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Stringer Plan Calls for Revamping City Workforce Development, Including Free Community College


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CUNY grads (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photography Office)


New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer proposed a plan Wednesday to revamp the city's workforce development strategy, including by making CUNY community colleges tuition-free and expanding job training opportunities for people at career crossroads.

The pandemic has decimated jobs in New York City -- with unemployment at roughly 16%, though some estimates say the “real” figure is much higher -- and shifted forecasts about the future of industries across the board. Advocates and policymakers are looking for ways to ensure available education and job training opportunities align with market changes. Stringer, a Democrat who is running for mayor in the 2021 election, says his proposal will help guarantee the city's fiscal recovery includes underserved communities, who have borne the brunt of the pandemic's economic fallout.

"My plan overhauls and modernizes our approach to job training, job placement, and education to reflect the evolution of work and aims to break down systemic barriers that have historically excluded women, people of color, immigrants and young people from higher-wage industries," Stringer said in a statement. "As we emerge from this economic crisis, we need to work with CUNY and other engines of economic mobility to build a pipeline of opportunity for the next generation and live up to a promise that anyone can make it in New York City."

On top of making community college tuition-free, Stringer's plan calls for enhancements to the city's disjointed and underfunded patchwork of job readiness, technical training, and skill-bridging programs. It proposes greater public investment and coordination among those programs, as well as private sector partnerships to encourage hiring practices that could promote diversity.

According to the comptroller's report, unlike past recessions where job losses were greatest among higher-wage office workers, the current crisis is falling largely on low-wage, in-person service jobs. Since the end of 2019, the private sector lost 479,000 jobs in New York City, according to the comptroller's office on Wednesday. Over the last six months, 29,000 "white-collar" workers lost their jobs, compared with 253,000 employees in personal service sectors, a 29 percent decrease since 2019, the report states.

"While these low-wage, shift work industries had added more than twice as many jobs (291,565) as had professional industries (135,955) in the first two decades of the century, in just five months, that trajectory has been profoundly—and perhaps permanently—upended," reads the report.

Ongoing racial, geographic, and age disparities in the workforce mean unemployment in the city has been felt disproportionately by non-white New Yorkers, youths, and people living outside Manhattan, according to the report. Workforce development organizations have been looking for ways to connect these underserved populations to new and better job opportunities as a key element of the city's recovery.

Stringer believes expanding access to public education at CUNY's seven community colleges would reduce some of these inequities, especially when coupled with other career services. While Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the state's Excelsior Scholarship to cover public higher education tuition for middle-class families, only 2 percent of CUNY senior college students and fewer than 1 percent of community college students received the scholarship in 2017-18, according to Stringer's report, largely due to obstacles for part-time students.

The report estimates that making tuition free at CUNY community colleges -- creating "a true, K-14 education model" for New York students -- would cost the state roughly $135 million. Doing so, it says, will increase opportunities for part-time, working, and adult students to get a degree beyond high school. Stringer is also proposing $2.4 million go toward hiring 50 "college navigators" to assist adult students with financial and academic challenges as they attempt to reenter the formal education system.

Stringer is also calling for other supportive programming, like an expansion of CUNY ASAP (Accelerated Study in Associates Programs), which provides additional academic advisory and assistance for books and transportation, as well as hiring more experienced, full-time faculty. Guaranteeing ASAP enrollment for all full-time CUNY associates-degree students would cost the city an estimated $100 million, according to the report. Expanding other programs, like early college and College NOW, which are two for-credit programs for pre-college-age students, could bolster career and technical education in the city's public high schools.

The dual requirement of a degree and work experience, especially in higher-pay industries, is a self-reenforcing barrier to employment and social mobility for many New Yorkers.

Individually tailored education and training projects, like bridge programing and "micro-credentialing," both included in Stringer's plan, are ways of closing the requisite gaps for people who have some level of work or educational experience or who may be looking to change or advance their careers.

While imploring corporate HR departments to "make a concerted effort" to review and adjust unnecessary job requirements, a leading contributor to workplace segregation, particularly in the growing tech sector, Stringer's report doesn't specify how the city should leverage that action.

