationally, while the nation’s unemployment rate has remained relatively stable over the past year, rising only 0.4% to 4.6% in December, the Black jobless rate has increased significantly from 6.4% to 8.3% over the same period.

According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s FRED database, that is the highest Black unemployment level since August 2021, when the nation’s civilian labor force was still grappling with the impact of the international pandemic.

Valerie Rawlston Wilson, a labor economist and Director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE), notes that the labor market for Black workers has clearly deteriorated this year, with the unemployment rate rising and employment falling.

“The decline in Black workers’ employment appears to be concentrated among Black women while Black men’s employment rates appear more stable,” Wilson wrote in a recent research note. “Since January 2025, overall women’s employment has fallen most in professional and business services, manufacturing, and federal government—suggesting likely culprits for the decline in Black women’s employment.”

According to Wilson and other labor economists, recent federal job cuts have mirrored the Trump administration’s Day One implementation of its aggressive policy to eliminate jobs and positions related to so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies.

On his first day in office in January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to eliminate the federal government’s DEI programs, affecting everything from federal grant funding for minority farmers and nonprofits to other initiatives aimed at increasing black homeownership and new business ventures.

White men as discrimination victims

Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and insisted on restoring strictly “merit-based” hiring, moving also to quickly to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directing that all federal DEI staff be put on paid leave and eventually laid off. Recently, under the same anti-DEI push, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has turned Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on its head, using employment discrimination laws to punish employers that promote equal Black hiring and promotions.

Long a refuge for Black and other minorities seeking protection from workplace discrimination based on race, sex, or gender, EEOC Chief Andrea Lucas on —– urged white men to file claims with the federal agency if they experienced DEI-related discrimination in the workplace based on race or sex.

Furthermore, Trump’s anti-DEI executive order also revoked an affirmative action mandate issued nearly 65 years ago by President Lyndon Johnson and restricts DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the key tools employed by the Biden administration to promote DEI programs across the private sector—encouraging their adoption by federal contractors—to eliminate them now.

More layoffs ahead in 2026

Meanwhile, unlike during the first term of the Trump administration, when the president and top Labor Department officials often boasted about low Black unemployment rates, there has been no mention of the struggling Black workforce or widespread layoffs across the country in his second term.

In fact, according to the latest data from BLS, the statistical arm of the U.S. Labor Department, the U.S. is experiencing a significant rise in mass layoffs, with nearly 950,000 job cuts announced through September 2025, the highest level since 2020. This trend is driven by a combination of factors, including the labor market’s stalled performance, employers’ scaling back hiring plans, and the rise of artificial intelligence as a factor in job cuts, analysts said.

Through the first eleven months of 2025, major corporations like Amazon and Salesforce have cited AI as a reason for their layoffs, with AI accounting for almost 55,000 layoffs in the U.S. alone. The overall job cuts are expected to surpass 1 million in 2025, marking the highest level since the Covid-19 pandemic.

But acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer instead blamed the ailing U.S. workforce on the previous administration nearly two years after President Trump took the reins of the world’s largest economy.

“November’s jobs report shows our economy continues to gain momentum despite the economic mess President Trump inherited from the Biden administration and the reckless Democrat shutdown. With 64,000 jobs added in November, more and more Americans are coming off the sidelines and working in the private sector. Investment has been booming thanks to the President’s America First policies, leading to strong nonresidential construction growth. 

Importantly,” Chavez-DeRemer continued, “the growth we are seeing is concentrated in the private sector and among native-born Americans. Federal employment has retreated to the lowest level in over a decade, completely reversing the previous administration’s federal hiring frenzy.”

Though the federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has not been the cause of job cut announcements in two months, “DOGE Impact” remains the leading reason for job cut announcements in 2025, cited in 293,753 planned layoffs so far this year. This includes direct reductions to the federal workforce and its contractors.

An additional 20,976 cuts have been attributed to DOGE Downstream Impact, which reflects the loss of federal funding to private and non-profit entities.