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Gains in National Job Figures Don’t Mean Bronx Resurgence

Gains in National Job Figures Don’t Mean Bronx Resurgence

Bronx residents line up outside a Workforce 1 job center in February. (Zabaneh/Bronx Ink)
Bronx residents lined up outside a Workforce 1 job center in February. (Zabaneh/Bronx Ink)

Story by Shreeya Sinha, Lynsey Chutel and Sunil Joshi

While the national jobs figure for March indicated that the country is on the path to economic recovery, the employment picture in the Bronx was not so sanguine. Unemployment in the borough remains several points above the national average, and thousands of residents are still unable to find work.

For more coverage of Bronx job hunters, click here.

Above the bustling business hub of 149th Street and Third Avenue, rows of almost 50 people sat on Thursday in a cordoned-off waiting room in the Workforce 1 office, looking for help from the Bronx branch of the citywide employment agency.

This was Veronica Eaddy’s second time at the “one-stop employment center.” With a soft round face under thick waves, in a casual jeans and T-shirt, Eaddy, who asked that her full name not be used, doesn’t look her age at 42. But the string of jobs she has tried her hand at reveal a long struggle with unemployment. “I’ve been through many systems where a job has been promised and nothing happened,” Eaddy said.

Nationwide, there may be reason for optimism after the jobs report revealed that the depressed economy may be turning around. The U.S. Department of Labor announced on Friday that 162,000 jobs were added to the national economy, though the nationwide unemployment rate remained steady at 9.7 percent. But an increase in the national jobs number does not necessarily correlate to an increase in the number of jobs in the Bronx, said James Brown, an analyst with the New York Department of Labor. “There’s not a one-for-one increase,” he said. For Bronx job-seekers like Eaddy, economic struggles are still festering.

“You pretty much need a master’s degree to pick up the garbage,” said Eaddy, who feels that living in the Bronx has been a disadvantage for her. She’s spent the last seven years looking for a full-time job. Unemployment in the borough soared to 14 percent in January, well above the national average. Hunger and poverty are stark realities in the borough that is already struggling to compete with a higher-skilled workforce.

“That doesn’t bode well for the Bronx, which has a pretty high percentage of the local workforce that doesn’t have high levels of educational attainment,” said Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, a research firm.

About half of Bronxites work outside the borough, Brown said. Many of these jobs in the hospitality and retail sectors are not only low-paying but largely dependent on consumer spending, which has sunk deeply in the recession. Analysts are hopeful that consumers will grudgingly start spending. Consumer spending picked up for the sixth month running in March.

“A lot of establishments are closing,’’ Eaddy said. “There aren’t many jobs that you could get if you come straight off school, like low-skilled jobs. And most of them can be pretty crap.”

Arthur Merlino, manager of Workforce 1, has worked in the labor market for 48 years, crisscrossing labor offices across the city’s five boroughs. After two years managing the Bronx branch, he admits that the borough poses a specific challenge. “This is a real serious time,” said Merlino, his eyes closing as he spoke. “I’d say, experientially it’s been a very difficult couple of years.”

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. has made economic development and job creation a priority but critics have accused him of costing the Bronx thousands of jobs at a mall he opposed at the Kingsbridge Armory. Diaz opposed the project on the grounds that it would not provide Bronxites living wages. The City Council voted against the mall.

Franck Strongbow, associate director of the James Monroe Senior Center agreed with Diaz. After he spent eight months living “between a rock and a hard place,” Strongbow lived paycheck to paycheck when he was 25 years old trying to make ends meet. For him, a job is all about dignity. “What the borough president was saying was, “Let’s start with affordable living range because people should be paying an honest day’s labor.” According to the Center for Urban Future, 42 percent of the Bronx workforce is making less than $10 an hour.

The payroll company Automatic Data Processing said this week that U.S. employers cut 23,000 jobs in March, dampening expected forecasts ahead of Friday’s job report. Much of the nationwide growth in March was in temporary government jobs, particularly by the Census Bureau, which hired 48,000 temporary employees, according to the Department of Labor, including enough staff for four Census offices in the Bronx.

Elsewhere, there are signs of life in the borough’s jobs market. A coalition of construction workers in the Bronx said it has seen employment opportunities tick upward in March, with more activity on job sites. While the overall number of new building permits issued in the Bronx during the first three months of the year is down from 2009 — 44 to 18 — there were eight new building permits issued in the Bronx in March (up from four last year), according to the Department of Buildings. Richard Rodriguez, an administrator for United Hispanic Construction, said that his labor coalition was able to connect more workers with jobs in March, particularly with a new development on 163rd Street in Morrisania.