The plan also includes a "universal paid internship" for CUNY community college students in their final year of study as they prepare to enter the workforce full-time. Doing so would require partnerships with private-sector employers, as would efforts to ensure private employers "play a more active role in retraining, upskilling, and diversifying their workforce and refrain from leaning on contingent labor."

Stringer additionally wants the city's Department of Small Business Services to partner with CUNY to create an "NYC Tech Corp" that would connect recent graduates and interns with digital or design majors with small businesses looking to upgrade their online presence.

To combat unemployment and mitigate the impact of the recession, Stringer says the state should rely more on its Shared Work program, which allows employees to receive partial unemployment benefits for working reduced hours and helps avoid layoffs. The city can help by expanding apprenticeship programs, especially in healthcare, finance, design, early education, cyber-security, and other industries. "These programs should be focused on diversifying those fields and increasing economic mobility for those without a college degree," the report states.

The city should also subsidize wages for so-called "transitional employment" for certain populations, like people exiting incarceration, people in homeless shelters, and out-of-school youth, according to the plan.

The unemployment rate among 16-24-year-olds in New York City is 24%, compared with roughly 16% unemployment overall, according to the report. Stringer wants the Mayor's Office and the Department of Education to work with community-based organizations and the chambers of commerce to bring unemployed young people who are not enrolled in school back into an education-to-career pipeline. The report notes, citing figures from the Migration Policy Institute, that "a significant portion" of these young people are recently-arrived immigrants.

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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City-Solicited Recommendations Offer Strategies for More Inclusive Workforce


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Mayor de Blasio at Google in Manhattan (photo: Mayoral Photography Office)


A series of new reports commissioned by the de Blasio administration to examine ways to develop a more inclusive and robust workforce, particularly in New York City's growing tech sector, lays out both big opportunities and high barriers to achieve them.

The studies, recently published by the New York City Economic Development Corporation but conducted largely before the pandemic-spurred recession, were designed and conducted by nonprofits, many of which run workforce development programs. Their purpose is to help ensure that city residents, particularly in historically marginalized communities, have access to the range of tech jobs that have been growing rapidly in the city over the past decade. They paint a picture of a tech industry landscape that cuts across virtually all other sectors. The data show tech employment offers stability and economic mobility to those who can access it, but it is largely guarded by structural inequities that largely exclude women and Black and Latino people.

The reports -- titled "Exploring Paths to an Inclusive Workforce in NYC" -- also offer a patchwork blueprint for helping communities overcome those obstacles, often through partnerships with business and community stakeholders. The studies and their recommendations are now in the hands of the Economic Development Corporation (EDC), a city government-run nonprofit that is promising to use them to inform its workforce strategies, while acknowledging that the economic crisis has made funding for programs scarce.

"We've learned a lot of good things from the findings, obviously we firmed up some of the statistics on the diversity of the tech ecosystem in particular, that we had imperfect data on before," said Lindsay Greene, EDC's Chief Strategy Officer, in a phone interview.

Funding for workforce development "is almost always focused around delivering training to individuals, not on some of the systemic issues that the organizations grapple with," Greene said. "They don't typically get funding to do research on solutions and system-wide needs, that sort of long-term, strategic thinking."

"We hope we can continue doing it in the future and hopefully continue to make investments in workforce when the financial picture improves," she said.

The seven reports cover different areas of the tech workforce equation, focusing on specific challenges and solutions. Some are local case studies, examining opportunities in a particular NYCHA complex or training model, for instance. Others center on expanding opportunities for CUNY students or people with disabilities. EDC says it plans to use the findings to help ensure jobs created with projects like Google's expansion in Manhattan and Amazon's aborted bid to open a second headquarters in Long Island City are more inclusive of city residents of all backgrounds.

The research, much of which was completed before the pandemic and resulting economic recession set in, points to longstanding inequities that have only been exacerbated by the new crises.

