Outsized jumps in the city’s unemployment rate for Black New Yorkers — especially youth – are signaling stress in the labor market that our leaders at City Hall cannot afford to ignore.
Consider the latest youth labor data: It shows New York City’s unemployment rate for 16–24-year-olds at 13.2 percent in 2024, with Black youth facing a staggering 23.8 percent — nine points higher than in 2019. These numbers are a barometer for broader labor-market fragility. When young Black New Yorkers struggle to get a foothold, future workforce strength, household income stability, and citywide economic competitiveness are all at risk.
NYC’s overall unemployment was 5.1 percent in September 2025, while Black unemployment hovered around 8.3 percent. Still, the city recorded record highs in total jobs. However, those figures mask persistent racial gaps in the labor market. Entry-level retail jobs, which many Black youth rely on to build experience, remain far below pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, many entry-level jobs are shrinking as a result of AI and automation, hitting young workers the hardest.
Black unemployment rates are also driven by long-standing structural issues. A 2020 report by the Center for an Urban Future documented stark disparities in employment and wages for Black New Yorkers. It cited gaps in educational attainment as a big driver, as well as similar findings found in our own 2025 housing and economic security survey: hiring practices that disadvantage Black candidates, unequal access to peer networks and mentorship, and the ongoing impacts of racism.
In the CSS survey, we asked unemployed New Yorkers what the two biggest challenges they faced when it came to finding and keeping a good job. Twenty-five percent of Black respondents said they don’t have the work experience employers are asking for, compared to 17 percent of White respondents and 13 percent of Hispanic respondents. Nearly 30 percent of Blacks said they lack personal connections or professional networks, compared to 23 percent of Whites and 15 percent of Hispanics. And 20 percent of Black respondents said they faced discrimination based on age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or immigration status, compared to 13 percent of Whites and 19 percent of Hispanics.
The structural drivers of the city’s labor market inequality is not a secret. Occupational segregation and significant underrepresentation of Black workers in higher-paying fields like finance, tech, and information systems remain entrenched. In NYC, Black New Yorkers hold an outsized small share of well-paid industry roles despite making up roughly a fifth of the workforce. This isn’t merely about pay gaps, but about the distribution of opportunity across sectors that set the city’s income trajectories. Nationally, tech and finance pipelines are equally skewed, with persistent representation gaps and advancement barriers for Black professionals in high-growth, high-wage occupations.
Education is the City’s On-Ramp to Good Jobs
Last week, Mayor Mamdani named Kamar Samuels as the city’s new Schools Chancellor. Mr. Samuels has a daunting task given all the critical needs of the city’s school system. Among them is developing solutions for widespread chronic absenteeism, with the highest rates among Black and Hispanic high school students. If the city fails to tackle chronic absenteeism now, it weakens the tech, finance, and information workforce pipeline a decade from now.
Research consistently shows that long spells out of work depress lifetime earnings, with impacts persisting for years. Out-of- School/Out-of-Work rates remain high for young Black New Yorkers. Left unaddressed, these patterns increase the risk of criminal justice system involvement, state dependence, and compounding of inequality over the long-term.
The good news is Mayor Mamdani campaigned and won on a platform of attacking the city’s affordability crisis, which gives his new administration the political capital to take on Black unemployment as part of a broader effort to build a more inclusive economy. To that end, the Mamdani administration should treat the 2025 rise in Black adult and youth unemployment as an early warning and respond with targeted, measurable interventions. Besides addressing chronic absenteeism among Black and Latino high school students, we urge the new administration to:
Fund mentorship-driven pipelines into tech and information careers at scale; encourage more of the city’s tech companies to participate in the City’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) to develop talent pipelines from underrepresented communities; stabilize entry-level jobs by partnering with employers to protect the on-ramps to retail and hospitality sectors while accelerating transitions into health care, green energy, and information sectors where jobs are expanding; use targeted wage subsidies and hiring credits for youth to create pathways into high-wage sectors; and fund and promote skill-bridging bootcamps that can help Black jobseekers close the skills gap and pivot into better-paying roles with advancement ladders.
The choice before city leaders in 2026 is stark: hope for a market driven course-correction that miraculously reverses rising Black unemployment or treat it as the warning signal it is and build the policies that ensure every New Yorker has a fair shot at the jobs shaping our future.
David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer. The Urban Agenda is available on CSS’s website: www.cssny.org.