Opinion | Eric Adams Has a New Job. Many of His Constituents Don’t. – The New York Times
Advertisement
Supported by
Peter Coy
Send any friend a story
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.
Opinion Writer
Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor-elect, will have a lot to do when he takes office on Jan. 1, but no task will be more important than helping New Yorkers of modest means get back to work.
This chart makes the challenge clear. In August, payroll employment was still down 8.7 percent from where it was in January 2020, while payrolls in the United States as a whole were down only 2 percent. Four of the nation’s five biggest cities have done worse than the national average, although Chicago and Houston are better off than New York and Los Angeles, and Phoenix’s employment has risen. (New York City’s unemployment rate was 9.8 percent in September.)
What the chart doesn’t show is that low- and middle-income workers have suffered the most. You can stroll through upper-income neighborhoods of New York City like the Upper West Side, Greenwich Village and Brooklyn Heights and barely register the health and economic crisis, aside from seeing some mask-wearing and outdoor seating at restaurants. According to data from the New York State Department of Labor, employment fell a relatively modest 3.8 percent in the high-paid field of investment banking and securities dealing from February 2020 through September 2021. It rose 0.3 percent during that period in computer systems design and related services, reflecting New York’s emergence as a tech hub that has attracted employers like Google, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Amazon.
The picture is far darker for people who work in lower-paid support occupations, which have been devastated by the decline in the hospitality sector and the rise in remote work. Employment fell 34 percent from February 2020 through September 2021 in accommodation and food services, including a 39 percent decline in employment in full-service restaurants. Employment is down 15 percent in services to buildings and dwellings. Those jobs pay less, and the people who perform them have thinner safety cushions to fall back on. According to data from state unemployment insurance records, average annual pay in the leisure and hospitality sectors is $49,000, compared with an annual average of $261,000 in financial activities.
“It’s a full-blown recession here,” says James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies at the New School Center for New York City Affairs.
To get an on-the-ground reading of the situation I interviewed Jessica Johnson, the chief executive of Johnson Security Bureau, a supplier of guard services that was founded by Johnson’s grandparents in 1962 and is based in the Bronx, which had the city’s highest unemployment rate in September, 12.4 percent. She employs more than 150 people. She agreed with Parrott that New York’s employment decline amounts to a crisis: “How can we have that high a percentage of the population sitting on the sidelines and think that’s acceptable? It’s not. So we have to come up with solutions.”
Johnson said that even in New York, with its high unemployment rate, it can be hard to find workers who have the skills her company needs. “We’ve got to use several different approaches” to solve that, she said. “I feel like we’re living in bizarro land right now. Wages are going up. People are jumping from job to job to job.”
The solution, she said, includes education, training and early exposure to the workplace. Johnson supports “braided” learning, in which children as young as 12 combine traditional education with exposure to various careers.
I’ll end with this: Johnson recommended that Adams or his staff members read a report issued in July by the Center for an Urban Future that presents 250 suggestions from New Yorkers on how to revive the city’s economy, create good jobs and build a fairer city. (She is responsible for two of the bite-size ideas: “Turn vacant storefronts into cooperative spaces for small businesses” and “Incentivize corporate executives to mentor small businesses.”)
Johnson said small businesses like hers that hire people without college degrees can and should be part of the solution to the employment problem. One former Johnson Security Bureau guard is working in investment banking now. Another is a federal air marshal. “I tell people, ‘I’m the only one who has to die here,’” Johnson says. “‘The rest of you all can keep moving.’”
The statement of principles of the National Development online magazine is internally contradictory. On the one hand, it wants the government to play a more active role in guiding investment and innovation into socially and economically productive directions. On the other hand, it wants to let corporations amass monopoly power so they can generate excess profits so that they can guide innovation into the directions that suit them, which only occasionally and coincidentally advance the social and political goals of the nation. Those two principles are obviously in conflict with one another. I agree with the first, but not with the second.
Jack Wells
Washington
The writer was chief economist of the U.S. Department of Transportation from 2004 to 2014.
“When you gather the grapes from your vineyard, do not glean afterwards; what is left shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.”
— Deuteronomy 24:21, “The New English Bible” (1972)
There will be no newsletter on Mon., Nov. 8.
Have feedback? Send a note to coy-newsletter@nytimes.com.
Advertisement
