The Invisible Workforce: Uninspired

Other stories in the series:

• The Invisible Workforce: Redefining recruiting
• The skeptical view: Long odds and disputed assumptions
• Reporter's Notebook: In search of malaise – an enlightening walk
• Earnings gap — by the numbers
• A fragile future: Between courts and jobs, a young man stumbles
• Unemployment in the midstate

The recruiters sat idly at their booths in the basement, waiting for somebody to interview.

In the days leading to the job fair, career trainer Michael D. Jefferson had talked to at least 50 people who told him they needed work. But now, this room deep in the bowels of a community center in York was almost empty.

That vacant basement illustrates a common idea among workforce experts and advocates for the urban poor in Central Pennsylvania.

A massive deficit of confidence and motivation is keeping thousands of people from joining the skilled workforce and building real careers, these observers say. Almost universally, a wide range of local observers cited attitudes as the top problem, ahead of institutional failings. And many people who are poor - or have been - seem to agree.

Think about walking into another kind of basement - the bottom of the labor market. It's a windowless place, hard to get out of or look into. But businesses are starting to peer inside. That's because the upstairs rooms of the labor market are thinning out - the rooms that are supposed to be filled with welders, nurses, carpenters ...

Business leaders are saying, "I just can't wait for people to come to my door," said Cheryl Irwin, vice president of the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce & Industry.

But you cannot help people out of the basement without knowing what it's like down there.

Grab your flashlights.

 
Waking up to a problem

The problem that Jefferson, Irwin and many others are talking about is widely dubbed "underemployment." What people mean by the term is that many midstate residents do not have enough work or are relegated to jobs that do not pay them enough to escape poverty.

The underemployed can be roughly defined as falling into three segments. The first group is made up of people working full time but not earning enough to get by. One measure of this problem is wage by race. Among men who worked year-round in Lancaster County, blacks typically earned about $22,400, Hispanics about $31,400 and whites about $42,500. Those were median wages the U.S. Census Bureau found in 2005, according to a recent, business-backed report.

A second group of people have no formal jobs at all. Instead, they get by on sporadic work and assistance from family and friends.  Some neighborhoods are crowded with these people - parts of midstate cities had unemployment rates of 20 percent, according to the 2000 Census.

A third segment of people has slid farther: into persistent homelessness, addiction or crime. These people likely are beyond the reach of employers and job trainers. But many advocates argue the workforce system can and should engage the other two groups more effectively. (For more data, see charts on this page and page 13.)

The problem is not limited to the cities of Central Pennsylvania, but urban areas clearly have the largest concentration of underemployed people. That also is where business leaders appear to be focused. Here, underemployment is inseparable from wearying problems such as drugs and failing schools. But underemployment also is a problem in its own right. If business leaders are serious about tackling it, they will have to confront three big factors that came up repeatedly in conversations with more than 20 workforce experts, nonprofit leaders, employers and underemployed residents. Here is how those people described the issue:

First, apathy stifles many workers. Second, it is made worse by pervasive practical problems that are difficult for a middle-class person to fully grasp, from getting a ride to making a phone call. And, third, a communication gap between the workforce system and many of the urban underemployed keeps them from seeing ways out.

Underemployment is becoming a big concern for businesses out of both social and hard-nosed reasons. In York County, underemployment stood out as a major concern in a report on urban problems that was issued in 2007 by the nonprofit group Metro-York and endorsed by top business leaders. Similar worries were voiced in Lancaster County later that year in a business-backed study of the county's Hispanic population. The emphasis on underemployment coincides with fears that a shortage of skilled labor will choke key industries in Central Pennsylvania.

"Without an influx of new workers, industry and the region's economy will be severely impacted," York County workforce-development leader Sean London wrote in a recent newsletter. He was hired this year to lead a new county Office of Workforce Development.

 
A crisis of confidence

Aimeé Urban runs a big office for an international company, but she knows what it's like to be on the fringes of the workforce.

"I grew up in a home where both of my parents were addicts. By the time I was 17, I dropped out of school," Urban said. "I had absolutely no confidence. I felt like the biggest loser ... I mean, I felt like a failure. I had a baby young, now I was on welfare. I couldn't even support my child.

"I had a horrible work ethic. I went from job to job. You know, didn't show up. And it was completely a matter of, you know - I absolutely hated who I was."

In the end, Urban said, it took great bosses to show her "I wasn't the mistakes that I made, that there was more to me than the choices that I made that were wrong in my life."

Urban is now the general manager of a multi-county region for Adecco, a Swiss company that provides temporary staffing and other employment services. She is based in Lancaster County.

You might expect advocates for the poor to blame employment problems on insufficient social services, insufficient wages, failing schools or time constraints that prevent low-income people from learning new skills. Those things do come up. But talk to the people who work in these neighborhoods every day, and the first thing you hear about is almost always attitude.

"We're not talking about poverty just in terms of finances, but in terms of thinking," said the Rev. Nathaniel Gadsden, community-impact manager for the United Way of the Capital Region and a life-skills counselor at Life Esteem Inc. in Harrisburg.

