I recently wrote a series of essays on what I consider to be phony or exaggerated economic issues in New York State. Now I’m going to write a series of essays on the real problems, as I see them. For New York City, perhaps the biggest problem is the low share of its adults who work, or look for work. The support of the non-working is a burden the working have to carry, and to the extent that burden is concentrated on those who live in their proximity, it is a particular burden in New York. But that liability is small compared with the impact of the absence of employment on the non-employed themselves. It is one of several ways New York’s poor are less well off now than in the 1950s – though, as we shall see, better off than in the mid-1990s.
The low level of labor force participation here is a reversal of a historic pattern: in 1960, the share of New York City adults in the labor force was higher than the national average, according to decennial census data, and anecdotal evidence indicates that had been true for decades. Jobs for teens were plentiful here; women were more likely to be employed outside the home in New York as well, before it became fashionable nationwide. Beginning in the 1960s, however, New York City adults became less likely to be in the labor force, and to the extent they were in it, less likely to be employed rather than unemployed, than the national average. In June 1995, only 55.2% of New York City adults were in the labor force, a record 12.0 percentage points lower than the national average of 67.2%. The share of NYC adults actually employed that month was just 50.8%, a record 12.6 percentage points lower than the U.S. average of 63.4%. At the national average, another 750,000 or so New York City residents would have been working. New York City was just emerging from a deep recession at that time, but its employment/population ratio had lagged the national average, generally by at least 8.0 percentage points, for decades. (See attachment).
Why? For decades, New York City has had an above average share of less skilled adults, and a below average share of jobs accessible to the unskilled. For the former blame the city’s schools, and its families. Difficult family circumstances put many of the city’s children at an initial disadvantage – in 1995 out-of-wedlock births accounted for half the city’s total. Meanwhile, although New York City’s schools continued to produce legions of Westinghouse winners from its gifted and magnet programs despite a shortage of resources, vocational education collapsed during the fiscal crisis and never revived.
As a result, jobs that required basic skills and some training went to immigrants or suburbanites, while the graduates of the city’s schools either went on to high achievement or were destined for the social landfill. Yes, New York’s educational attainment ratio is getting better rapidly, with a much higher share of city residents high school or college graduates. But as I wrote in another essay, that is the result of better educated people from elsewhere moving in, and those who had the misfortune to be educated here leaving or dying off.
Moreover, the sectors that provide the most jobs for the unskilled, and for teens, have employ relatively few workers in New York City its population and the income of its residents. In the 1950s, much of the metropolitan region had its local consumer needs met in New York City, which accounted for most of the large stores, entertainment, and local manufacturing and wholesale trade. Suburbanites came into the city to shop and have fun. By the mid-1990s, however, not only were suburbanites not coming in, but New York City’s own middle class was spending its dollars outside its borders for everything from accounting services to sporting events to food.
A statistical comparison by the Department of City Planning at the time showed that city residents must be shopping outside the city at the large stores and supermarkets New York City didn’t have, but the suburbs did. Then-Borough President Ruth Messinger, who was running for Mayor at the time, commissioned a survey to prove that wasn’t true – but the survey proved the opposite (to her credit she released the results). And better off New Yorkers had always been more likely than other Americans to have second homes where they spent some of their income, and to travel far and wide. But those lost dollars had been offset by dollars gained by travelers to the city. By the 1990s, that was no longer the case.
So the jobs for the unskilled that are present elsewhere in the country weren’t as abundant in New York. But even if they had been, to the extent the unskilled were influenced by New York’s opinion leaders, they didn’t want such jobs anyway. Speaking as one who has lived elsewhere (my family was forced to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma by the 1970s recession when I was a junior in high school) New York City is far ahead of other places in its appreciation of cultural diversity and toleration of lifestyle diversity. But it has a lack of appreciation with regard to class.
Whereas in Tulsa what is here called a “McJob” was a rite of passage for children from all backgrounds, in the New York area many affluent parents consider such jobs to be beneath their children. And whereas in Tulsa the member of the Country Club and the man who parks his car might be former classmates, members of the same church, and think of themselves as being on the same level in ways other than income, here the highly educated affluent often seem to think of those in menial jobs as members of a different, lower species. You can sense it, and so can they.
If a person working behind the counter isn’t going to be treated with much more respect than a bum begging for change, one might as well be a bum begging for change. Perhaps this attitude is the downside of New York’s high appreciation for education, an appreciation not present in Tulsa, Oklahoma where half your teachers are referred to as “coach.”
And speaking of education, perhaps this attitude is in part responsible for school’s the failure to provide basic skills and job training for those not destined to be scholars. And perhaps it is responsible for what in New York is considered an egalitarian attitude on the part of some that, as opposed to working in a restaurant, service occupation of store, or picking up trash in a park if none of those positions are unavailable, the unskilled should be supported in a life of poverty in isolated neighborhoods without working at all.
The good news is that things are getting better. Many large stores have opened in the all corners of the city (but not large supermarkets in poor neighborhoods – the City Council succeeded has succeeded in preventing that thus far), creating retail jobs. More importantly, shoppers who travel to the suburbs to shop at large stores also purchase other stores and services there; now that more are staying local, other types of retail trade have also expanded. Expanding tourism has increased employment in hotels and restaurants.
Of course the biggest source of unskilled jobs in the practice of assigning a large share of the city’s elderly home care aides via Medicaid, a policy that has drawbacks and well as advantages – most notably the trading away of a fair share of state school aid in exchange for excess Medicaid spending.
In any event, in June 2006 57.2% of NYC residents were working, just 6.3% less than the national average of 63.4%, the smallest June gap in decades. That is still too much, of course, but the trend is moving in the right direction.
To keep it moving that way, the city will have to look at the local consumer sector as a source of potential growth, rather than just a caboose pulled along by Wall Street. It’s schools will have to start training children with the full range of abilities for the full range of jobs, rather than just identifying those destined for the top at age four and placing them in gifted programs at age five while consigning everyone else to the bottom. And the city’s culture will have to shift so that even unskilled jobs, and those who do them, are considered worthy of respect.