Despite the real-estate market’s more than two-year struggle, prices in Manhattan remain high, fueling new development in the outer boroughs, said Ken Margolies, director of organizing programs at the Cornell School of Industrial Labor Relations. But while Margolies noted the signs of improvement, he cautioned against unbridled optimism. “The key thing about the news,” he said, “is that, by and large, the new jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that are being lost.”

The manufacturing sector is another industry that saw accelerated growth in March, according to the Institute for Supply Management, a private trade group. In February about 11,000 jobs were created, the largest increase in almost four years. Other sectors like health care have also done well, especially after President Obama’s health care plan passed. In March, 27,000 new health care jobs were added to the national economy, according to the Department of Labor.

That’s where Eaddy hopes to try her luck. She’s optimistic that the health care reform will revitalize jobs in this sector. “Since there was such a push going on in public health, I think that a lot of jobs are going to start that I want to get into while the getting in is good,” she said. Eaddy is trying to secure a voucher from the New York State Department of Labor that will cover a six-month-long Medical Billing and Coding course at Hostos Community College. Waving a manila folder on Thursday, with the college brochure inside, she checked that she had all her documentation. She had been waiting for move than an hour for her 4 p.m. appointment.

While she waits for a steady job, Eaddy decided to start her own business. “Splendidly Me,” a cosmetic business that she runs out of her East 180th Street apartment, supplements her income. When she is not teaching customers how to make coconut oil or twist their hair, Eaddy is pinning her long-term hopes on the health care industry.

“Now I have to come back,” she said, “but this time I’m doing something smart with a marketable skill so that I can have some leverage.”

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VIDEO – National Unemployment Falls, in the Bronx a Different Picture

Video by Rania Zabaneh

The national unemployment rate fell last month to 9.7 percent, according to a report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. In the Bronx, however, where unemployment climbed to 13.9 percent in January, economic recovery seems more distant to the thousands of Bronxites struggling to find work. Another measure of the borough’s tough times comes from a recent study noting that it now leads the nation in hunger.

Carlos Martines is a regular at the Department of Labor “Workforce 1” job center in the Bronx, and he’s desperate to find some work to support his family.

“I’m late on my rent, bills. It’s hard, its very hard,” he said. “You know my son depends on me, you know it’s hard, very hard right now. There are no jobs.”

The Bronx has the highest unemployment rate in New York City.

Arthur Merlino, the community service manager at the Department of Labor in the Bronx, says certain factors have made the Bronx extremely vulnerable to the recession.

“I think that in the Bronx approximately 40 percent of the population is at the lower income standard,” he said. “And I think there are a good number of them who have various kinds of employment barriers including a lower level of education than prevails in the rest of the city. And I think that’s a major factor.”

Another hopeful statistic in the jobs report is in the manufacturing sector. About 11,000 jobs were created, according to the report, the largest growth in almost four years.

But Ken Margolies, director of organizing programs at the Cornell School of Industrial Labor Relations, said that job creation in manufacturing might not affect New York City as much. “One of the reasons why manufacturing has been leaving New York City for years is that the real estate is more valuable for other things,” he said.

National statistics also showed that construction continued to suffer, as businesses grappled with the recent crisis in the commercial estate market. In an effort to find a sector that might create jobs, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. recently secured a $4 million federal grant to create green jobs in the community.

This comes after the borough president opposed the now-defeated re-development of Kingsbridge Armory on the grounds that the proposed mall would not create living-wage jobs.

“In order for our borough to get out of this long slide of unemployment, we need to fight against poverty, to educate and train our residents to become a skilled work force, to ensure that when companies come to do business here, those new jobs are offered to Bronxites,” he said in an emailed statement.

But Margolies, who worked with the community organization, is cautious about the green-job approach. “It’s really kind of early to know whether it will be a bigger boom or not,’’ he said. A lot depends on whether the government would subsidize it to create a lot of work in those areas.”

Even Americans who have jobs are feeling the slump. The underemployment rate, which counts people who have given up looking for work and part-time workers, has steadily risen over the past year to almost 16.5 percent nationwide, according to the Labor Department’s report.

Francis Ayalah works in part-time retail and says she works the hours of a full-time employee. “There’s nobody hiring full time,” she said.

State Senator Ruben Diaz, a Bronx Democrat, says he sees people like Ayalah every day. “In my office here in the South Bronx, I have people coming in daily looking for jobs,’’ he said. “I’m pretty sure the economy will recover, but how do I tell that to someone who doesn’t have a job?” He breathed a deep sigh on the phone.

“President Barack Obama promised to create jobs, and he has failed” he said. ” If the president doesn’t create jobs, I’m sure us Democrats will lose seats because the nation is turning away from Democrats.”

Daniel Martin hung out on the street corner of East 175th Street and Eastburn Avenue, explaining that he lost his job last year as a window installer. Friday he was searching for better prospects. “I filled out applications at McDonald’s and Wendy’s, without any luck,” he said.

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