The American labor market continued its steady recovery in October, as the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the economy added 171,000 jobs last month. The nation’s unemployment rate is now 7.9 percent, and there is an unquestionable recovery taking place. Lost in the positive news, though, is that the unemployment rate for African-Americans rose nearly a full point to 14.3 percent, up from 13.4 percent in September.

The black unemployment rate has fallen from its Great Recession peak of 16.7 percent, but it’s at the same level it was in October 2011, even though the nation’s overall unemployment rate has fallen more than a full point since then. As this chart from The Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal shows, black unemployment averaged 8.6 percent before the recession:

And while the 7.9 percent overall unemployment rate is still too high, it would represent a historical low for blacks, whose unemployment rate has been over 10 percent for most of the last 50 years:

Austerity policies that have crunched federal and state governments partially explain the problem. Blacks are more likely than whites to work in the public sector, meaning the loss of more than 600,000 government jobs at the federal, state, and local levels has disproportionately impacted them. The public sector shed another 13,000 jobs in October.

Had the government kept pace with previous levels of job creation, the overall unemployment rate would be a full point lower than it is today. It stands to reason that black workers, one-in-five of whom work in the public sector, would have filled a significant amount of those jobs.

The larger story, though, is that high black unemployment is a structural problem that has resulted from centuries of less access to education and higher-paying jobs. Sixty years after the Supreme Court officially desegregated American schools, they remain largely segregated along racial and economic lines. Students from low-income, low-education backgrounds, more likely to be black, are less likely to go to college; even high-achieving students at low-income schools are less likely to attend college than similar students at high-income schools. And black students are more likely to fall on the wrong side of the growing education gap between the rich and the poor.

That has created a cycle of rising income inequality that was only exacerbated by the recession, when the wealth gap between black and white families doubled (blacks were twice as likely to have been hit by the housing crisis as whites, thanks in part to discriminatory lending policies). Declining unionization rates are more likely to hurt black workers, and cuts to all sorts of social programs, from public transportation to the safety net, have made it harder for black workers to participate fully in the economy.

This is nothing short of a crisis. And unlike the unemployment crisis that has afflicted the United States since the Great Recession began, it is not one that will be addressed simply by fostering economic growth.

A nonprofit group that supports fair housing has filed a lawsuit claiming that Bank of America, the nation’s second largest mortgage servicer, has failed to maintain and market foreclosed homes in African American and Latino neighborhoods the same way it does in white neighborhoods.

The National Fair Housing Alliance filed the complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development after examining Bank of America-owned properties in eight American cities and finding “significant racial disparities” in how the properties were maintained and marketed to potential buyers, Reuters reports:

The group reviewed 373 properties owned, managed or serviced by Bank of America in eight U.S. cities as part of its ongoing examination of how U.S. lenders maintain bank-owned properties. Investigators evaluated properties for problems such as broken windows, overgrown lawns, trash accumulation and a lack of “for sale” signs.

“We have found significant racial disparities,” Shanna Smith, chief executive officer of the National Fair Housing Alliance in a conference call with reporters.

NFHA filed similar complaints against Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest mortgage servicer, and U.S. Bancorp earlier this year after it released a report detailing the disparities between white and black and Latino neighborhoods. The report looked at bank-owned homes in nine cities and found that properties in black and Latino neighborhoods were more likely to be left in disrepair than homes in white neighborhoods, driving down home prices, increasing vagrancy and crime rates, and making it harder to sell homes in those neighborhoods.

Discrimination was widespread throughout the mortgage and foreclosure process leading up to and after the housing crisis. Black and Latino borroweres were twice as likely to have been affected by the crisis because banks that used predatory practices against borrowers were even more predatory toward minorities. Pushing qualified lenders into subprime loans cost minorities as much as $100,000 in additional interest payments.

Workers across the country experience a “union premium” — an increase in wages for workers who belong to a labor union compared to workers who are not organized. That premium amounted to $1.24 per hour last year, a 17.3 percent premium. And according to a new study from the Economic Policy Institute, union membership is even more important for African American and Latino workers, whose union premiums exceed that of white workers.

Black union members have a union premium of $2.60, earning them about 17.3 percent more than black non-union workers. Black men who belong to a union see a 20 percent increase over the normal wage; for black women, the increase is 14.8 percent. Union membership is even more beneficial to Latinos, whose men and women workers earn union premiums of 29.3 percent and 15.7 percent, respectively. (Latinos’ union premium is 23.1 percent overall.):

The importance of union membership to blacks and Latinos is significant, given that both groups are already disadvantaged in the American economy. Both groups have unemployment rates that are far higher than the nation’s 8.3 percent rate. Black unemployment, in fact, has spent most of the last five decades above 10 percent. Black and Latino women are more likely to face larger gender wage gaps than whites, and blacks and Latinos face significant wage and wealth gaps when compared to white workers and families.

Unionization played an important role in the creation and prosperity of the American middle class, and the decline of America’s labor movement has significantly contributed to stagnation of wages and the rise of income inequality. The further decline of labor only stands to hurt workers who are already disadvantaged.