"COVID-19 has highlighted the deep-rooted racial disparities and inequities in this country, affecting Black and Latinx populations disproportionately higher across cities, including New York City," states an introductory note in a report written by HR&A Advisors, Jobs for the Future, and LaGuardia Community College.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has also accelerated the adoption of digital and remote work, and as a result demonstrated how crucial and urgent it is for today’s workforce to have tech skills and digital literacy," the note reads.

According to that report, New York City's "tech ecosystem" -- defined as the total tech and non-tech jobs in the tech industry plus the tech jobs in other sectors -- is second in size only to Silicon Valley's, employing 355,000 people in 2018, good for 7% of the city's workforce and roughly equal to the number employed by New York City government. Jobs in the tech ecosystem paid a median wage between $37 and $45 an hour in 2018, compared to between $21 and $30 for the overall city workforce.

Yet despite accounting for 13% of the city's job growth between 2009 and 2018, the ecosystem disproportionately excludes Black and Latino people and women. The gaps are especially stark among tech jobs within the tech industry: 17% are held by Black or Latino workers despite them being 37% of the city's overall workforce, according to the report. Women are employed in under a quarter of those jobs despite accounting for half the city workforce. The higher tech the job, the deeper the disparities.

The report identifies high educational barriers and an arbitrary culture of selectiveness -- informed by long-standing racial and gender prejudices -- as a main driver of the disparities. Employers in tech, especially for tech jobs within the tech industry, often screen by degree and further require work-based experience, even when the positions don't necessitate either. The dynamic creates a circular maze that can be almost impossible to penetrate without inside help, perpetuating segregation in the industry. The lack of representation is self-reinforcing, the study found, making it difficult to retain diverse talent in the sector's large white spaces.

The challenge means that the economic development from the expanding tech sector is only accessible to a certain class of already upwardly-mobile New Yorkers -- a group that is disproportionately white and male.

"Despite a large number of jobs in the tech ecosystem that do not require a bachelor’s degree, and higher-than-average pay among those jobs, tech ecosystem jobs are still more likely to be filled by workers with high educational attainment than NYC jobs overall, creating a barrier to entry for many New Yorkers seeking upward economic mobility," the report reads.

Greene said EDC is working with employers to adjust their stated requirements for jobs to match what they actually need.

Many of the reports highlight the need to have Black and Latino representation in the tech industry, not only to advance the goal of economic equality, but to ensure the more democratic development of a field that has become increasingly central to public and private life.

One of the models experts are exploring is bridge programming, which are sector-specific training and mentorship courses aimed at addressing a particular barrier, be it math skills, English proficiency, or license requirements. Unlike degree programs, bridge programs are tailored to a clients' needed skillset and often have an immersive element that exposes them to the vicissitudes of the field.

Jose Ortiz, Jr., executive director of New York City Employment and Training Coalition, which authored a report on bridge programs among the new set of studies procured by EDC, said partnerships with city government, businesses, and philanthropy were key to expanding the model.

"We need to link existing programs more effectively to the agencies that support them in the city," he said in a phone interview.

"We need to develop stable sources of funding that are not just government dollars being allocated but really thinking about innovative models for how the business community can support the workforce development community here in New York City," he said, "particularly when they are themselves benefiting from that talent."

In 2014, the de Blasio administration committed to invest $60 million in bridge programs on an annual basis by 2020. The money has never been fully allocated, according to advocates, and under the current fiscal crisis, that promise likely won't be fulfilled.

"When it comes to the city, sadly, we don't expect at this point given the current budget situation to see the type of investment that we've always advocated for," Ortiz said. "Given the current economic crunch, it is very difficult for us to see significant investment during this current administration."

"We continue to have conversations with our partners at the state level and our federally elected officials as well," he added. "But with regard to local government, we are looking to the future and thinking about how we can effectively get the future of New York City's leadership to invest more deeply in workforce, particularly during a time when more folks are in need of employment and businesses need talent more than they ever have."

New York City's unemployment rate hit 16% in August, 3.5 points higher than the state rate, and an enormous jump from under 4% at the same time last year, according to the latest figures available from the state Department of Labor. 

"If there is a federal stimulus package that prioritizes putting people back to work, let's talk about really having next generation workforce programing and putting money towards that," Greene of EDC told Gotham Gazette.

