Only Third World Detroit has move black unemployment than San Fran. The racism of this “tolerant” city permeates the air like the second hand marijuana smoke that fried the brains of citizens and visitors alike.
“The two-person attendance at the orientation may give the impression that nearly everyone who wants work has already found it in San Francisco’s bustling economy, where unemployment has shrunk to just 3 percent.
That’s because San Francisco has the highest disparity between white and black employment in the nation, with The City’s black employment rate of 53 percent the second worst, faring only slightly better than Detroit’s.
What’s more is that about 100,000 San Francisco residents — 13 percent of the population — are living in poverty, of which 79,000 are of working age between 18 and 64.”
Why aren’t the leaders of San Fran held to account for this obvious racist unemployment number? TWO people attend a workshop on getting a job in a town with 53% black unemployment. The city obviously pretends to be liberal but is run like Birmingham, Alabama in 1955. Racism comes in all colors—hypocrisy of the generations of Democrats running this city is transparent. Want racism—1955 Alabama or 2017 San Fran.
SF’s pricey workforce training scrutinized amid stark employment disparities
By Joshua Sabatini, SF Examiner, 4/24/17
While San Francisco was reeling from a major power outage Friday morning, a city-funded workshop for unemployed people hoping to find work in the health care industry went on as planned inside the Goodwill building at Mission and 11th streets.
At the 10 a.m. start time, one man sat in the front row in an otherwise empty room, save for the instructor with a PowerPoint presentation ready to go.
A moment later outside, a woman briskly walked toward the building carrying an Office of Economic and Workforce Development printout of the six health care orientations scheduled between April and June. Attendance at one of them is the start of a path toward a city-assisted career.
“I’m late,” she told the San Francisco Examiner upon entering. “I’m actually going to start working with them soon.”
The two-person attendance at the orientation may give the impression that nearly everyone who wants work has already found it in San Francisco’s bustling economy, where unemployment has shrunk to just 3 percent.
But the reality darkens upon a closer look.
That’s because San Francisco has the highest disparity between white and black employment in the nation, with The City’s black employment rate of 53 percent the second worst, faring only slightly better than Detroit’s.
What’s more is that about 100,000 San Francisco residents — 13 percent of the population — are living in poverty, of which 79,000 are of working age between 18 and 64.
One of San Francisco’s best answers to address these inequities is through The City’s workforce job training programs, which can lead to work in industries such as health care, hospitality, technology and construction.
But The City has for years spent tens of millions of dollars annually on job training programs with little accountability, as exposed in two city audits by the budget analyst — one in 2007 and another in 2013.
The City’s job training has come back under fire publicly after a recent Brookings Institution study found that while San Francisco has the ninth highest employment rate compared to other cities — at 79 percent — 84 percent of working-age whites are employed but only 53 percent of working age blacks are employed.
“Whatever they are doing to serve the African-American population is clearly not working,” Board of Supervisors President London Breed said last month when calling for a hearing on The City’s workforce programs under the Office of Economic and Workforce Development. “We are failing right here in liberal San Francisco.”
Breed’s sharp criticism comes even as city officials and nonprofit executive directors have engaged in ongoing work to improve San Francisco’s workforce training as part of a 2014 law adopted by the Board of Supervisors. Among the new tasks they were charged with is the development of a five-year workforce plan, which was released last month.
The plan comes at a time when San Francisco’s unemployment rate has declined dramatically since the Great Recession high of 9.4 percent in 2010, to 3.2 percent in 2017. In that time, San Francisco added an average of 25,000 new jobs each year with a sharp rise in the tech sector.
The prosperous times has urban centers around the nation debating how best to address gentrification and ensure everyone can benefit.
“While an economist may characterize this current [unemployment] rate as ‘full employment,’ approximately 18,000 residents are still looking for work,” the 2017-2022 CityWide Workforce Development Plan said.
The job growth, strong economy and low unemployment “must not overshadow the 79,000 residents of working age (18 to 64 years old) who are living in poverty. Of this population, roughly 45,000 are no longer looking for work,” the plan said. “The workforce development system must continue to develop strategies to re-engage and provide opportunities for these residents.”
