Report: AAPI women suffering the most from COVID-19 job losses

Asian American and Pacific Islander women have experienced the highest rates of long-term unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans due to increased morbidity, mortality, and unemployment rates. Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women in particular, have been significantly disproportionally impacted by the pandemic, facing an alarming increase in race/ethnicity- and gender-based discrimination, violence, and job losses.

Government data reveal that AAPI women experienced the highest rates of long-term unemployment of any racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. in 2020, concludes a report by the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, NAPAWF.

 

Almost half (44%) of all AAPI women who experienced job losses in 2020 have been out of work for longer than six months. This staggering statistic is likely a result of the intersectional effects of a number of factors such as race- and gender-based discrimination, immigration status, and working in jobs that make them more susceptible to both workplace harassment and job losses. 

AAPI women are overrepresented in both the front-line and low-wage workforces: they make up 3.8% of the front-line workforce, despite only making up 2.9% of the overall workforce, and are typically paid less than their white male counterparts in the same occupations, says the NAPAWF analysis.

UCLA 

These "essential" frontline occupations include, but are not limited to, restaurant workers, salon workers, retail workers, and personal care aides, that includes nurses and caregivers to the elderly. Not only were the aforementioned jobs disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but working in such jobs also makes AAPI women increasingly susceptible to anti-AAPI violence and discrimination. 

Among the employees in who have continued to work, they often having to take health risks by continuing to interact with customers, patients and the public, says a study by UCLA. Among non-essential workers, many were able to work remotely from home. This is particularly true for white-collar employees and professionals. The group hit the hardest economically were non-essential workers who could not work remotely or worked for a fIrm that shut down. 

Racist incidents targeting AAPIs increased by 150% between 2019 and 2020. A staggering 70% of the incidents reported in 2020, the height of the coronavirus pandemic, were by women or gender nonbinary individuals with many of these incidents happening in workplaces and in places of business.

The NAPAWF-conducted national survey found that nearly 78% of AAPI women have been affected by anti-AAPI racism in the last two years. A fear of facing violence and discrimination at the workplace, especially in low-wage jobs, further reduces AAPI women’s ability to re-enter the workforce. 

In December 2020, the economy lost 140,000 jobs – all of them women’s jobs, according to the National Women’s Law Center.

"Many times Asian women have an especially high burden of domestic work and child care responsibilities in families, and with all the children at home, it's just been harder," Alexandra Suh, executive director of the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance in Los Angeles, told USA Today. "They also have more involvement with elder care. There's so many pressures with the pandemic."

AAPI women’s immigration status also plays a significant role in their employment, especially during the pandemic. From March 2020 through February 2021, immigrant women experienced the largest unemployment rates of any group in the United States, including US-born men, US-born women, and immigrant men.

In May 2020, the unemployment rate for AAPI immigrant women increased to 17%.

Disaggregating data

Given that nearly 70% of adult Asians in the U.S. are foreign-born, with many being recent immigrants or refugees, the AAPI community’s workforce participation was again disproportionately impacted, this time due to immigration-related job losses. 

Due to the combined effects of immigration, occupational segregation, and gender-based harassment and violence, disaggregating data by ethnicity, immigration status, and gender on employment for the AAPI community is of critical importance.

By lumping data under the umbrella term of "Asian American," the impact of the coronavirus on certain ethnicities are hidden and perpetuate the “model minority” myth. 

The AAPI community is a vast and incredibly diverse group encompassing more than 50 ethnic subgroups speaking more than 100 languages and dialects. There may be critical differences in the rates of unemployment among different ethnicities, and lumping us all together not only fails to acknowledge that, it also erases many of our distinct economic issues that need to be addressed. 

For example, AAPI women working full-time are typically paid, on average, 85 cents for every dollar paid to their white male counterparts. However, disaggregated data from 2015 to 2019 reveal that many AAPI women experience much larger wage gaps, particularly Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander women. Samoan and Tongan women only earn 60 cents for every white male dollar, Nepalese women only earn 54 cents for every white male dollar, and Burmese women earn only 52 cents for every white male dollar.

"They’re serving your food, they’re doing your nails and they’re caring for your children and your elderly," Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the NAPAWF, told USA Today. "There are Asians in these jobs that people don’t often think about."

Mourn, pray, honor, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, but get ready to fight

SCREEN CAPTURE / ABC

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, 1933-2020

OPINION

With the pandemic, the sour economy, the divisive elections, can 2020 get any worse? The answer, I'm afraid, is "Yes, much worse."

The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg Friday (Sept. 18) at the age of 87 has turned the heat up by several notches in one of the most contentious and important Presidential elections in America's history. 

“The stakes of this election couldn’t be higher,” Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted after offering prayers for Ginsburg and her grieving family. “Millions of Americans are counting on us to win and protect the Supreme Court—for their health, for their families, and for their rights.”

We should celebrate that we lived in an age when Justice Ginsberg was possible. We should work so that there can be even more Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

RELATED: AAPI community pays tribute to an American hero

Many people would like to honor the late champion of civil rights, women's rights with quiet respect to mourn her passing; others would like to wallow in despair for the future of our country. To truly honor RBG's memory, we should redouble our efforts to turn this country around. 

It may be proper to offer a quiet prayer for the soul of RBG, but you would be totally wrong if you think Republicans are going to sit on their hands quietly during this period of mlourning. Conservatives have been waiting for Ginsberg's death for years to solidify their grip on the Supreme Court. 

