Minorities Are Delivering All the US Labor Supply Growth

It’s a striking statistic, gathered by Bloomberg News reporters from US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data: 94% of the 323,094 jobs added in 2021 by members of the S&P 100 Index — the biggest US corporations, basically — went to people of color, defined as everybody but non-Hispanic White people.

Before judging whether that’s impressive or excessive or some other adjective, it’s helpful to know what the available pool of new workers looked like. Or, more precisely, what the pool of new workers minus the pool of departing workers looked like. Net change is what we’re able to see. It’s not that 94% of S&P 100 hires in 2021 were people of color, for example, it’s that when you look at S&P 100 employment totals after a year of arrivals and departures, people of color accounted for 94% of the net increase.

One way to measure labor supply is by looking at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ estimates of the labor force, which count everybody who either has a job or is actively looking for one. From December 2020 to December 2021, the US labor force grew by 1.7 million people, 90% of whom were not non-Hispanic White. Over the five years ended last month, people of color accounted for more than 100% of the increase of 6.1 million people in the labor force — because the non-Hispanic White labor force shrank by 817,000.

The makeup of the labor force is maybe not the perfect measure given that it’s shaped to some extent by demand: Those who think their job prospects are poor stop looking and drop out.

The population of working-age people is mostly, if not entirely, immune to such pressures (immigrants are drawn to the US by job opportunities). I’ve focused here on ages 16 through 54 because those 25 to 54 are “prime working age,” the years of highest labor-force participation, while ages 16 to 24 are when people usually first enter the labor force. The monthly population estimates from the BLS don’t sort out non-Hispanic Whites, but even without doing that it’s clear their numbers aren’t rising, given that the overall 16-to-54 White population (including Hispanic Whites) has fallen by almost 2 million over the past decade and almost 4 million since 2003 while the Hispanic population has risen steadily. (Don’t pay too much attention to the recent increase, much of which is simply a revision based on 2020 Census data.)

Just to be clear, Whites are still in the majority in this age group and every one of its subgroups. Of Americans ages 16 through 54 as of August, 74% were White, and of those 15 through 54 as of the middle of last year, 55% were non-Hispanic White, according to the Census Bureau, which uses slightly different age categories than the BLS. But as older cohorts with much higher shares of non-Hispanic White populations — it was 72% for Americans 55 and older last year — move out of their prime working years, most or all of the growth in the working-age population will come from other groups.

With that in mind, 94% of new jobs in the S&P 100 going to people of color sounds about what we ought to expect. It’s not evidence of employers going to especially great lengths to hire minorities, or discriminating against White workers, or doing anything other than fishing where the fish are. If the percentage were much lower than 90%, that would be cause for concern.

What will be interesting is what happens the next time companies start shrinking their workforces across the board. There’s a long history of Black workers in the US losing their jobs in recessions before others do, and the Bloomberg News investigation of S&P 100 employment found that the share of new hires who are minorities was highest in the least senior, lowest-status roles that would be most susceptible to layoffs. A lot is changing in the American workplace, but that particular pattern may not have.