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Ahead of Mother’s Day this weekend, the Los Angeles Black Worker Center will be honoring and saluting the city’s African-American working women. The “Celebrating Sisters in the Struggle for Quality Jobs” rally this afternoon in Leimert Park will feature a blessing ceremony as well as testimonials drawing attention to the economic difficulties of their situation. As the Black Worker Center notes, African-Americans in the LA region comprise 9% of the population, but within the community, thirty-percent of blacks make less than $12 per hour. African-American women are a very important sector in the black employment crisis. Nationwide, as data from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances shockingly found in March, the average median wealth for a single black woman in her prime working years was five dollars. Married or cohabitating black women had median wealth of $31,500. Highlighting the importance of mothers and women to the Black Worker Center’s purpose of developing and strengthening LA’s black working class, today’s event has invited speakers and guests in common cause such as Assembly member Karen Bass and local organizations like the Community Coalition and A New Way of Life.

GUEST: Erin Aubrey Kaplan, freelance journalist and contributing editor to the LA Times Opinion page, on the planning committee of the Black Worker Center, Lori Condinus, Vice President of UNITE HERE Local 11.

Celebrating Sisters in the Struggle for Quality Jobs will take place on Friday May 7th from 1 – 2:30 pm at Leimert Park on the corner of Crenshaw and Vernon Avenue in Los Angeles.

Find out more at 213-480-4155 x 210.