Don't expect Senate Leader Mitch McConnell to stick to his words that he used to rationalize go against centuries-old tradition by turning down President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court four years ago.

When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016, McConnell said: 

"Given that we are in the midst of the presidential election process, we believe that the American people should seize the opportunity to weigh in on whom they trust to nominate the next person for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court," they conclude. "It is today the American people, rather than a lame-duck president whose priorities and policies they just rejected in the most-recent national election, who should be afforded the opportunity to replace Justice Scalia."

With those words, the GOP-dominated Senate pushed through the nomination and vote for Neal Gorsuch, who has been a steady vote for conservatives since he took his place on the bench.

“A basic principle of the law – and of everyday fairness – is that we apply rules with consistency, and not based on what’s convenient or advantageous in the moment,: wrote President Obama in Medium. "The rule of law, the legitimacy of our courts, the fundamental workings of our democracy all depend on that basic principle. As votes are already being cast in this election, Republican senators are now called to apply that standard.”

"I have a very simple message for Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell tonight," said Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-HI, who sits on the Senate Judicial Committee, "The best and only way to honor the life’s work of Justice Ginsburg, a giant of a jurist, is to honor her fervent final wish that she not be replaced until a new president is installed.

On Friday night, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, declared: “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” Hypocrisy be damned! 

Ginsberg was fully aware what was at stake and fought to stay healthy until just a few weeks ago. And ... she fought to the end. On her deathbed, she uttered her dying wish to one of her granddaughters:

“My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

The Senate and McConnell should honor that wish, but I'm afraid "honor" has no meaning in Trump's Republican Party. 

Make no mistake what's at stake here. They are enormous. The selection of the new Justice could determine what kind of America we, our children, our grandchildren and their children will live in, given the key role the court plays in guiding our society on cultural, social and political issues.

The highest court in the land  already has four steady right-wing votes in  Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Chief Justice John Roberts might sometimes side with the more liberal wing of justices but for the majority of his votes, he has voted conservative. That's a majority of five. 

With the possible appointment of another conservative, that would give conservative-leaning SCOTUS and decided rightward tilt. The more ideologically liberal justices, Steven Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor would be reduced to writing dissenting views --  which boil down to nice thoughts but totally powerless in implementation.

MSNBC host Ari Berman tweeted: "It’s truly shocking that 4 of 5 conservative justices on Supreme Court (Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch & Kavanaugh) were nominated by Republican presidents who lost (the) popular vote.

Indeed, both Presidents Bush and current White House occupant Donald Trump lost the popular vote but won the electoral college votes.

Diving down even further, the U.S. Senate Republicans represent 15 million less voters than their Democratic counterparts. In the 2018 elections, Senate Democrats garnered 18 million more votes than Republicans.

It is unlikely that Ginsberg's replacement would be appointed before the first Monday of October, when the Supreme Court traditionally opens a new term and decides which cases it would accept for their judgement.

Trump has been using the conservative-leaning High Court as his backstop to controversial measures that have been rejected by lower courts.

Some of the life-changing decisions the 2020-2021 SCOTUS will likely face: Affirmative action, what's left of President Obama's Affordable Care Act which has been whittled down since Trump took office; Roe v. Wade, the ruling that allows a woman to choose, has been chipped away at the last few years; the future of the participants in the Deferred Action on Delayed Arrivals (DACA) that similarly has been upheld by lower courts, in fact, Trump's entire anti-immigrant agenda from the issuance of visas and green cards to the detention and deportation of refugees. 

Looking further down the road, in keeping with their anti-big government pillar, Republicans would also like a conservative Supreme Court to eventually review and perhaps end New Deal institutions of Social Security and Medicare, which have long been targets of the ultra-rich who don't believe in sharing their good fortune; doing away with estate taxes benefiting the ultra-rich; and just about any government assistance program from unemployment to food supplements would be vulnerable.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg through the years, as an advocate, and later as a Supreme Court Justice,  fought for the rights of men and women.

So mourn, pray RBG's passing, but also start planning and girding yourselves for a battle -- and we're not exaggerrating -- that could determine how we and our descendants live our lives in our country -- with rights equal to all -- or as second-class citizens who have to claw our way to the upper tiers of society in order to have the rights we enjoy today.

The first step, is to make sure Justice Ginsberg's replacement is not nominated until after the November elections when voters can give Democrats the edge in the Senate and remove McConnell, who represents Kentucky. In states where a Senate seat is up -- yes, that means Arizona, Maine, Kansas, Kentucky, Colorado, Iowa, Montana, North Carolina, Alabama -- vote for Democrats in the Senate races.

The second step in that battle is to kick out Trump and his minions from the White House and the power that office holds.

“We cannot let them win this fight,” said Harris, the first Asian American nominated for national office, in a prepared statement to supporters today (Saturday, Sept. 19). "Millions of Americans are counting on us to stand up, right now, and fight like hell to protect the Supreme Court -- not just for today, but for generations to come.“

"The work of holding Senate Republicans accountable to the standard they set in 2016 starts now," she said. "To Joe (Biden) and me, it is clear: The voters should pick a President, and that President should select a successor to Justice Ginsburg.”

RBG has died. We must pick up her banner. Her fight, is now our fight.

EDITOR'S NOTE: A word of caution, this is news laced with opinion. Readers are encouraged to seek multiple news sources to formulate their own positions.