Resilience and Momentum: Where Black Workers Are Gaining Ground in the U.S. Labor Market
Resilience and Momentum: Where Black Workers Are Gaining Ground in the U.S. Labor Market
The U.S. labor market has been through a great deal of turbulence in the past six years, and Black workers have felt that turbulence acutely. Unemployment gaps widened, wage gains were uneven, and economic uncertainty cast a shadow over household finances. And yet, something important is also happening beneath those headline numbers: Black workers are not just weathering the storm, they are steering the ship.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS) and ZipRecruiter's survey data paint a portrait of a Black workforce that is engaged, proactive, and forward-looking. That doesn't mean the structural challenges are gone, but it does mean that Black workers are increasingly writing their own stories of success.
A mixed picture
Start with wages. According to the 2025 CPS data, since 2019, median wages for Black workers have grown 36.4%, outpacing the 28.2% growth seen across the broader workforce. The shift is meaningful given that the median wage for a Black worker ($45,000) is still 10% below that of workers overall ($50,000).
ZipRecruiter’s recent survey data suggests this more rapid rise in wages could be a response to a more direct posture at the bargaining table. Black workers are more likely than workers overall to report that they got their most recent raise by asking for it (15.7% vs 10.4%) or by securing a promotion (56.8% vs 37.7%), rather than receiving a standard annual bump. They are more likely to seek management opportunities (47% vs 39.4%) and more likely to find real value in performance reviews (46.5% vs 35.9%). In short, Black workers are not waiting for the labor market to improve to advance their careers and forge new paths to success.
The unemployment picture is more complicated. The gap between Black unemployment and overall unemployment began to widen again in the second half of 2025, a signal of a softening labor market. Black unemployment has historically served as a leading indicator of broader economic conditions, rising earlier and falling later. As Black workers, and especially Black female workers, are overrepresented in the Federal Government, unemployment spikes were even more detrimental in 2025. More recently, the gap between topline and Black unemployment started to close in December, as labor market conditions began to stabilize. January data showed Black unemployment falling further still. While two months doesn’t make a trend quite yet, the narrowing of the unemployment gap is a positive sign for continued improvement.
Where Black workers are finding their footing
One of the most positive signals for narrowing the racial employment gap is that Black workers make up a larger share of workers (relative to their 12.6% share of the overall workforce) in several industries that have seen significant growth since 2019.
Health Care and Social Assistance stands out as a particular bright spot. Black workers make up 18.4% of the healthcare workforce, and Black employment in the sector has grown 10.9% since 2019. Not only are more Black workers engaging in healthcare, they are making more money doing so. Black workers in healthcare have seen median wage growth of 38.7% since the start of the pandemic, outpacing the 31.6% growth seen by healthcare workers overall. As healthcare continues to drive the labor market, Black workers might continue to find gains in employment and wages, narrowing the racial employment gap.
Transportation and Warehousing is another industry where Black workers have built a significant presence, making up 20.2% of the sector's workforce. Employment among Black workers in transportation has grown 19.2% since 2019, ahead of the 18% growth for all workers in the industry. Wages have grown 12.5%, slightly behind the 15.6% for the industry overall. This gap warrants attention, especially as transportation jobs tend to be closely linked with economic cycles, leaving workers more vulnerable in economic downturns. Even small discrepancies in wage growth can have lasting impacts on workers as they navigate their careers and financial lives.
Professional and Business Services, a broad sector that includes technology, consulting, and professional roles, offers one of the clearest examples of Black workers expanding their footprint in higher-wage industries. Black employment in the sector has grown 22.5% since 2019, outpacing the 12.8% growth for the industry overall, and Black wages have risen 37.1% over that same period. The Information sector tells a more complicated version of the same story. Black wages there have grown 71.5% since 2019, nearly double the 38.3% growth for all workers in the industry. But Black employment in Information has contracted since the pandemic, down 12.6%, meaning those gains have accrued to a shrinking pool of workers who were fortunate enough to maintain or gain footing in the sector.
What may be helping those workers hold their ground: a distinctly forward-leaning relationship with technology. According to ZipRecruiter's State of the Workforce Survey, nearly two-thirds of Black workers (65.5%) use AI tools daily or weekly, compared to fewer than half of workers overall (48.8%). And 46% of Black workers say they are very confident in their ability to learn and apply AI in their field, more than 17 percentage points higher than the 28.7% of workers overall who say the same. In industries being rapidly reshaped by technology, that orientation is likely to translate into real and lasting advantages. The more pressing challenge is access: wage growth is encouraging, but it will matter more when the number of Black workers in these sectors grows to match it.
The work ahead
The playing field is not level. Wage gaps persist, unemployment remains disproportionately high, and structural barriers (in housing, credit access, and wealth accumulation) have not disappeared. While there have been some significant gains since the pre-pandemic labor market, yearly trends paint a less rosy picture. Black employment levels in the CPS data only grew 0.2% from a year ago, far slower than the 1.3% for employment overall. ZipRecruiter data also shows Black workers are more likely to say they would quit over layoff risk (36.6% vs 28.4%), reductions in benefits (14% vs 10.4%), or lack of recognition (36.1% vs 31.4%) than workers overall, a signal that Black workers are operating with a keener awareness of how quickly gains can be undone.
But the data also makes clear that Black workers are not waiting for those barriers to be removed before moving forward. They are asking for raises and getting them. They are learning new tools and capitalizing on them. They are building careers in industries where they have long been present and demanding—through their performance, their advocacy, and their tenure—that those industries meet them with fair wages and real opportunity.
That is what resilience looks like in practice. Not simply enduring unfavorable conditions, but actively, strategically refusing to be defined by them.