Through most of the 1990s, the unemployment rate for city of Milwaukee residents ran below or close to the national average for the nation's 50 largest cities. At 9.3 percent, Milwaukee's 2003 unemployment rate is over two percentage points higher than the national "big city" average, and significantly higher than the 5.7 percentage unemployment rate at the beginning of the 1990s. Since 1990, Milwaukee has lost 21 percent of its manufacturing jobs and overall job growth has been anemic compared to other cities.

The unemployment rate in the city of Milwaukee runs over five percentage points higher than in the suburbs, a gap that has widened considerably since the mid-1990s. All of the net job growth in metropolitan Milwaukee since 1995 has occurred in the suburbs. Consequently, the metro Milwaukee labor market continues to suffer from a structural "spatial mismatch" between pockets of high unemployment (the city of Milwaukee) and locations of job growth (mainly, the suburbs).

Racial disparities in unemployment continue to characterize the Milwaukee labor market. Among the cities and metropolitan areas surveyed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Milwaukee had the highest rate of black unemployment (18.5% in the city, 17.4% in the metro area) in 2001. The gap in white and black unemployment rates in Milwaukee was among the largest in the nation; in metro Milwaukee, the black unemployment rate was over four time higher than the white rate in 2001.