Neil deMause

With unemployment still through the roof, are job training programs just preparing people for jobs that don’t exist?

As the economy threatens to sink into a double-dip recession, pressure is growing for federal, state, and local governments to do something about the 16 million Americans who remain out of work. One solution popular with politicians of all stripes—and with both business and labor groups—has been job training programs to close the gap between employers’ needs and workers’ skills.

“Even though a lot of folks are looking for work, there are a lot of companies that are actually also looking for skilled workers; there’s a mismatch that we can close,” President Obama said in June in presenting a community college program to teach manufacturing skills. Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg has launched a series of job training initiatives, most recently as part of his new Young Men’s Initiative to aid black and Latino teens—a cause to which he gave $30 million of his own pocket money… [read more]

Nouriel Roubini takes to Twitter to debunk last week’s rosy employment report, and I look at what it all means for New York City’s job picture:

Between the stock market nosedive and the S&P downgrade (based on a $2 trillion math error), last week wasn’t a great one for the U.S. economic outlook. There was, however, one glimmer of hope: U.S. employers reported they added an above-expected 117,000 jobs in July, as the unemployment rate fell from 9.2 percent to 9.1 percent.

Unfortunately, there to throw cold water on that hope was NYU professor Nouriel Roubini — best known as the man who predicted the housing bubble… [read more]

I’ve blogged a bit about the sports ticket bubble, but haven’t had the space to sink my teeth into the question of whether ticket prices are continuing to deflate, and if so what that will mean for the sports industry. Until now:

A few months ago, it seemed like Major League Baseball was in the throes of a ticket apocalypse. Through the first two weeks of the season, six teams had set all-time single-game lows at their current homes. The surprising Cleveland Indians led the American League Central in the standings, but remained in the cellar at the turnstiles. The New York Yankees, whose ultrapricey new stadium has been beset by empty seats since it opened in 2009, hosted record-low crowds for four games in a row. It was as if fans, having quietly absorbed more than a decade of price hikes and the advent of $9 beers, had spontaneously decided to go on strike…. [read more]

If you didn’t get enough on how tough it can be to apply for public benefits in New York City in my recent City Limits magazine story, here’s a new article on a report saying it’s doubly tough if you’re a teenager or young adult:

It’s a story that’s repeated itself several times now under the Bloomberg administration: A leading New York social services agency issues a report harshly criticizing the Bloomberg administration’s welfare policies as inappropriate for many poor New Yorkers, and ineffective at moving people into economic self-sufficiency. City officials respond by insisting that the study is flawed, and that the city’s “Work First” model has been a success at connecting low-income New Yorkers with employment.

The latest study, “Missed Opportunity,” was issued jointly last month by the Community Service Society (owner of City Limits) and the Resilience Advocacy Project to investigate how young applicants for public benefits are handled by the city Human Resources Administration, which manages public benefits. Their answer: poorly… [read more]

And one more from the City Limits extravaganza (which is now optimized for you to read through start to finish online, beginning here). This is a companion piece that didn’t make the print magazine for space reasons, profiling a Hunter College student who’s stuck in low-wage work thanks to her country of birth:

Like many students at Hunter College, C. is in her mid-20s, is working on her degree after several years in the work world and commutes to class from a shared apartment in Queens. But she stands out in one way, though it’s not one she goes out of her way to mention to classmates and teachers.

“I would love to be able to tell people, ‘You know, I’m undocumented,’ ” she says, “because I think it would shock them. My accent is not too strong. I’m young. I’m going to school. They would never characterize me as undocumented. The problem is, I am.”… [read more]

I’m happy to report that contrary to what I said yesterday, my entire article profiling low-income New Yorkers and how they make ends meet is now available online via the City Limits website. You can find links to all six sections here, or if you prefer individual links to each chapter, be my guest:

1. The Poor Have Numbers. Do They Count?
2. Even Entrepreneurs Need Food Stamps
3. From Blue-Collar to the Welfare Line
4. One Woman’s Plan to Beat Poverty
5. Sharon’s Homework: Self-Sufficiency
6. What Would Help Poor New Yorkers? Take Your Pick

You can also still order a print or electronic copy as well, but the new issue isn’t in the ordering system just yet. So if you want to see all the nice charts and photos, just hold tight and I’ll post an alert when your money is good here.

