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Good news from teen America
While we're wringing our hands over Littleton, evidence of a sharp decline in teen birthrates, especially among blacks, shows that adults can make a difference
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[04/30/99]

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The State Department interferes with the second Cuba-Orioles game.
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[04/30/99]

More bad news for California GOP
Rising star Jim Rogan won't challenge Dianne Feinstein.
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[04/29/99]

Sucking it up
The Clintons think about boycotting the White House Correspondents dinner because it's honoring Michael Isikoff.
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[04/29/99]

Draskovic fired
The Yugoslav deputy prime minister is removed from office for criticizing Milosevic.
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[04/28/99]

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My study encompassed both the almost-entirely black Central Harlem and the Latino section of Harlem that is largely Dominican and Puerto Rican. These are self-identifying racial categories. It turns out, when you look a little closer, that a fair proportion of the people in this area are black immigrants who in a relatively short period of time start to call themselves African Americans. A number are Caribbean immigrants, but the lion's share are native-born African Americans.

In this all-black neighborhood, the likelihood of being rejected [for jobs] was greater for African Americans than it was for the Latinos who didn't live in the area. And this was in a black neighborhood with black customers, management and owners. This wasn't a racial divide, but a preference. Employers have a favorable impression of immigrant labor. Even though they themselves are black, they often have a jaundiced view of the urban, or African-American labor force. They had very fine-grain preferences when it came to immigrant labor. I had managers say to me that what they really wanted were recent immigrants, people who grew up in really poor countries who would not think of this as a bad job, but instead as a king's ransom compared to what they might find in Haiti or the Dominican Republic. Latinos apply in smaller numbers than blacks but are much likelier to get hired.

In your study, you looked not only at what you describe as "success stories," but also at 100 people who don't make the 14:1 cut for jobs at Burger Barn. What did you find?

I realized midway through that I was looking at success stories. It shocked me to come to that realization -- we were working with struggling minimum wage workers who were living pretty rough. However, they were people who had jobs. There were many out there who were not successful at getting those jobs. What did we know about them? Nothing. Employers who I was friendly with gave me the applications of all the people who applied for jobs during the same period we were doing the study. We went out to find 100 of them. I tracked them down a year later and 73 percent were not working. But they had applied all over the place. In fact, some had applied so many places we had to attach additional sheets to their interview form to list all the places they had applied. These numbers were dismal.

The 14:1 job-to-applicant ratio evident in Harlem differs widely from city to city. In San Francisco, for example, there are two entry-level jobs for every seeker. Preliminary evidence also suggests that welfare reform has been successful in San Francisco. Why is it such a different story in Harlem?

New York City hasn't pulled out of the recession of the early '90s to the degree that other cities did. Unemployment is almost twice what it is nationwide. Cities do vary in their economic health, which is why it is important to look at this issue across urban areas. Then again, as the Cuomo report makes clear, Harlem isn't the only neighborhood left behind by economic expansion. It has plenty of company. It is also important to note that places like San Francisco have "exported" some of their poverty problems. It is just too expensive a city for many poor people to live in at all anymore. Look across the Bay to Oakland or pockets of Richmond and you see a less-glowing story.

Preliminary results from your research were presented on the floor of the House while the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 was debated. Did it have any influence?

Even President Clinton used some of the numbers from the study in one of his speeches. When it came to asking the question, "What will happen to welfare recipients when they look for work?" mine was one of the few studies that could answer that. Until this study became known in policy circles, the view was, without any evidence, "Anybody can get a job. The problem with welfare is that it's been too easy for people not to get a job. If we just make that more difficult, they'll just go out and get a job." My study helped hammer the point home that that wasn't going to be true for everyone, and that we were going to end up with a large number of people who weren't going to find work.

What kind of impact is welfare reform having on the working poor?

My fear, for which I think we do have evidence, is there will be a downward pressure on what are already low-wage jobs. If you look at the human capital characteristics of long-term welfare recipients, the group targeted by welfare reform, the only labor market they can expect to enter is the labor market of the working poor. There are already too many people searching for too few jobs in the low-wage sector.

If it were not for increases in minimum wage, we would see vast stagnation in the wage base of the working poor. The forecasts for wage depression have been pretty bleak. There is no pressure to raise wages in labor surplus environments, which is what you have in Harlem. If you add long-term welfare recipients to the mix, you just get that many more people applying for the same jobs.

Next page | But are they better off on welfare?