A local coalition is announcing plans for a new campaign to address the large unemployment disparity between whites and blacks with a public meeting at Zion Baptist Church, 621 Elwood North, at 6 p.m. on Tuesday (Feb. 21).
HIRE Minnesota, a coalition of organizations and activists notes that the Twin Cities unemployment rate of blacks is over 20 percent, nearly three and a half times the white jobless rates, one of the worst unemployment gaps between whites and blacks in the nation. I reported on this jobless gap last year.
"HIRE is calling for the application of a new set of principles to deal with Minnesota's economic apartheid," it says in a news release. Those principal--for the public and private sector--include developing training programs for people of color, lasting funding streams to pay for it, specific guidelines to increase diversity in the workforce, hiring ex-offenders, and eliminating laws, practices and polices "that impede social, economic and political justice." For more information, call 651-403-0338
