Colleen Gardner, New York State's Labor Commissioner, was describing what school-leavers and the unemployed already know based on hard experience, as they try to find work in the state and the City.
With a jobless rate of 9.8 in the City in April, down from 10 percent in March, Gardner was offering people some hope, a possible light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, while dealing with the hard realities of trying to earn a living in a sick economy that is still suffering from the hangover that came in the wake of the deep economic recession – the worst since the Great depression of the 1930s.
But if the job pictures of the City and the State are gradually improving, if only by a fraction of one percent, the situation in Black and Hispanic communities gives us little to cheer about. In some neighborhoods the unemployment rate is closer to 15 percent, a clear indication that Blacks, including many Caribbean immigrants, for instance, are bearing a disproportionate share of the economic burden than other ethnic groups.
That may explain why U.S. Congressman Gregory Meeks, a Democrat of Queens, is organizing a federal job fair at York College of the City University on Friday. It also indicates why immigrants and native-born Americans should turn up in droves to meet with recruiters from a host of federal government agencies that are recruiting employees.
Meeks' effort should be applauded, supported and duplicated by other public figures – not just elected representatives at the federal, state, and local government levels, throughout the five boroughs and across the state.
The presence of so many federal agencies, including Immigration Customs, Enforcement, Federal Air Marshall Service, the Food and drug Administration, Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Small Business Administration, along with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection would send an important and positive message to those suffering economic distress: the people's plight is being taken seriously. Another crucial aspect of the job fair is the ability of legal resident immigrants to participate in it. Green card holders and naturalized American citizens should take advantage of the opportunity and, in the words of the Congressman, "dress for success."
The jobless story has a depressing chapter to it. It is fueling the housing foreclosure crisis, which remains a fact of life in the City, especially in immigrant communities in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Far too many homeowners who were relying on steady employment to pay the mortgages now find themselves unable to meet their monthly obligations because of the absence of a paycheck. Some families who had to depend on two working adults to keep the roof over their heads and put food on the table have seen the jobs of husband and wife, mother and father simply disappear.
In some tragic cases, the homes are also being lost. The serious nature of the situation was evident recently when [N.Y.] State Senator John Sampson (D-District 19) organized a somewhat similar job fair in East New York section of Brooklyn and thousands of jobseekers turned up for interviews with recruiters. And that happened at a time when both state and City labor specialists were telling the world that New York was faring better than the rest of the country – at that time, the national jobless rate was 9.9 percent compared with the City's 9.8 percent. Towards the end of last year, the unemployment rate in the City was 10.5 percent.
The trouble with many of these figures is that they don't reflect the pain being felt in households where unemployment is a bit of hard reality, not a statistic. That was why at some of the job fairs, three, four and sometimes five times as many applicants line up for the available offers of employment.
When one considers that almost 600,000 people across New York are receiving unemployment benefits and more than 50 percent of them have been unemployed for at least six months, the psychological and financial damage is evident. As if those numbers weren't bad enough, a nightmare has been added to the equation: 64,000 New Yorkers have exhausted 90 weeks of unemployment benefits.
Because joblessness is imposing such an unbearable burden on families and dulling the aspirations of young people entering the job market for the first time, a more aggressive approach needs to taken by the U.S. Congress.
Lawmakers must extend unemployment benefits by approving a bill now before the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The private sector, which created a mere 41,000 jobs across the country in May, must do more as well. Had it not been for the 411,000 workers hired by the federal government to assist with the U.S. census the problem would have been worse.
Little wonder, then, that Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute sounded a bleak warning when he said "these new data do not present a picture of a healthy private sector and offer nothing even closely resembling the job growth we need to dig us out of a very deep hole."
No one expects private firms simply to add workers just to improve labor statistics. But if they don't hire, then consumers wouldn't have income to buy goods and services. On Friday at York College, several private companies are sending interviewers to the Meeks initiative. Banks, airlines, insurance companies and others are to be there. We trust that many of the people who turn up would return home with solid indications of jobs that would take them out of their economic misery.