"A lot of our workforce work right now comes from federal funds that we leverage with additional city dollars but we can certainly do more going forward," she said.

The Mayor's Office did not provide comment for this article.

One of the new studies, conducted by Urbane Development in partnership with Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, looked at the "NYCHA to tech pipeline" with a focus on public housing residents in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The study recommended that to deal with obstacles to tech employment, the city and community partners should invest in public awareness campaigns among NYCHA residents, as well as mentorship programs that support them in navigating the constricted avenues to tech employment.

The resources of a region are key to accessing the tech workforce, a fact partially hidden by the online nature of some of the work, and in some ways exacerbated by the fact that most industries have moved to a work-from-home format.

"There is a direct correlation between the city's transit deserts and communities that are further away from public transportation and higher unemployment numbers and higher poverty numbers," Ortiz told Gotham Gazette. "There is a correlation between individuals that reside in public housing and the lack of opportunities."

With the COVID-19 pandemic shuttering many in-person services, the reports leave questions around what is "viable in the marketplace," according to Marjorie Parker, president of Jobs First NYC, a nonprofit that has been involved in bridge programming, but did not author a report in the series. "So many of these communities lack broadband access and folks that need to sign on to training don't have high speed internet," Parker said. "So how these translate into remote training and learning is something that we will have to discuss."

Regionally-based development projects that fall under the rubric of revitalization can fail to bring job opportunities to local residents, as was the case with the reconstruction of Sunset Park's waterfront, the focus of another study delivered to EDC, by Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow and Perch Advisors.

"One of the things we've seen as we've invested in advanced manufacturing and built up our waterfront assets across the city is that there is a tremendous amount of residents nearby -- and those are huge employment centers," said Greene of EDC. "Often the demographics in those areas reflect some of the challenges of the city...folks don't have the education level that allow them to readily get into new jobs."

"So you have to not only do the outreach so that they are aware of the jobs but you need to be, on a dedicated basis,” she said, “working with local organizations to connect those folks to workforce training opportunities so that they can get to those jobs.”

Greene said the agency is still looking at ways to support bridge programing, despite little city funding. EDC is also working with employers to remove unnecessary qualification requirements that help reinforce workforce segregation.

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Long-Time Transit Advocate Eyes New York City E-Scooter Pilot


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Link e-scooters on the move (photo: @LINK_Scooters)


New York City is about to solicit bids for a new electric scooter sharing program that could eventually transform the city’s micro-mobility landscape. One firm that plans to seek a city contract believes it has the track record to prove itself and create a network of e-scooters that will be sustainable and accessible to communities of color that have been underserved by the city’s mass transit system.

For years, transit advocates clamored for the legalization of e-bikes and e-scooters, which was finally approved by both the state Legislature and Governor Andrew Cuomo in this year’s state budget in April. In June, the New York City Council passed legislation establishing local regulations as well as mandating an e-scooter sharing pilot program for at least one year and two years at most. Under the legislation, the Department of Transportation is required to issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) on October 15, with the aim of launching the program by March 1, 2021. 

The e-scooter program is meant to offer a new option for getting around, especially in environmentally-friendly fashion, and to fill the gaps in transit alternatives, particularly in neighborhoods that currently aren’t served by Citi Bike’s bicycle-share system.

“Now more than ever New York City needs transportation options, especially micro mobility which is affordable, accessible, environmentally friendly and allows safe distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19,” said City Council Member Fernando Cabrera, a Bronx Democrat who sponsored the legislation, in a statement. Though Cabrera acknowledged that the city faces budget constraints that Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg has raised concerns about, he urged the administration to create a program that “is as broad as possible to compare and contrast results in different communities and develop best practices, particularly around storage of scooters.”

A DOT spokesperson acknowledged a request for comment from Gotham Gazette but did not provide one.

Transit advocates are eager to see the program get up and running, particularly as the pandemic has changed how New Yorkers live and commute across the city. Subway and bus ridership have yet to recover back to pre-pandemic levels while bike ridership has boomed. The program is also another reason for the city to reimagine its streetscapes, they say, with an eye to creating more room for micro-mobility and reducing New Yorkers’ reliance on cars.

