Running the Numbers on Black Unemployment

Coming up on today’s show:

• As workers in white-collar industries are increasingly unionizing, organizing efforts in lower wage industries have failed. What does this revelation say about the state of the divided American economy? Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor and labor movements at the City University of New York, discusses the divergent trends in union efforts. 
• An investigation by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has found that drug wholesalers sent nearly 21 million prescription opioids to Williamson, West Virginia between 2006 and 2016. Williamson is a town of only 3,000 people. This was first reported by the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia, a local paper that won a Pulitzer for its opioids reporting, and Eric Eyre is behind all that.

• On Monday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Charleston Gazette-Mail announced it was headed into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But it’s not the only news outlet in trouble. The Los Angeles Times has undergone a period of turmoil in the newsroom, where a fight over unionization and tensions between managers and journalists have spiked. Christopher Ali, assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, and Jim Newton, a former Los Angeles Times journalist who spent 25 years at the paper, weigh in. 

• During the president’s State of the Union speech, President Trump claimed that black unemployment is the lowest in recorded history because of his policies. But the numbers don’t really explain why African Americans are still two times more likely to be jobless than white Americans. To help make sense of this all, The Takeaway turns to William “Sandy” Darity is the Samuel DuBois Cook professor of public policy. 

• On February 1, 1968 Echol Cole and Robert Walker, both sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee were crushed to death in the back of a trash truck. Their deaths became a flashpoint in Memphis. Cleophus Smith was a sanitation worker in Memphis back in 1968, and he discusses the dangers that faced them, the abuses they suffered, and the low pay they received. 

This episode is hosted by Todd Zwillich