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Business & Finance |
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Who Will Get the 2,500 Million New
Jobs? |
by Ron Walters
President Election Barack Obama has been formulating plans
for the Stimulus Package that will be enacted shortly after
he takes office. It is reputed to be in the area of $800
billion to $1.2 trillion and he originally proposed to
create 2.5 million jobs. More recently, however, he has
adjusted his goal to 3-3.5 million jobs because of analyses
that show the probability that the
economy will lose 3.5 million jobs in all of 2009. Yet this
goal should be juxtaposed against the size of the growing
Black unemployment rate, estimated to be 12 percent at
present, which would be viewed as a crisis if it were a
national figure. It has always mystified me why government
officials and economists consider this as “normal” with
respect to Blacks. The truth
is that it has always been a crisis, but neither Democratic
nor Republican officials have cared enough to enact special
measures targeted to this population of 40 million to help
it achieve employment parity. So, my question is who will
get those jobs? More directly, since the Black unemployment
rate could reach 20 percent by the end of next year, and
they have had difficulty accessing jobs in “normal” times,
whether this fact will be taken into consideration in the
Obama administration. Every one talks about education as the
remedy, but education is a very long range strategy and is
not guaranteed to bring about employment parity, when racism
still influences who gets a job when employers can detect
that an African-American is at the other end of the
application process.
Studies still show that whites with a prison record and a
high school education are able to secure employment in a
greater measure than Blacks with a college degree or a
Black-sounding name. For Blacks to get those jobs the Obama
administration will need to vigorously enforce the laws
against employment discrimination. Second, the announced
targets for job creation by Obama in areas such as
infrastructure, healthcare, environment and others, creates
some doubt that the available jobs will be distributed
equitably. For example, in infrastructure jobs, Hispanics
are poised to consume them, having “crowded out”
African-Americans and others, to use a concept of some
economists, in trades such as construction, landscaping and
other pertinent employment categories. Then,
African-Americans are no better poised in the healthcare
industry to obtain jobs that have quickly been appropriated
by immigrants from many countries, from the Caribbean and
Latin America to the Middle East. Finally, in the
environmental industry, the increase of jobs from 1990 to
2006 was just over 440,000, so with this sector of the
economy targeted for growth, Blacks could obtain a
significant number of jobs with adequate training.
All of this means that since states can deploy workers in
“shovel-ready” jobs in the low-wage category rather quickly,
there should be an acute sensitivity to the fierce
racial/ethnic competition that exists. Otherwise, since
increased employment in other sectors will require training,
what could enable Blacks to become more competitive is the
creation of a more powerful job-training
model that encompasses features of the old CETA
(Comprehensive Education and Training
Act) and the currently ineffective JPTA (Job Partnership
Training Act). It should enable
states to provide the funding to a variety of service
providers (high schools, community colleges, churches, small
businesses, social service organizations and etc.) to
re-establish a priority on training the most disadvantaged
low income American citizens for higher paying jobs.
Many people have asked “What’s next?” now that we have a
Black president and many of the answers have been abstract.
However, coming down the pike is the largest amount of
social
and economic funding to be invested in moving the economy
and the country forward we have seen in a long time. If
Blacks are not poised to take advantage of it, they will not
only lose one of the most important economic opportunities
in history, but also fail to provide our own answer
to the question of what it means to have Barack Obama in the
White House. His job is to open the doors, ours is to fight
to open it wide enough to that we can obtain the equal
benefits of
American citizenship.
Dr. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar,
Director of the African American Leadership Center and
Professor of Government and Politics at the University of
Maryland College Park. His latest book is: The Price of
Racial Reconciliation (University of Michigan Press).
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