[Platform] Fwd: Out of Sight - Jobless Kids

[Merelice]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: mel king <mhking at mit.edu>
Date: Jun 10, 2008 10:18 PM
Subject: Fwd: Out of Sioght - Jobless Kids
To: dusp at mit.edu, Merelice <merelice at gmail.com>, Robert Turner
<rlturner16 at gmail.com>, "Ron (GOV) Bell" <Ron.Bell at state.ma.us>, Chuck
Turner <Chuck.Turner at cityofboston.gov>, "Deval L. Patrick"
<info at devalpatrick.com>


Begin forwarded message:

From: moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG
Date: June 10, 2008 4:43:26 PM EDT
To: PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: Out of Sioght - Jobless Kids
Reply-To: moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG


Out of Sight

By Bob Herbert
New York Times
June 10, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/opinion/10herbert.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

When the dismal unemployment numbers were released on
Friday (at the same time that oil prices were surging
to record highs), I thought about the young people at
the bottom of the employment ladder.

Below the bottom, actually.

A shudder went through the markets when the Labor
Department reported that the official jobless rate had
jumped one-half a percentage point in May to 5.5
percent - the sharpest spike in 22 years.

The young people I'm talking about wouldn't have
noticed. These are the teenagers and young adults -
roughly 16 to 24 years old - who are not in school and
basically have no hope of finding work. The bureaucrats
compiling the official unemployment rate don't even
bother counting these young people. They are no one's
constituency. They might as well not exist.

Except that they do exist. There are four million or
more of these so-called disconnected youths across the
country. They hang out on street corners in cities
large and small - and increasingly in suburban and
rural areas.

If you ask how they survive from day to day, the most
likely response is: 'I hustle,' which could mean
anything from giving haircuts in a basement to washing
a neighbor's car to running the occasional errand.

Or it could mean petty thievery or drug dealing or
prostitution or worse.

This is the flip side of the American dream. The United
States economy, which has trouble producing enough jobs
to keep the middle class intact, has left these
youngsters all-but-completely behind.

'These kids are being challenged in ways that my
generation was not,' said David Jones, the president of
the Community Service Society of New York, which tries
to develop ways to connect these young men and women
with employment opportunities, or get them back into
school.

It is extremely difficult because, for the most part,
the jobs are not there and the educational
establishment is having a hard enough time teaching the
kids who are still in school.

'Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this
population back in,' said Mr. Jones. 'Once you fall out
of the system, you're basically on no one's
programmatic radar screen.'

So these kids drift. Some are drawn to gangs. A
disproportionate number become involved in crime. It is
a tragic story, and very few people are paying
attention.

The economic policies of the past few decades have
favored the wealthy and the well-connected to a degree
that has been breathtaking to behold. The Nation
magazine has devoted its current issue to the Gilded
Age-type inequality that has been the result.

Just a little bit of help to the millions of youngsters
trying to get their first tentative foothold in that
economy should not be too much to ask.

It's not as if these kids don't want to work. Many of
them search and search until they finally become
discouraged. The summer job market, which has long been
an important first step in preparing teenagers for the
world of work, is shaping up this year as the weakest
in more than half a century, according to the Center
for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in
Boston.

Now, with the overall economy deteriorating, the
situation for poorly educated young people will only
grow worse. As Andrew Sum, director of the Center for
Labor Market Studies, told The Times recently:

'When you get into a recession, kids always get hit the
hardest. Kids always go to the back of the hiring
queue. Now, they find themselves with a lot of other
people in line ahead of them.'

As the ranks of these youngsters grow, so does their
potential to become a destabilizing factor in the
society.

More important, the U.S. needs the untapped talent (and
the potential buying power) in this large pool of young
people, just as it needs the talents of the many other
Americans of all ages whose energy, intelligence and
creativity are wasted in an economic system that is not
geared toward providing jobs for everyone who wants to
work.

America needs to dream bigger, and in this election
year, job creation should be issue No. 1. If I were
running for president, I would pull together the
smartest minds I could find from government, the
corporate world, the labor movement, academia, the
nonprofits and ordinary working men and women to see
what could be done to spark the creation of decent jobs
on a scale that would bring the U.S. as close as
possible to full employment.

We've maxed out the credit cards, floated mindlessly in
stock market bubbles, refinanced mortgages to death -
now's the time to figure out how to put all Americans
to work.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company