The economy is showing signs of recovery. Many Black Americans are not.

"It was a matter-of-life-and-death situation," Cuna, 39, a Black immigrant from Mozambique, said in a phone interview, explaining that she worried her job might expose her to the virus.

Experts and Black workers said it will take a much more aggressive approach from the federal government and employers, such as overhauling labor laws and closing the racial wage gap, to address historic inequity in the American labor market — not simply bring Black unemployment back to pre-pandemic levels.

"I think that it is time for nannies and domestic workers to be valued, because we do work that makes all other work possible," Cuna said.

Since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting employment data in 1971, the Black unemployment rate has largely been twice the white rate, Wilson said.

According to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll in May, 16 percent of Black workers reported having been laid off or furloughed since the pandemic upended the economy, compared to 11 percent of white workers.

According to a study in June by the National Employment Law Project, Black workers faced higher rates of retaliation for raising Covid-19 safety concerns, and they were twice as likely as white workers to report having unresolved coronavirus-related concerns at work.

Black workers are also disproportionately represented in low-wage, blue-collar jobs, studies show— the types of jobs that cannot easily make the transition to work from home during a pandemic.

There's no dignity and no pride," Townsend said in a phone interview.

"It's really tough out here right now," Girtley, who also protested over the summer, said in a phone interview.

"It makes me angry, because Peet's donated money to Black Lives Matter and the ACLU and the NAACP, but I feel like it was a direct slap in the face, because most of your workers that work at the location that I work in are Black, or we are people of color.".

"They mouth all these wonderful statements about Black Lives Matter, but then, when it comes down to it, they take half their workforce and they designate them as contractors so that they can shift the cost to the worker from the company for health care, for Social Security, for unemployment and all that," she said.

Black workers, particularly Black women, also make up a disproportionate share of domestic workers, who generally have worse pay and fewer labor protections

"We're seeing this pandemic really exacerbating what's already a pretty dire situation for domestic workers, and particularly Black domestic workers, who are just bearing the brunt of the economic and public health crisis," said Aimée-Josiane Twagirumukiza, an organizing director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance

"What we don't see, though, in those unemployment numbers is the numbers for domestic workers — that isn't actually something that has been recorded," she said

A National Domestic Workers Alliance survey in April found that 60 percent of domestic workers had no income at all by that point

She has been working with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to change how domestic work is viewed in labor law and plans to increase her activism going forward