After near-record-low unemployment in April of 3.4 percent, the U.S. jobless rate rose to 3.7 percent in May, but employers are still finding it difficult to fill job openings and the U.S. economy continued cranking out jobs — just not for everyone.

Public and private sector payrolls increased by 339,000 in May, the 29th straight month of positive job growth in the post-pandemic recovery.

However, the unemployment rate for Black workers rose to 5.6 percent in May from 4.7 percent in April — the lowest since the Labor Department started tracking the statistic in 1972.

By contrast, unemployment remained largely unchanged in May for whites (3.3 percent), Asians (2.9 percent), and Hispanics (4 percent) over the month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Black unemployment reached a pandemic peak of 16.1 percent in April 2020.

Despite the big job gains, the overall unemployment rate increased due in large part to a sharp decline of 369,000 in self-employment, CNBC reported: “An alternative measure of unemployment that encompasses discouraged workers and those holding part-time jobs for economic reasons edged higher to 6.7 percent.”

More Americans are choosing to work part-time, CBS reported. In December and January, 1.2 million more Americans said they were working part-time compared with previous months, the data showed. 

More than 850,000 of those workers said they were working part-time by choice rather than out of necessity, or because their hours had been cut.

“I think people are reassessing,” said Pennsylvania State University economics professor Lonnie Golden. “First, when we went through the pandemic, a historically high number of people experienced their hours being cut — so they were working part-time for reasons that were not voluntary.”

Now some are cutting their hours by choice, Golden said. Some are reevaluating and saying, “‘Maybe I don’t need to commit every day of the week to that and I can spend more time with children, I can spend more time in school, I can spend more time in leisure activities.'”

Full-time job gains are not being felt by everyone, according to labor economist Michelle Holder, an associate professor at John Jay College of the City University of New York.

“Of the 3 million more jobs that the U.S. economy has now than it did in February 2020, a third of those jobs are in the transportation and warehousing industry,” Holder said in a Marketplace report. “That industry has the best representation in terms of Black male workers.”

Black women especially struggled to recover jobs lost during the pandemic, Holder said. She predicts that job gains for Black men could start to reverse as the Federal Reserve keeps financial conditions tight to control inflation. “Black men are well-represented in those industries that are vulnerable to business cyclicality,” she said.

While Black workers are making strong gains in fast-growing cities like Miami, the same is not true in other parts of the country, according to economist Claudia Sahm, who served on the White House Council of Economic Advisors and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. 

Black workers in New York City, for example, are unemployed at critical levels with a Black jobless rate of 12.2 percent — nine times the white unemployment level, a far wider gap than elsewhere in the U.S. — the nonprofit New York news platform The City reported.

“Certain parts of the country have been scarred more by the recessions than others. Certain industries have a harder time than others, and there are geographically different concentrations,” Sahm said. “What you’re seeing is the recovery is of different strength and of different length in these different parts of the country.”

The Florida unemployment rate for Black workers is 4.6 percent — twice the overall rate, and most economists say Miami is likely to be in that range. The Miami metro area saw its economic recovery driven by job gains in trade, leisure and hospitality, and transportation industries, all of which reopened much later in New York, The City reported.

Black men saw a median wage increase of 29 percent, or $4.90 per hour, between 2020 and 2022, according to a Florida International University study. In New York City, earnings for Black workers rose 17 percent between 2021 and 2022.