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With Fewer Jobs Close To Home, Unemployment Soars For Black Teens
By: Michael L. Diamond, Business Writer Daily Record
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July 9, 2008
When word spread around Burlington City High School this past spring that Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson was hiring and the city was offering free transportation, the students were skeptical.
No doubt, many of the students had wanted to work at the amusement park before, but there were always obstacles in the way. Chief among them, how would they get there?
"Some didn't (sign up) because they didn't think it was for real," said Shakila Forbes, 17, who is working in food service at Great Adventure this summer. "A lot of kids, we want to work. We just don't have transportation."
Forbes is one of 35 students from the inner city school taking advantage of the free transportation and trying to cut into a persistent problem: The unemployment rate of black teenagers is nearly twice as high as the national average.
The high jobless rate isn't for a lack of jobs, particularly at the Shore, where employers have been known to search overseas to find labor. Instead, experts say, there is a long list of obstacles from transportation to subtle racism that keeps the jobless rate for black youths particularly high.
"It's easy to say a kid doesn't want a job, when the reality is, they would love to work," said Craig Bogard, chief executive officer of Aslan Youth Ministries, a Christian organization based in Red Bank that works with disadvantaged youths.
The experience of Burlington City High School, where about half of the school's students are black, provides an example. Great Adventure had made presentations about job opportunities at the school, but it got little interest, Burlington City Mayor James Fazzone said.
So Fazzone came up with a plan: He told the students the town would provide bus service each day, and the students could use the public library's computers to fill out the online applications.
Only 15 students signed up, but they were hired quickly. From there, the program took off. All of the slots were filled, and the town began a waiting list.
The bus leaves the high school each day at 9:45 a.m. and returns at 7:15 p.m. It costs $12,000 to operate, and Fazzone still isn't sure how to pay for it; he is soliciting donations from the community.
"We felt we wanted to get the program up and we will get the money as we can," Fazzone said. "The kids on this bus are by many means hot shots, smart kids with good personali-ties. The only thing they may not have going for them is they may not have as much money as someone living in a McMansion in the suburbs."
The unemployment rate for African Americans ages 16 to 19 was 29.6 percent in June, com-pared with 16.6 percent for white teenagers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statis-tics.
That marks little change from 10 years ago, when the unem-ployment rate for black teena-gers was 24.7 percent, and the unemployment rate for white teenagers was 13.4 percent, ac-cording to the government.
Why the discrepancy?
Jobs have shifted from urban centers to the suburbs, and the transportation to get to those jobs is limited, said Donald Scarry, a Mount Laurel econo-mist. Monmouth and Ocean counties, for example, provide thousands of summer jobs to ac-commodate visitors to the Shore, jobs that are ideally suit-ed to teenagers.
But many towns that prosper from summer tourism have few black residents to begin with. Belmar's population, according to the 2000 U.S. Census, was 3.5 percent black. Bay Head's popu-lation was 0.2 percent black. Beach Haven's population was 0.1 percent black.
"There are significant trans-portation issues from centers where black teenagers live to the Shore," Scarry said.
Many black teen-agers don't have the support network that comes with a two-parent house-hold, leaving them at a disad-vantage, not only in finding transportation, but also in find-ing role models who can teach them job skills, Bogard of Aslan Youth Ministries said.
About 54 percent of black children are growing up in a one-parent household, com-pared with 21 percent of white children, according to a 2004 Census Bureau report.
Bogard said his organization works with about 40 children and teens, ages 5 to 18, and teaches them skills they other-wise might not learn, from how to dress appropriately for an in-terview to conflict resolution.
"The problem that we face so often is that there's not a strong support system for a lot of our young people," Bogard said.
Employers remain reluctant to hire black workers, said De-vah Pager, a sociology professor at Princeton University.
Pager said her research has found that employers are much more likely to hire a white worker than a black worker, even if their qualifications are equal. When asked why, the em-ployers point to negative stereo-types instead of concrete perfor-mance qualities.
"I think it has certain cyclical and self-reinforcing proper-ties," Pager said. "The more employers are reluctant to hire young black (workers), the more they feel they won't get a fair shake in the labor market."
Forbes has overcome her share of obstacles. She recently moved to Burlington City to es-cape family problems in South Carolina and to help her 27-year-old sister raise her three children.
The program gave her a chance for her first job and without it, it wasn't clear what she would have done this sum-mer; she said there were few other opportunities closer to home.
So far, she's worked at two restaurants at Great Adventure, and she said the lessons have helped her build confidence. She said she wants to save the money for college, which she plans to begin after she graduates high school next summer.
"It's teaching us responsibility, and we can say now we earned our own money," Forbes said. "We worked for it."
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