Minorities Build Ladders to Employment, Rung by Rung
Despite nonprofits best efforts, joblessness continues to blight black and brown communities in New York City
On a warm, wet April morning, in Gowanus, Brooklyn, eight men and women ring the buzzer on a nondescript, industrial-looking brick building. As the door unlocks and swings open, they each walk in hoping that they can finally learn how to build something lasting, sturdy and valuable.
They take a seat in a classroom of the nonprofit Brooklyn Woods. Each of the attendees is either unemployed or underemployed. Most of them are people of color. All of them are looking for help. Through social workers, online ads, and friendly referrals, they found their way to this orientation for a free, seven-week woodwork employment training.
In front of the classroom, in New Balances, blue jeans and a plaid shirt, stands the program’s assistant director and orientation leader, Toby Gardner. In an introduction with buzzy references to basketball teams’ synergy and pianists’ craftsmanship, Gardner’s paints a colorful picture of what the program offers and what trainees can expect.
“Woodworking is physical work, and this program isn’t cheap,” he tells the audience, strolling the length of the classroom. “It cost us about five thousand dollars per person to train you, so we have to be careful who we choose. But if you put your energy and time in us, we will put our energy and time in you — we are here to help.”
Closing his pitch, Toby leads the group out of the classroom and into the workshop. As the prospects look around, Toby picks two pieces of wood off a shelf — one rough, uncut, the other shaped and smoothed. “I want you to rub your hands across this,” he tells the group, passing them the cutting boards. “This is a process woodworkers do. We go from rough and unfinished to smooth and fine.” As the prospective students examine the cedar’s dramatic transformation, they hope that they too can saw and sand themselves into something anew.
Brooklyn Woods is a program of the Brooklyn Workforce Innovations organization, whose mission is to help jobless and working-poor New Yorkers establish careers. The training programs are free to participants. Graduates can expect to make $12–15 an hour. And since the program draws from amongst some of the city’s neediest individuals, the training can be the difference between living in a shelter and getting a stable home. But unfortunately for New York’s indigent population, there just isn’t enough training to go around.
“We get more applications than we can take,” said Katherine Girgis, a Brooklyn Networks Job Developer. “They come here seeking job growth and opportunity, but we just can’t find a spot for everyone.” Last year, from over 2000 applications, BWI was able to take about 850.
Many of those in the applicant pool have traveled from the margins. Their homes are disproportionately insecure. Their education disproportionately incomplete. And their demographics are disproportionately black and brown.
The particular severity of systemic unemployment among people of color in New York City was highlighted in a 2016 report by the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Researchers found that in New York City about 27 percent of blacks and 24 percent of Latinos age 20- to 24-years-old were out of work and out of school in 2014.
And given the recent tensions nationwide between police, policy makers, and communities of color, the overrepresentation of minorities amongst the unemployed remains a source of contention and embarrassment for many.
Last year, New York City native and then presidential candidate Donald Trump drew fire when he said black communities have “fifty-eight percent” youth unemployment and “nothing to lose.” Following his comments, many publications snapped back citing overestimations, and exaggerations, but none could deny the underlying truth in Trump’s observation of the unemployment disparity. As New York Times civil rights reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in an article titled Trump’s Inconvenient Racial Truth, “Whatever his motives, Trump was talking about the black working class in a way that few national politicians do.”
But much more contentious than the scope of racialized unemployment has been the debate of its cause.
On the right, Republican House leader Paul Ryan has blamed racialized unemployment in cities like New York on a cultural pathology:
“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
On the left Democrats like former-President Barack Obama, cite nondiscriminatory market forces:
“These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts: downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy.”
However history suggests that this contemporary debate on race and unemployment fails to wrestle with both the underlying role racism has had in shaping the American labor market and the subsequent failure of government and business policy to correct these disparities.
The black unemployment rate has been roughly double the national average as far back as the 1960s. Duke University historian Nancy MacLean traces how the American public and private sector artificially engineered a racial employment and skill gap in her 2010 book; Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace:
“Brought up in segregated housing that produced high rates of illness, deprived of good medical care, confined to the worst schools, denied access to advanced training, cut off from the cultural mainstream… African Americans seemed all but doomed to the lowest rung of the labor market.”
Under this pressure of racist employers, and with new competition from automated manufacturing, civil rights leaders rallied for massive investment in job programs. Leaders as diverse as A. Philip Randolph, Percy Sutton, and Malcolm X pushed for billions in public and private financing “to create fair and full employment” for racial minorities. This call would be echoed throughout the decade, including at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the 1968 Poor People’s Movement.
Herbert Hill, then- Labor director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, warned the country that if it failed to fulfill these large-scale, systemic efforts to correct the labor market, it would create “a permanent black underclass,” “a group of unemployables.” Decades later, Hill’s words would prove prophetic.
By 1968, the Civil Rights movement ended without any large-scale employment creation program or job training intervention. Explanations for the inaction are numerous — the war in Vietnam, a conservative backlash, a lack of political will. But the results were clear.
Two decades later, in his seminal 1987 work The Truly Disadvantaged, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson described how the decision not to correct racial employment left black and brown inner-cities to be ravaged by globalization and automation. “Urban minorities have been particularly vulnerable to structural economic changes, such as increasing polarization of the labor market into low-wage and high-wage sectors, technological innovations, and the relocation of manufacturing industries out of the central cities.”
Wilson found that the side effects of this long-term, concentrated unemployment degraded the social fabric of neighborhoods, increased crime, and decreased quality of life. Like the scholars who preceded him, Wilson too ended his book with a call for “a comprehensive program that combines employment policies with social welfare policies.” But like those before him, his employment policy recommendations fell on deaf ears.
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Over the last thirty years, globalization and technology have continued to hollow out employment opportunities for urban minorities. Absent any systemic interventions on race and unemployment, programs like Brooklyn Woods and a patchwork of other nonprofits, agencies, and charities have addressed the racial inequities in the labor market piecemeal.
On the Brooklyn Workforce Innovations website, the program’s mission reads, “we seek to develop programs that counter prevailing market inequalities (especially those based on race or gender) and contribute to a broader movement for economic justice.”
For Toby Gardner at Brooklyn Woods, that means fighting for people who are overrepresented among the unemployed and underrepresented among woodworkers to enter the industry. After the tour of the workshop, he invites each person into his office for an interview. The applicants tell him about the homeless shelters they live in. The condemned buildings they moved out of. The employers who robbed them. And despite it all, the dreams they still harbor.
In exchange, he offers them the clear-eyed truth on whether he thinks the program can help them. For many, it’s not a perfect match. The years of living on the margins have taken their toll. The demands of lifting wood and operating heavy machinery are too much. For them, Toby does his best to find another program or contact for them to follow up with.
But for the chosen, who are lucky enough to mesh with the program’s criteria, Brooklyn Woods offers what so many of the city’s downtrodden have been denied for generations — the training and connections that can provide a fighting chance, at a living wage.
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