Although late to the game of micro-mobility, New York City has the advantage of being an attractive market for companies because of its density and connectivity with mass transit, especially as e-scooter usage has increased dramatically over the last few years – according to a report from the National Association of City Transportation Officials, there were 38.5 million trips on shared e-scooters in 2018 across the country, out of 84 million shared micro-mobility trips.

Paul Steely White, a longtime transit advocate, is now the director of development and public affairs at Superpedestrian, a Boston-based firm that launched its own e-scooter service, Link. The firm, a “second mover” in the micro-mobility market, has won contracts in cities that include Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Rome, and now has its eyes set on New York, where there’s likely to be intense competition to win the city contract for a pilot e-scooter program. 

In a phone interview, White said that his firm may be an “underdog” but it has an edge over some of its more prominent competitors like Bird, Lime, Lyft, and Spin, which are all expected to apply with the city. Link’s chief selling point, White said, is its own e-scooter built from scratch that does not suffer from issues that make other e-scooters unsafe and unsustainable. He said the scooter’s “secret sauce” is its patented “Vehicle Intelligence System,” which monitors safety issues, with the battery or electrical components for instance, and can fix them automatically.

“So that means that it's a safer vehicle. But it also means it's cheaper to operate the fleets,” he said. “The biggest cost that Bird and Lime and really any shared mobility operator incurs is in maintenance and spare parts and depreciation.” White previously worked for Bird. Lower operating costs also mean that Link can offer services in areas that other firms may avoid because of a lack of profitability.  

Link’s scooters also have a geofencing system, which determines the parameters of where the vehicles can be operated, that is native to the scooter rather than based on smartphone apps that have to communicate through the cloud. That allows Link scooters to more quickly prevent people from traveling into restricted zones such as roads or sidewalks, he said, and allows for self-enforcement that will help alleviate the need for the city crackdown on errant scooter riders. The geofencing can kick in in less than a second, compared to almost 30 seconds for other scooter companies, according to a Link presentation provided to Gotham Gazette. 

That last point would likely work in Link’s favor. In a hearing before the City Council last month, Trottenberg warned that budget cuts to her department meant it was short-staffed and may not be able to monitor the rollout of the e-scooter program. “I don’t really have the personnel to do all these programs as well as I want to,” Trottenberg said, according to a New York Daily News report

White noted that Link also does not need to rely on quickly capturing market share but instead is focused on providing dependable services. Early adopters like Bird and Lime, he said, “were looking to the Uber and Lyft playbook of market share as the goal. But what they missed was that that might work for a pure tech company or software company, but these are transportation companies operating in the public realm. So much more important than market share is complying with the regulations and city rules.”  

There are likely to be challenges for the city besides staffing. Though the DOT has installed more than 400 miles of bike lanes under de Blasio, the city’s bike infrastructure remains woefully inadequate to handle a crush of new bicycle and scooter riders. E-scooter sales have already shot through the roof, according to a Streetsblog report.

“There's never been a time when New Yorkers have been seeking new ways to get around like the time we're in right now,” said Joe Cutrufo, communications director at Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group where White served as executive director for nearly 15 years. 

Cutrufo criticized the city for not prioritizing scooters and bicycles as modes of transit during the pandemic, particularly as people continue to be wary of taking the subway. “This should have been a priority for the DOT and frankly, it's a shame that it's not,” he said, noting that last year also saw the most cyclist fatalities in 20 years. “The pandemic hit. The mayor said walk or bike to work if you can. Well, what did he do to try and make it safer for people to be able to do that? Not much.”

He said the city needs to capitalize both on the rising demand for e-scooters as well as the changing use of curbside real estate triggered by outdoor dining. But he seemed skeptical of the mayor’s commitment to it. “The truth of the matter is that if we have the infrastructure to separate cyclists and scooter riders from motor vehicles, we're setting these types of programs up for success,” said Cutrufo. “I don't know if the mayor sees things that way. He looks at the risk as something that he has no control over.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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