And now it can be revealed: One of the big projects taking up much of my time this spring was a special issue of City Limits magazine on low-income New Yorkers, how they make ends meet, and how government policy helps (or hinders) them in getting by.

Currently available online are the first two sections: My introduction on the anywhere from 1.5 million to 3 million New Yorkers (depending on how you count) who are poor, and the first of several profiles of low-income individuals — students, parents (single and otherwise), homeless shelter residents, low-wage workers — and their daily lives. From the former:

It’s a simple enough question on the face of it: How many people living in New York City are poor? The answer, it turns out, depends on how you count.

For decades, the milepost was the federal poverty line, a measure developed in 1963 by government statistician Mollie Orshansky to try to quantify how many Americans were in need. Noting that a federal survey had estimated the average American family’s food spending as one-third of its income, Orshansky took the cost of a subsistence “food basket,” tripled it and deemed families earning below that amount officially poor… [read more]

And from the latter:

It’s Monday, Jan. 31, and as usual, Tanya Fields is having a hectic morning. The Bronx mother of four has already had to juggle her schedule after her babysitter called in sick, forcing her to be late for an important appointment in downtown Brooklyn. But on this occasion—unlike her daily work running a nonprofit startup or her prior years as an environmental advocate—there’s no calling in sick or asking to reschedule: This appointment is for trying to keep her welfare benefits… [read more]

There are another four chapters after that, but the moment at least, you’ll need to buy a copy ($4.95 for a PDF, or add $2 shipping for a paper copy) to read those.

It’s well worth doing so, though, or else you’ll miss out on meeting people like Sharon Jones, Walter Greene, and Beverly Davis, and hearing what it’s like to live in the world’s most expensive city when your monthly income barely breaks four digits. Also, supporting City Limits, which enables me to write more of these stories. It’s a win-win!

[UPDATE: My entire article is now available online for free! But ordering a copy is still the polite thing to do.]

The June issue of Extra! is out, and with it my article on how coverage of state budget battles back in the spring swept under the rug the question of how much of the budget crises were caused by past tax cuts for the rich:

When protests against attempts to roll back state workers’ benefits swept across the nation in February and March, local and national media coverage largely portrayed it as the inevitable collision of generous worker benefits and tight economic times.

The Columbus Dispatch (2/20/11), for example, reported that “the protests at the Ohio and Wisconsin capitols portend what lies ahead as governors in both parties move to cut worker benefits or jobs to balance their books.” The Dispatch called employee pension and healthcare benefits “a long-term threat to state budgets,” citing economists with both the right-wing Heritage Foundation and the right-wing American Enterprise Institute as saying that worker pensions are “squeezing” state budgets…

This story is subscribers-only for now, so you’ll need to sign up (only $15 for a year’s digital subscription!) if you want to read it. Or wait a couple of months until it shows up for free on FAIR’s website, but where’s the fun in that?

Next up fo New York City after the defeat of a paid sick leave bill: a proposal to require decent wages for employees at development projects that get city subsidies.

The battle lines are all too familiar: A worker-rights bill backed by a broad coalition of unions and progressive politicians, but opposed by major business interests. A majority of the City Council on board as sponsors, but no commitment from the Council speaker. Dueling economic impact studies conducted by the two opposing sides, with each insisting that the other’s is inadequate.

After the Council’s long-awaited bill to extend sick leave to all private employees in New York City crashed and burned last fall once Council Speaker Christine Quinn declared that it would be too harmful to businesses during tough economic times, many of the same players turned their sights on a proposed “living wage” bill for recipients of city development subsidies… [read more]

The 1099 tax form mess continues, with both the House and Senate moving to pass repeal bills. Unfortunately, the Senate’s solution for filling the resulting revenue gap is to promise vaguely to find unneeded spending it can cut; the House’s is to raise low- and middle-income earners’ health insurance premium costs; and the whole thing might still fail if the two sides can’t agree on a compromise:

There’s one legislative issue lawmakers on both sides of the aisle overwhelmingly agree on: The onerous 1099 tax-reporting mandate that snuck into the health-care reform bill has to be repealed.

The Republicans promised to eliminate it in their Pledge to America, and President Obama did the same in his State of the Union address. So nearly one year after its passage, why isn’t the law dead yet?… [read more]