City neighborhoods are suffering from a widespread crisis of confidence, according to religious and secular observers. Many underemployed people assume they are not worthy of a higher paycheck. They don't ask for promotions. They don't apply for jobs that are a reach.

People rein in their aspirations out of self-doubt, but also because getting ahead implies a plan, advocates said. And a plan requires something severely lacking in these neighborhoods: confidence in the future.

"This environment ... doesn't instill confidence and trust. It instills: ‘I gotta survive, I gotta survive, I gotta survive,'" said William Jones Jr., a pastor who runs Reclaim the Streets Ministries in Harrisburg. (Visit www.centralpennbusiness.com/invisibleworkforce to see video of Jones describing the environment.)

As a result, people are primed to see life day-to-day, advocates said.

"Not too many people are trying," said Carlos Rodriguez, a 20-something resident of Harrisburg's Hall Manor housing project who works two jobs. He then added: "Hard enough. They settle up for whatever they're doing. They just stay there."

Don Carl Jr., who teaches job skills at the Community Action Commission in Harrisburg, cited the example of a man who began studying for his GED but disappeared when it came time to take the next step.

"He's not taking that other step up the ladder to get out of that generational poverty," Carl said. "You just want to stand there and push him (up) or something."

Shannon James has an idea about her future, but she does not seem to have a plan. She would like to be a nurse, she said. Her husband, Sam, is a home nurse, she said. Asked whether she would go to school for nursing, James said some jobs require it and some do not. So what does she prefer?

"It don't matter," James said.

There is more than just confidence missing in these neighborhoods, advocates said. There is a chunk of the underemployed population - there is no way to say how many - who are not motivated to work or do not understand the realities of working life.

If many of the underemployed lack a work ethic, it's because they were denied a good opportunity to learn it, said Jefferson, the York job trainer. A work ethic is not something that is just handed to you, he said, leaning forward and making a draping motion with his hand: "Here's your work ethic, you know, put this on and go to work."

Jefferson is director of employment and training for the Crispus Attucks Association in York.

An alternative perspective on the issue would stress wages, and some observers did bring up low pay as a problem.

Carlton Allen worked a series of temporary jobs before finding a stable position with Harrisburg-based PC Parts Inc., which sells computer and printer parts. Gesturing toward the cashiers at a local McDonald's during a lunchtime interview on a recent Saturday, he said people in low-skill jobs also should make enough to get by.

"I thought it was OK ... in an honest job, for me to want to drive a bus," he said, "for me to want to be a cook, even."

And low-skill jobs still need to be filled, even if the people holding them now move up, said Eric Menzer, a leader of Metro-York, the York County nonprofit that highlighted underemployment as a key problem in the city.

"But then who's gonna cook?" he said, referring to the idea that workers in low-skill jobs would move up.

"At the point that engaging in hard work does not allow you to live a decent existence in any given community, that, I think, is a community issue," he added. Most people would likely agree with that premise, though opinions on the solution vary sharply, Menzer said.

Still, motivation was the biggest theme in these conversations. One part of that problem is well beyond the scope of the workforce-development system. Addiction kills motivation, and drugs are everywhere in these neighborhoods, advocates said.

"I know mothers and sons that get high out here," said James Hymon Sr., a longtime Harrisburg resident who celebrated 19 years clean in June. "And they're just generation after generation after generation in the projects." He poked the air with each generation.

Even if people finally get clean, they often are unable to go further, Hymon said.

"All they do is go to work, go to (addiction-support) meetings and come home. I mean, there's no outgoing thing." He flicked his hands out, suggesting sparks.

 
A bumpy road

At the same time, getting ahead can be extremely difficult, not least because of a thousand practical problems.

Of the 50 people who walk through the doors of the Harrisburg temp agency A Personnel Connection each day, about a quarter have food or shelter issues, said Vickie Fleming, the company's employment-services manager. More than half of the women are single mothers who struggle with child care, she said. One company fired a client of the temp agency for calling home too often to check on her kids, Fleming said.

Employers must be more aware of the serious obstacles people from these neighborhoods may face, agency owner Samara Gallatin said.

"They have no clue, and these are things that affect people and affect their work habits," she said. (Visit www.centralpennbusiness.com/invisibleworkforce to see video of Gallatin discussing problems with transportation, drugs, criminal convictions and motivation.)

Transportation may be the biggest concrete problem in these neighborhoods.

John-Michael Walton, 21, attends a Harrisburg School District program during the daytime and works part time as a security guard at the Capital City Mall in Cumberland County at night. He leaves for the mall at 1 p.m. and usually arrives an hour-and-a-half later, using public transit. To get back home at the end of his shift, he has to take a cab. The $13 taxi bill takes a big bite out of his $8.75 hourly earnings. Transportation is a huge issue, but attitude is still the most important, Walton said.

"You can definitely do it," he said. "It's hard."

Allen, the PC Parts employee, also faces a long commute by bus and on foot. Some days, he kills time watching TV in a Laundromat while waiting for his shift to start. (Visit www.centralpennbusiness.com/invisibleworkforce to see video of Allen commuting and talking about his job.)

These problems are difficult for outsiders to grasp, said London, the York County workforce director.