The plan identifies the demographics of those most in need of services, including transitional-age youths who are between the ages of 16 and 24, adults over the age of 55, black residents, and Latino and Asian residents with limited English proficiency.
The plan acknowledges there is much more improvement needed, but says it has laid the groundwork for significant reform by offering five categories of recommendations to “tackle the challenges facing San Francisco’s labor force, especially its most economically vulnerable.”
Recommendations include a timeline to “build data sharing infrastructure across city workforce development departments” and “help residents in poverty better navigate city-funded workforce development programs.”
The plan concludes that The City’s workforce development system “is in many ways not yet a ‘system.’”
“Progress has been made in developing a shared set of terminology, in coordinating programs and procurement across core departments, and in understanding service gaps and overlap across the system. But improvements are still needed in how system stakeholders communicate, including the collection and sharing of data,” the plan reads.
“Standardizing program and client data would allow The City to definitively evaluate whether its workforce development programs are meeting the needs of employers and the labor force.”
Michael Carr, OEWD’s director of workforce development, acknowledged Friday in a statement emailed to the Examiner that “our community faces real challenges” and much work is needed to ensure San Francisco “is a city of equal opportunity.” Carr said the plan “is an important step in a push towards good jobs for every San Franciscan who wants one.”
San Francisco spent $100.5 million on 120 workforce job programs in fiscal year 2015-16, with the top spending by the Human Services Agency, Department of Children, Youth and Families and Office of Economic and Workforce Development. Two-thirds of the spending went toward services ranging from résumé and placement assistance to industry-specific trainings, while the remaining third of the spending paid for actual salaries for internships and apprenticeships.
The funding led to 5,845 unsubsidized job placements, 4,486 subsidized job placements and 15,760 job trainings.
The total number of clients served regardless of whether they completed training or found job placements by The City has steadily declined from 46,252 in fiscal year 2013-14 to 39,650 clients in fiscal year 2015-16.
While success of job placements may be a factor in the decline, the plan also suggests other reasons such as the migrating out of an increasingly unaffordable city — some 24,000 black and Latino residents left San Francisco between 2010 and 2014 — and increased competition to obtain livable-wage jobs, which could discourage residents from participating in the programs.
Another contributing factor may be that “the system may be serving fewer homeless individuals than in the past,” according to the plan, however, there isn’t accurately reported data to draw that conclusion.
Shamann Walton is the executive director of Young Community Developers, a nonprofit based in the Bayview neighborhood which helps place residents in construction jobs and in other sectors. He also played a role in crafting the plan and is president of the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education and a District 10 candidate for the Board of Supervisors.
Walton said a better pipeline of jobs in the private sector outside of construction would help address inequalities in the job force. Construction jobs are unique in that The City has a mandate for developers to hire local residents.
“That private sector connection is something that we all need to do better at,” Walton said. “For example, outside of construction, making sure that we are getting our people into tech jobs, getting our people more into the restaurant industry and getting employers that own corporations to do more hiring of our folks that are in our community. I think OEWD could be a better broker in that aspect.”
OEWD Director Carr said The City is targeting those sectors in underserved communities of color but he also said that the public sector should step up as well. “We must continue creating opportunities and workforce improvements within local government,” Carr said.
Walton said that The City is attempting to align the resources of all city departments and nonprofits “to help everybody provide better services.”
While criticism of The City’s job training is nothing new, some aspects of the job market are.
Reflecting that change, one new group will in July join the cadre of traditional nonprofits that receive city funding for workforce training. Samaschool will focus on preparing lower-income residents for the growing “gig economy,” a term used to describe independent contractual work obtained through online job platforms like Upwork or TaskRabbit.
“Workforce is changing and the nature of jobs are changing,” said Lindsey Crumbaugh, managing director of Samaschool, which also provides training in New York City. “Our focus in San Francisco and with OEWD is really around independent work readiness.”
She said they plan to incorporate digital skill lessons and income planning related to the gig economy in existing vocational programs.
“We want people to have full knowledge of some of the pros and cons associated with independent work,” Crumbaugh added.
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