Tiffany Arnold had been a paratransit driver for Atlantas mass transit system, MARTA, for nine years when COVID-19 sent the city into lockdown. Just like that, her job and all her co-workers jobs vanished.

How are we going to eat, how are we going to live, how are we going to pay the utilities? she said in a recent interview, recalling the first few thoughts to race through her head. Arnold, 42, has two children, and she had just purchased a home six months before the pandemic started. Her first few unemployment checks were not even enough to cover the mortgage.

Arnold was able to hang on until MARTA reopened last summer. But thousands of Black families like hers have not been as lucky. The public sector employs roughly one out of every five Black workers in normal times, making this one more way the pain of the COVID-19 pandemic which had wiped out nearly 1.4 million public sector jobs has fallen disproportionately on Black families.

The public sector is a very Black sector, said Janel Bailey, the co-director of organizing and programs for the Los Angeles Black Worker Center, a grassroots labor organization. What that looks like today, in 2021, with this massive job loss, particularly in the public sector, is extreme pressure on Black families.

Black families started the recession with less savings and worse employment prospects than other American families, meaning even those who held on to their jobs may be under extreme pressure to support family members who didnt.

We were already dealing with a Black jobs crisis when this started, but this pandemic has just really done a number on folks, Bailey said. Its outrageous.

President Joe Bidens $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the American Rescue Plan, dedicates $350 billion to reversing the damage, and with no time to spare: State and local government job losses during the pandemic are already three times greater than they were during the Great Recession. In February, when the economy gained 379,000 jobs overall, the public sector still lost 86,000 jobs . Those jobs disappeared even though the broader economy is showing signs of recovery and many states projected budget shortfalls are starting to shrink.

Education, in part because it is one of the biggest line items in every state budget, accounts for more than two-thirds of the total public sector losses. But given the scale of services the government provides, no occupation has gone completely unaffected, including social workers, health care workers, courthouse personnel, transit workers, maintenance workers, home care providers, IT staff, parks and recreation workers, librarians and camp counselors.