During the Great Recession, though, as tax revenues plunged, federal, state, and local governments began shedding jobs. Even now, with the economy regaining strength, public sector employment has not bounced back... The Labor Department counts half a million fewer public sector jobs than before the start of the recession in 2007. That figure, however, understates just how much the government’s workforce has shrunk, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Ins ute, a labor-oriented research organization in Washington. That is because it fails to account for the normal growth in the country’s population: Factor that in, she said, and there are 1.8 million fewer jobs in the public sector for people to fill.
The decline reverses a historical pattern, researchers say, with public sector employees typically holding onto their jobs even during most economic downturns.
Because blacks hold a disproportionate share of the jobs, relative to their share of the population, the cutbacks hit them harder. But black workers overall, women in particular, also lost jobs at a higher rate than whites, Laird found. There was a "double disadvantage for black public sector workers," she said. "They are concentrated in a shrinking sector of the economy, and they are substantially more likely than other public sector workers to be without work."
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