St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 24, 2010
Charles Laden Jr. has been running into a "brick wall" for two years since being laid off by the city of St. Louis.
"You look for a job, they tell you they'll call you back. Then you don't hear from them. Or they'll call you back for an interview, and then you'll never hear from them again after that, either. It's been a tough road," he said.
Laden estimates that at least half of his friends and neighbors in his St. Louis neighborhood share his troubles.
"A hole in our community" is the way the black 34-year-old father of three (with another on the way) describes it.
Nationally and locally, the academic and business communities along with economists and civil leaders concur. Sadly, they say, it appears disproportionately high black unemployment in St. Louis and other urban areas is not likely to disappear soon, if ever.
In 2009, a year when 10.5 percent of the overall St. Louis-area work force was unemployed, 18.4 percent of the region's African-Americans were out of a job, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The jobless rate last year for black men in St. Louis stood at 22.1 percent.
(Nationally, black unemployment in July was 15.6 percent, compared with 9.5 percent for the general population.)
St. Louis, experts say, has little or no hope of meeting, let alone exceeding, its pre-recession productivity levels unless drastic measures are taken to address the epidemic of black unemployment that has festered for generations in north St. Louis and parts of North County.
"There is no retail there, the service sector employment for the most part isn't there. And if you look at the overall data, given the number of people who live there, that's the drag (on the local economy)," said Howard Wall, vice president and regional economics adviser with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Efforts to help
Locally, the Regional Business Council has launched initiatives to address the problem at the grass-roots level in mentoring programs aimed at area high school and college students.
The business organization also is raising the community profile of its Young Professionals Network, a council-sponsored coalition of minority business executives.
"It's not just about a discussion around a table," said Steven Harris, president of the network of young professionals and a partner with RubinBrown, one of Missouri's largest accounting firms. "You need to take a tiered approach."
The RBC effort represents a single but significant step toward slowing an economic conundrum that some experts trace to Reconstruction.
Unfortunately, business and civic leaders agree, government statistics — which only track displaced workers actively searching for new employment — are the tip of a far more troubling iceberg.
Tony Thompson, the president of Kwame Construction who has taken an active role in leading the RBC initiatives, agrees with the assessment of Layden, the former city employee:
About half the black men living in the metropolitan area, Thompson ventures, are out of work.
Indeed, an African-American living in the St. Louis region in 2009 was twice as likely to be unemployed as a white resident of the area, according to an analysis of government data by the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute.
The ratio hands St. Louis the ignominious distinction of being the nation's third-worst metropolitan area when it comes to black unemployment. Only Minneapolis and Memphis were worse.
Nor is there historical precedent to suggest the gap will narrow once the economy and job market bounce back.
No quick fix seen
Steven Pitts, a policy specialist with the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California-Berkeley, notes the black employment disconnect has 'stayed at roughly 2-to-1 for 50 years. It's not a new phenomenon at all."
The ratio, he added, is not unique to St. Louis.
"If you look at the top 20 cities in America, you'll see similar statistics," said Pitts, who monitors black unemployment trends for the Labor Center. "It's not that one city has it right and 19 others have it wrong."
James Buford, president of the Urban League of Greater St. Louis for 25 years, says systemic reasons will prevent the "normal economic cycle" from fixing black unemployment.
Buford's list begins with the disintegration of the black nuclear family and runs through the disproportionate number of African-Americans who do not earn a high school diploma (47 percent in 2008, according to a recent report).
It ends with black-on-black crime and, with it, an incarceration rate that results in one of every nine African-American men ages 20-34 spending time behind bars.
But Buford does not blame racism as a cause of black unemployment.
"We have more opportunities now than we ever had in the times of our grandfathers and grandmothers, under Jim Crow or the hangman's noose or slavery," he said. Racism "is just an excuse. You can't fall back on it and you can't tell me there aren't jobs out there. ... If you want to work, there are opportunities, and (racism) is just an excuse we fall back on for lack of another reason."
Pitts maintains — and Buford agrees — that the dots connecting race to the employment gap cannot be ignored.
The overarching issue of black unemployment, Pitts further contends, cannot be rectified without an honest dialogue about color.
"It's not one factor by itself. But when a lot of different things contribute, race is important," said the Berkeley analyst. "We can talk about different ways to phrase it. We can call it 'elephants' if you like. But it's still there. And to call it anything else is counterproductive. You just can't go beyond race."
Education cited
Many say a discussion of unemployment among blacks is impossible without including the state of public education.
It is a system, Buford and others charge, that has failed to engage and nurture young people through four full years of high school.
Wall, of the Federal Reserve, contends that the inability of the St. Louis Public Schools and some suburban districts to turn out a pool of diverse, qualified high school graduates presents the largest single impediment to attracting job-creating businesses and industries to the region.
"Every study in urban economics that determines how cities grow comes down to human capital and education," Wall said. "It's not the university education here that is suffering. It's high school attainment. It's shocking the number of adults in St. Louis that don't have at least a high school diploma."
A subpar education has not deterred many black residents from seeking work, according to an administrator with the Grace Hill Settlement House.
Without a formal announcement, the regional health and social services agency earlier this month began spreading the word it was accepting applications for 30 spots in an AmeriCorps training program.
So far, said Doug Eller, director of community development, 150 to 200 residents — many of them black — have asked Grace Hill to add their names to the list.
"They may not have a high school (diploma), and there may be some literacy issues," Eller said. "But they are really motivated and they want to do something."
Original Article
|
