February 8, 2022

How to Help Low-Wage Workers Pay Bills

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will host a series of webinars next month for professionals and volunteers who regularly work with low-income clients and want guidance on how to help them with their finances.

People who serve this vulnerable population may want to help but don’t always feel comfortable giving advice. CFPB has assembled an online toolkit – a companion to the webinars – filled with simple, practical solutions and suggestions about how to get clients to open up about their finances or overcome the emotional obstacles to change. The agency also supplies professionals with thought-provoking questions for their clients about a range of financial issues.

“There are no right or wrong answers,” CFPB explains.

The webinars, scheduled for March, are open to everyone, including social service case workers, legal aid providers, housing counselors, tax preparers, non-profit volunteers, financial advisers, and local government officials.

The agency’s package of tips, tools and worksheets cover the basics that can make a big difference to families on a tight budget. A couple examples are a Spending Tracker to help them manage their expenses and a Comparing Auto Loans worksheet for car shopping.

Try these links for more information:

• Registration for the webinars scheduled for Thursday, March 3, 10, 17 and 24.

…Learn More

tags bill paying|​CFPB|​Consumer Financial Protection Bureau|​financial|​financial resources|​household budget|​housing counselor|​inequality|​legal aid|​low-income worker|​low-paid|​low-wage|​SNAP food stamps|​social work|​TANF|​tax preparation

October 13, 2020

The Economics of Being Black in the U.S.

The COVID-19 recession demonstrates an axiom of economics. Black unemployment always exceeds the rate for whites, the spikes are higher in recessions, and, in a recovery, employment recovers more slowly.

A record number of Black Americans were employed in 2019. But when the economy seized up in the spring, their unemployment rate soared to 17 percent, before floating down to a still-high 12.1 percent in September.  Meanwhile, the white unemployment rate dropped in half, to 7 percent.

The much higher peaks in the unemployment rate for Blacks than whites and the slower recovery are baked into the economy.

This phenomenon occurred during the “jobless recovery” from the 2001 downturn. When the economy had finally restored all of the jobs lost in that recession, the Black jobless rate remained stubbornly higher.

And after the 2008-2009 recession, as the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center accurately predicted at the time, Black unemployment hovered at “catastrophic levels” longer than the white rate did.  This disparity is now the issue in the COVID-19 recession.

Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, a Boston College economist who writes a blog about inequality, gives three interrelated reasons for Black workers’ higher unemployment rates.

First, “The U.S. still has a tremendous amount of education inequality, and the unemployment rate is always higher for people with less education,” he wrote in an email. Despite the big strides by Black men and women to obtain college degrees, roughly 30 percent have degrees, compared with more than 40 percent of whites, he said.

Second, Black workers without degrees are vulnerable because they are more likely to earn an hourly wage. An hourly paycheck means that a company can cut costs by simply reducing or eliminating a worker’s hours. “It’s much easier to lay off hourly workers, whose employment is more flexible by nature, than salaried workers,” Sanzenbacher said. …Learn More