"You probably don't worry about getting from your front door to school and getting home," he said. "It also presents ... a stress level that I think many of us don't understand very clearly."

On top of that stress, many people hear the constant drumbeat of rejection.

The Rev. LaVette Hymon-Paige, who is related to James Hymon, sees a stream of Harrisburg residents who are out of work.

"They come here crying," she said in her office at the Martin Luther King Baptist Church in the city's Allison Hill neighborhood. "And I tell them how to dress. I tell them what to do."

Then she sends them off to job fairs.

"They constantly come back and say, ‘That was just a total waste of time,'" she said. "Their job application is going into the table, into File 13 ... A job fair is not fair to everybody."

Sometimes they come in happy, celebrating a new, low-wage job.

"And I'm thinking to myself, my God," Hymon-Paige said. "You know - you try living on $8 an hour."

 
Getting through

Central Pennsylvania has no shortage of workforce-development programs. The state's CareerLink offices help unemployed people find jobs.

Numerous schools offer a range of training, including Harrisburg Area Community College and YTI Career Institute.

Industry-specific training is available at places like the William F. Goodling Regional Advanced Skills Center in York. And a relatively new state-funded program helps employers train existing workers so those people can move up to higher positions.

What Central Pennsylvania seems to lack are bridges, ways to inform a deeply isolated population about opportunities and encourage participation. Somewhere, communication about options is breaking down.

For example, Hymon was incredulous when he was told underemployment is a puzzling problem because there are so many employers with good jobs and so many agencies that provide training and referrals. The Harrisburg resident leaned forward with a pen and an envelope, his glasses pushed down on his nose, and said, "Can you give me the names of some of those people?"

Workforce-development leaders agreed with the thesis that communication with the urban underemployed is falling short.

"That's a very good point. And maybe we're not doing that correctly. And there's better ways to get the word out to the community," said Bob Garraty, executive director of the Pennsylvania Workforce Investment Board.

"You're dead-center on the public-

relations side of this," said Terri A. Kaufman, executive director of the Southcentral Workforce Investment Board.

Several observers said the workforce-development system would have to adjust how information is communicated. If underemployed people do not use computers to look for jobs, it doesn't help to post openings online. And if news of a job spreads by word of mouth but city residents are not part of that network, they will be excluded, advocates said.

"In terms of how people find out about jobs, it's really ... based on who you know," Garraty said.

The workforce-investment boards are experimenting with programs aimed at the urban underemployed. For example, Kaufman's group is part of a partnership working to inform isolated populations about health care careers. (To learn more about these programs, see next week's installment of The Invisible Workforce.)

But bridging the communication gap also is a problem of trust.

"A number of the folks that could take advantage of (workforce-development programs) don't trust the system. They don't trust the process," said David Miron, an employment-development specialist for the Community Action Commission in Harrisburg. To borrow money for school, you have to believe you will actually get a job that will allow you to repay the debt, Miron said.

 
Promoting from within

Businesses need to change how they think about internal training and must prove more willing to take a gamble on somebody, advocates said.

To illustrate the point, York job trainer Jefferson moved together his outstretched hands. Companies need to be accommodating. So do the individual employees getting the help.

"It may not be perfectly balanced," Jefferson said, with one hand hovering above the other. "But it's close enough."

Gadsden, the Harrisburg counselor, recalled going to a funeral with a young man who was dressed inappropriately for the occasion. Gadsden bought him a suit, but the young man was reluctant to accept it and then found it difficult to say thank you. The reason, Gadsden said, is that the young man wanted to get across that his way of doing things also was OK.

"The last thing you can do for one of these kids, even a guy like him, is to make him feel bad," Gadsden said.

This is the kind of patient coaching that companies may have to do to guide a struggling worker along, Gadsden said.

"You can find (workers), but you have to take time to know them, to nurture them," he said.

Too many companies miss the connection between training and retention and spend money re-hiring and re-training people, Miron said. Many larger firms have handed off their entry-level workforce to temporary-

employment agencies, he said. The Community Action Commission several years ago worked with companies on a program to train managers to deal with workers unfamiliar with workplace etiquette, but the program did not get off the ground.

What helped turn things around for Urban was a good boss. Still drifting, Urban found a job at a hotel bar in Lancaster County in the mid-1990s. When a supervisory position above her opened, she was asked to fill it, and eventually she was promoted to higher levels. She never would have made it without support from her boss, Urban said.

"It took a lot of almost getting fired and teaching me a lot about management and leadership," she said.

When the hotel was sold and Urban had to look for a new job, she still was not fully confident.

"In my mind, I still kind of felt like I kind of got all those positions by default ... It wasn't because of my ability," she said. But Urban sounds assertive now when she talks about what she does for Adecco. She filled in what felt like the last missing piece when she got her high school diploma at age 37.

Businesses are not social service agencies. But increasingly, business leaders have found that inner-city social problems are becoming workforce problems. So they face a choice, Urban said.

"It's one of these points where we can either sit around and complain about the lack of good, hardworking people that are available to us ... or suck it up and start to do something about it," she said.

"Nobody is going to hand it to us. Obviously nobody else is going to do it for us at this point."

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