NiLP Latino Data note Latinos Continue to be the Most Underrepresented in NYS Government Employment

The only group to experience declining representation

By Angelo Falcón

According to the latest report by New York State, Latinos not only remain the most underrepresented community in state government employment, but are the only major racial-ethnic group to be losing ground as state workers. The latest report by the NYS Department of Civil Service, "2015 New York State Workforce Management Report," finds that as of January 2015, Latinos only made up 4.9 percent of the state government workforce. Latinos, however, make up about 19 percent of the state's population, making them the most underrepresented group in state employment.

This problem of extreme Latinos underrepresentation in NYS government has been the subject of reports and advocacy the National Institute for Latino Policy since 1982. During this period it has become clear that this is not a partisan issue but is shared by both major political parties. It is also clear that thisd issue has never been given the priority it requires, allowing the degree of Latino underrepresentation to continue to grow as the state;s Latino population increases dramatically.

The Civil Service report also found that Latinos were the only group to experience a drop in their percentage of the New York State government workforce between 2014 and 2015. According to the report, Latinos representation as employees in the Andrew Cuomo administration fell from 5.1 percent to 4/9 percent between the 2014 and 2015 reporting periods. Latinos were the only group to experience this decrease in the percentage of the-the state workforce in this period.

The state agencies under Governor Andrew Cuomo continue to be racially segregated. One indicator of this problem is the high positive correlation between the percentage of Black and Latino employees by the agency (+.45) with the high negative correlation between the percentages of Latinos and Whites by agency (-.41).

Because those agencies with the larger number of employees have the most ability to diversify their workforces, we identified those with the lowest and highest percentage of Latino employees limited to those agencies with of 500 or more totals employees. Based on this, we found the following agencies had the lowest percentages of Latino employees:

One indicator of the persistence of the extreme underrepresentation of Latinos in state government employment is the Department of States. Despite this being an agency unique in having had four Latino heads since as Secretaries of States, only 4.0 percent of its employees are Latinos. Another example of the problem is the Department of Civil Service, which coordinates the state's Equal Employment Opportunities programs --- the Latino share of their employees if only 3.3 percent.

The following five agencies had the highest percentage of Latino employees:

The racial-ethnic breakdown of the employees of all of the major state government agencies is provided in the table below (click here for enlarged table):

The extreme underrepresentation of Latinos in the New York State government workforce continues to be a serious problem throughout the Governor Andrew Cuomo Administration. It si encouraging to see some important Latino appointments by Governor Cuomo in the past year, such as maintaining Latinos as Secretary of State, but these political appointments have not resulted in any significant change in addressing the long-term problem of what is essentially Latino exclusion from state government employment. This is also a failure shared by the Latino state legislators in the Assembly and State Senate, and of mechanisms they have developed such as the NYS Puerto Rican/Hispanic Legislative Task Force and annual Somos El Futuro conferences to seriously address this problem by giving it the priority it requires. With 19 percent of state employees projected to be retiring in the next five years, this appears to present the state with an opportunity to finally address this longterm exclusion of Latinos.

Angelo Falcón is President of the National Institute for Latino Policy (nILP). He can be reached at afalcon@latinopolicy.org.