Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Robert L. Smith
Plain Dealer Reporter
As the region and the state strive to prepare workers to compete in the new economy, a local research group warns that huge numbers of people are likely to be left behind. Tens of thousands of black men are not only unemployed but also nearly unemployable in a knowledge-based economy, so investments in higher education and in high-skills job training will not reach them, PolicyBridge argues in a study to be released today.
"The Job Prescription: Examining Pervasive Joblessness Among African-American Men" argues that creative strategies are needed to re-introduce the working life to jobless black adults, some of whom have given up on ever finding steady work.
"That's a pretty scary trend," said Randell McShepard, a vice president at RPM International and chairman of PolicyBridge, a think tank founded in 2005 to explore issues critical to the black community. "It's the kind of thing we don't talk about so much."
The report, written by McShepard and Mark Batson, PolicyBridge's executive director, along with researcher Fran Stewart, warns of a "full-blown economic emergency" left largely untreated.
It's well known that the black unemployment rate well exceeds the white unemployment rate here and nationally, but even that alarming number reflects only people actively looking for work, the authors point out.
For a clearer look at the work force, the authors combined the numbers of unemployed with the numbers of jobless black adults reported to the U.S. Census Bureau.
By their reckoning, 38 percent of black men ages 25 to 54 in Cleveland are not in the labor force. Regionwide, 31 percent of black men of prime working age are not employed.
The numbers do not surprise Claudia Coulton, co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University.
"That's the long-term trend that people are concerned about: More African-American men are disconnected from the labor force," she said.
Some are disabled. Some have felony records. Some have lost hope and are no longer looking, the authors say. Their sheer numbers - about 35,000 adults in the region - demand attention.
"That's a big number of people who are going to be disenfranchised for a very long time," McShepard said.
"Somehow, new ideas need to come to the table," Batson added.
Often, a work ethic is lost in communities afflicted with long-term joblessness, making its residents even less attractive to employers.
The report calls for focused attention to the problem and suggests a couple of helping strategies.
Investments aimed at increasing the numbers of college graduates and high-tech workers, while important, will not lift the urban black underclass anytime soon, the report argues.
PolicyBridge calls for more basic adult job training and job matching. It suggests alternatives to jail for drug offenders, like "skills training camps," and more programs aimed at helping high school dropouts earn degrees.
The issue may even demand a marketing campaign, one promoting the working life in communities where men rarely leave the home for work.
"The standard and usual practices for placing these hard-to-place individuals, we know they don't work," McShepard said. "We're saying something different has to happen."
Find the report online at www.policy-bridge.org, or call 216-344-4600. To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: rsmith@plaind.com, 216-999-4024
Copyright, 2008, The Plain Dealer. All Rights Reserved. Used by NewsBank with Permission
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