Creating a Pipeline to Good Jobs

Next week, 50 New Yorkers who once faced a bleak future will be moving on to a pre-apprenticeship program that prepares them for well-paying jobs in the city’s booming construction industry.  They are the first graduating class of the construction skills program at STRIVE, a local nonprofit that specializes in helping people lacking job skills to enter the labor market. 

This program, which trains the chronically unemployed and high school dropouts, is a success story that should be both celebrated and expanded.  It addresses the problem of vast numbers of jobless New Yorkers as well as provides skilled workers for the local economy.

The private sector has often complained that many New York City high school graduates do not have the skills required for jobholding in our labor market.  The shortage of skilled workers is a detriment to the economic future of the city. 

One response to this problem is the development of specific educational curriculums for a new High School for Construction Trades, Engineering, and Architecture scheduled to open in the fall.  This is an innovative new model that will lead to good jobs.  Some graduates may even go on to become professionals in engineering and architecture.

Developing 
job skills

But those who have already been damaged by a dysfunctional education system must not be abandoned.  The Community Service Society recently issued a labor market report revealing that nearly 37 percent of the city’s black men and over 30 percent of Latino men were jobless last year.  Many are high school dropouts who left school without the skills necessary for employment.

In the coming years, there will be a number of large construction projects in the city – downtown Manhattan, the West Side, a new stadium for the Mets, among others.  These will bring billions of dollars and thousands of jobs to the construction industry.  We will need to decide which workers will benefit from the job and training opportunities that will be created.   
STRIVE was contracted by the city to develop a program where enrollees acquire a GED – the minimum educational requirement for a union apprenticeship - as well as the skills necessary for employment in the construction industry.  This is a promising new program that puts people on a path to good jobs.

Intensive Training

The STRIVE program – six-months of intensive training in basic workplace skills - is the beginning of a pipeline leading to employment for New Yorkers who might otherwise have given up any possibility of a productive life.  Next week, the program’s graduates will move on to a pre-apprenticeship program, Construction Skills 2000.  From there they will go into a union apprenticeship program and then to construction jobs. 

The Commission on Construction Opportunity – first proposed by the Community Service Society – was created with the considerable influence of Congressman Charles Rangel to ensure that all New Yorkers, especially people of color, can gain access to good construction jobs.  One of the commission’s achievements was an agreement by the construction trades unions to commit specific percentages of apprenticeship slots to this program.  We should be monitoring what happens to this first class of graduates to make sure that their efforts are rewarded.

A Model Program

The STRIVE construction skills program is a great achievement, but it is also an idea that could be replicated with other occupations.  When the Mayor’s Commission for Economic Opportunities makes its recommendations later this year, it should look to the STRIVE program as a model for creating pipelines to other well-paying jobs, in areas such as automotive repair, equipment servicing, and transportation – none of which require a college degree.

From the New York Amsterdam News
July 13 - 19, 2006