Some good news to report here. Al Jazeera America covers the Black Workers Center in Los Angeles, which not only provides jobs and skills training, but also trains black workers to be labor advocates.
Unemployment for African Americans is roughly double that of whites: 9.2 percent, compared to 4.4 percent for whites and 6.4 percent for Latinos. In California, black unemployment is around 14 percent and in Los Angeles, 16 percent. And when they are employed, very often black men and women and teens will toil in jobs earning minimum wage. More than 14 percent of black men and almost 17 percent of black women working full-time in Los Angeles make low-income wages.
The focus of the Black Workers Center has been getting a piece of the $70 billion the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority will be spending over the next 30 years on new rail lines. The projects will create an estimated 270,000 jobs. But until the Center stepped in, none of those jobs were filled with blacks. Center members met with MTA officials and attended hearings to push for a hiring agreement to employ black workers. It was approved by the MTA and now more than 20 percent of the workers on the project are African American. Another goal is to get the city of Los Angeles to form an enforcement office to prosecute wage theft and employment exclusion.
The brainchild of Lola Smallwood Cuevas, the Black Worker Center is becoming a model for other cities. The National Black Worker Center Project has helped open a similar center in the San Francisco Bay Area and has plans to launch one in Baltimore. It is working with Black Worker centers in Boston, Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Chicago, and Raleigh-Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
The center’s approach is so innovative that Cuevas was invited to attend the White House Summit on Worker Voice last week. The White House turned to Cuevas specifically because her work focuses on how to collaborate with employers, unions and community groups to create opportunities for good-paying jobs for black residents.
In the Los Angeles area, more than half of all working-age blacks are either unemployed or under-employed, making less than $13 an hour.
Empowering a community and giving it a voice. We can hope this will be replicated in other cities.