Sidney Madden's 'And Counting' Tracks Black Women After Layoffs

Sidney Madden's documentary "And Counting" documents Black women in the period after corporate layoffs, according to EBONY Magazine — a project built on a single, observable premise: that the day a layoff is announced is the start of a longer story, not its end.

What does the title signal?

The name "And Counting" frames the layoff as a continuing state. A workforce reduction, in the typical news cycle, gets treated as an event with a beginning, a middle and an end. The title pushes past that endpoint and into the months that follow — the part of the story that rarely makes it into headlines.

That framing matters because layoff coverage has a structural blind spot. Company filings, press releases and labor-market data describe the shape of a layoff wave in aggregate: how many jobs, in which sector, at what severance cost. They describe less reliably what happens inside that wave, particularly to workers whose labor market position starts from a narrower base.

Why does the film center Black women?

Black women's labor market outcomes have historically moved differently from the headline rate. Their labor force participation has run above the national average for decades, while their unemployment rate has run persistently above it. The combination means the same layoff wave lands with different weight on different résumés — a measurable pattern that aggregate reporting tends to flatten.

"And Counting" appears to be a documentary answer to that gap. EBONY's framing positions the film as a record of individual trajectories inside a statistical pattern — the kind of record aggregate reporting does not generate on its own.

What does it mean for working readers?

For professionals reading the labor market in real time, the project's premise translates into a useful calibration. Workforce reductions are usually discussed as a single moment: the announcement, the package, the bounce-back. The documentary reframes that moment as the first entry in a longer ledger — one that includes depleted savings, slower callbacks and a longer horizon before the next role lands.

That reframe has practical consequences for how readers track the market. A layoff announced on a Tuesday can still be defining a household budget two years later, particularly for workers whose networks and savings start from a thinner position.

The takeaway in plain words

The headline is the easy part. The count continues long after the news cycle moves on.