When the dust clears and we’ve hired a new mayor, he or she must immediately attack the employment crisis that triggers so many other problems, including homelessness, delinquency, addiction and crime. Fixing the problem starts with a sober, realistic sense of how complicated joblessness has become in the modern economy.
“We can’t just go back to the way our economy worked before [the pandemic], because it didn’t work for everyone,” said Joey Ortiz, CEO of the New York City Employment and Training Coalition, an alliance of groups that help New Yorkers get skills, training and jobs. “Workforce development is the connective tissue between community and the economy. Without it, far too many will not be able to productively participate in the recovery — with the potential for dire consequences to our city’s economy.”
Ortiz is right. New York, like the rest of America, is experiencing a frustrating breakdown in the labor market: We have tons of unfilled jobs, even as millions are seeking work. The federal Department of Labor recently reported there are more than 8 million open jobs available nationwide, the highest number ever recorded — and 9.8 million unemployed people, well above the pre-pandemic level of 5. 7 million.
Here in the city, even at the height of the pandemic shutdown — when a staggering 1 million New Yorkers were suddenly thrown out of work — there were 200,000 open jobs that employers were trying to fill. An already high number of so-called disconnected youth — 16-to-24-year-old New Yorkers who are neither working nor in school — more than doubled during the pandemic to 259,000 to 324,000.
Federal relief checks and food relief have been good and necessary emergency measures. But New York’s jobs crisis — before, during and after the pandemic — remains a problem of a skills mismatch. People looking for employment don’t have the right mix of training and experience for the positions that businesses want to fill.
The pandemic has added a new dimension to the crisis: a pervasive unease among workers and small business owners whose professional and personal lives were turned upside down over the last year. Many are hesitant about jumping back into the job or business ventures that collapsed during the pandemic.
Researchers at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs have put some hard numbers to the depth and breadth of this uncertainty. A newly published survey called The Astoria Project examined more than 700 families in Astoria and surrounding neighborhoods.
The survey, conducted between December 2020 and February 2021, captures the deep dislocation of a middle-class neighborhood where most annual incomes are between $40,000 and $100,000. About two-thirds of the people surveyed — and more than three-quarters of those making less than $50,000 — saw a significant loss in working hours and/or pay during the pandemic.
By the end of the survey in February, only 13% of workers who had been furloughed or laid off were back to full-time work, compared to a citywide figure of 33%. Fewer than half of those who had been laid off or furloughed expected to work with the same employer.
The message to the next mayor is clear: Workforce development has to be a central economic growth strategy, not an afterthought tacked onto the social services budget.
Ortiz recently held a forum on employment — but only three mayoral candidates attended.
“I am committed to making community college free in New York City and ensuring that we’re building a center for the future of work at CUNY,” candidate Shaun Donovan told me at the forum. Donovan has also promised to get a paid internship for every New York City high school student to help get them oriented toward the world of work.
Eric Adams has an aggressive plan as well, promising to name a deputy mayor of workforce development or a jobs czar who would report directly to the mayor. Adams also says the city should make jobs a central planning tool: “Whenever we use taxpayers’ dollars to do something to subsidize or benefits such as rezoning, attached to that must be workforce development.”
Kathryn Garcia has pledged to maximize the use of CUNY as a jobs engine. “Where’s the research CUNY can be doing to tell us what are the developing industries?” she asked. “It’s pointless to have an education system where you don’t feel you are going to have a career at the end, and we have not intentionally made those connections at scale.”
The reopening of New York’s economy won’t automatically cure the skills crisis that predated the pandemic. The next mayor needs to make major investments in workforce development and CUNY to begin fixing a labor market that, even before COVID, was failing and in need of a major overhaul.
Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.