Almost three quarters of the 2,422 women in New York state prisons are mothers. In part 1 of a three-part series, we follow one group of children as they travel nearly 400 miles to meet their moms on the inside.
Amid crisis-level black unemployment, government benefits, family support and off-the-books labor help make ends meet.
The centerpiece of the mayor’s anti-poverty plan is being phased out after showing mixed results. City Hall says it was a valuable try. But what lessons has the city learned?
As the United Nation’s Human Rights Council embarks on a review of the United States, some advocates say high black joblessness is a mark against America.
Advocates for the poor and homeless fear he’ll enforce harsh consequences on those who don’t shape up.
A 28-year-old union president is trying to get his members a new contract and, some say, reflecting a new wave of labor activism.
In the lobby of STRIVE, an employment-training program in East Harlem, the messages are clear, stated in a bold, black font on posters that greet the overwhelmingly black and Latino clients as they get off the elevator and enter the lobby: “Please Remove Your Hats.” “Please Do Not Wear Pants Below the Waist.” “Please Do Not Wear Headphones.”Inside the classroom, says STRIVE’s chief operating officer, Angelo Rivera, attitudes are a primary target. “You have to inflict some kind of discomfort and pain so they can own up to what their issues are,” he says. “That whole attitudinal piece will make you or break you in the world of work.”But in a month of instruction, STRIVE students also get two days on civics.
While the mild post-9/11 recession was a dry run, the current downturn is the first real test of the safety net since welfare reform.
In the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens on a slate gray Friday in February, the food pantry at St. Gertrude the Great was devoid of clients. The woman working there, who wanted to be identified only as Marbe, explained why.”There’s nobody today because it’s the beginning of the month,” she said. People had just received their unemployment checks and food stamp benefits. “By the middle of the month, there’ll be more.”Marbe began working at the pantry in 2000 and says she saw demand spike in 2001, only to subside as more pantries opened up in the area.
During four decades of debate over the causes of black-male joblessness and unemployment, there have been two broad schools of thought. There were those who blamed the problem on the way the economy works, especially its racial contours and barriers, and those who attributed it to the way black men behave, to their culture.According to New York University political science professor Lawrence Mead, black joblessness is about a failure of low-skill black men to choose to work or live up to their employers’ standards when they do get jobs. “The immediate problem is work discipline, a willingness to cooperate, to be a reliable employee,” says Mead. “It’s collective psychology. It’s attitudes, and this is characteristic of poverty, where people want to work in principle.
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