Left Behind : Hard-Core Jobless Have Little Hope

Elizabeth Munoz, who runs an employment agency near Times Square, is desperate for workers. “We need plumbers, bricklayers and electricians, and we can’t find any,” she says. “We need people.”

Not far away in another part of Manhattan, Judith Holmes McFatter, director of employment and training for the AFL-CIO in the state, has plenty of people. On her office wall, a map pinpointing recent plant closings and major layoffs is so pocked with red markings that it “looks like New York state with measles.”

Yet Munoz’s job openings are of almost no help to McFatter’s people: The two don’t match up because the great majority of those now unemployed in New York simply do not have skills that are in demand.

Low Unemployment Rate

And what is true in New York City seems to hold across the country. The prosperity generated by more than five consecutive years of economic expansion has pushed the unemployment rate to about as low as most economists think it can go--as reflected in the 5.5% jobless rate for last month. Yet the hard-core unemployed have barely been touched.

Even in high-employment states such as New York, where unemployment in May was only 4.2%, pockets of joblessness persist, particularly among former manufacturing workers.

These stubborn pockets of joblessness call into question President Reagan’s prediction in June, 1981, that general economic improvement would benefit everyone. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” Reagan said then, arguing that workers would benefit from Reaganomics even with the deep cuts he was making in federal jobs programs.

‘Lifts All Yachts’

“It’s more accurate,” complained Sar Levitan, a liberal economist who heads the George Washington University Center for Social Policy Studies, “to say a rising tide lifts all yachts.”

That may be a little hyperbolic. Nonetheless, government statistics as well as many private analyses suggest that the general prosperity has done little to help workers who are poorly educated, ill-trained or have been displaced by technical or economic developments after many years in a career. Their plight seems to be growing worse.

Long-term unemployment accounts for a larger proportion of the unemployed than it used to, and plants continue to be shut down as the nation’s economy shifts toward service industries and Sun Belt locations. Some older workers complain about age discrimination--particularly on the part of trade unions that deny them apprenticeships.

At the other end of the age spectrum, the high dropout rate at inner-city schools presages an uneducated segment of the labor force--fit only for low-tech jobs in an increasingly high-tech world. And the epidemic of drug problems, luring many young people into illegal trafficking, shows no sign of abating.

“What seems to be going on that is troubling is that there are much higher numbers of people who continue through their 20s without attaching themselves to the labor force,” said Greg Duncan, program director at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.

What are the dimensions of the nation’s hard-core unemployment problem?

The U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics says that, in addition to the 6.8 million people counted in the May unemployment figures, another 5.5 million were not counted because they no longer bother to look for jobs--for a variety of reasons. Some cite a lack of child care services or reluctance to lose welfare benefits--including medical coverage--by taking one of the jobs that may be available to them. Others have become so discouraged they believe they cannot find work.

Millions of Part-Timers

Add to these some 4.8 million part-time workers who would like to work full time, and the nation’s unemployment picture looks bleaker than the monthly figures indicate. About 17 million people are unable to find steady work, and only a fraction of them are touched by federal jobs programs.

As Christopher Ruhm, professor of economics at Boston University, put it: “For some particular groups, the recession never ended.”

In recent years, plant closings added dramatically to the ranks of the unemployed. Since 1981, almost 11 million workers have lost their jobs nationwide--270,000 in New York state alone. Although some have since taken lower-paying jobs with fewer fringe benefits, many refuse to do so and remain jobless. Others float in and out of the work force doing odd jobs or relying on state and federal benefits or income from other family members.

Milliner Loses Job

Here, where many clothing manufacturers have been moving their operations to the Sun Belt and to other countries--”runaway shops,” labor activists call them--Maria Rosa Vales of Queens lost her job last December when a hat maker left town.

At age 52, with an eighth-grade education, Vales is having a hard time finding a new job. Her $280-a-week income has been temporarily replaced by a $133 unemployment check while her husband, Carlos, tries to hold the family’s finances together on his income as a building superintendent. “I’m not feeling well,” said Vales. “I need work. We need the money.”

In the once-booming steel region, Elwin Murray, 48, of Rochester, Pa., exemplifies a familiar American tragedy. For 20 years he was a brakeman on the railroad, hauling steel produced at a mill. “When they (the steel mills) were working good, we worked good,” he said.

In August, 1984, Murray was laid off from his $16-an-hour job because the steel plant had cut back operations. Since then, he has worked at myriad temporary jobs--as a security guard, an electrician and as a rehabilitation aide at a center for the mentally retarded until his car broke down last December. And he has developed ulcers.

Family on State Aid

He, his unemployed wife and four children live on $516 a month in state assistance, “not enough to pay basic bills,” he says. It does include medical insurance, however. Although, Murray said, “quite a few” jobs are available in Pennsylvania (where unemployment in May was 5.1%) he cannot take any of them because they offer no medical coverage.

“There are other things that have to be considered, along with the wage per hour,” Murray said.

The misery and pain of being out of work can be unbearable. Experts tell of alcoholism, mental depression and family problems that afflict many people who lose their jobs, then beat their heads against closed doors week after week.

“I put in about 200 applications this year,” said William Noss, 47, a welder in Aliquippa, Pa., who earned $2,000 a month until he was laid off in 1985. He now gets less than half that amount from unemployment insurance related to another welding job from which he was laid off just before Christmas. “I’m getting disgusted. I feel I got no use anymore.”

“We try to give them hope,” said Ronda Faloon, manager of a workers’ assistance center at Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown, Mass., “but finding anything that is close to the salaries they were making is very difficult.”

A ‘Two-Tiered’ System

In North Carolina, a 3.5% unemployment rate belies heavy losses in manufacturing work during the 1980s--100,000 jobs in textiles alone, according to Christopher Scott, president of the state AFL-CIO. He said that the state has a “two-tiered economy” with the hard-core unemployed on one level and affluent people, such as high-tech researchers, on the other.

In some cities, he said: “You can’t hardly drive on highways for the BMWs.”

Then there is the other tier. Winston Hefner of Spruce Pine, N.C., was union president at a company that moved to Texas in 1986. He said that two employees committed suicide right after the plant closed. “I had some problems myself,” said Hefner, who now teaches welding part time. “Other men look to you for help, and when you can’t give it, your own mental attitude gets screwed up.”

The Reagan Administration’s response to unemployment problems has taken dramatic turns, most of which embodied the President’s belief that the best thing the federal government could do for business and the millions of people left jobless was just to get out of the way.

In his inaugural address in January, 1981, Reagan vowed to remove “the roadblocks that have slowed our economy and reduced productivity.” He said: “Putting America back to work means putting all Americans back to work.”

Response From Reagan

The next year, as the nation’s unemployment rate soared into double digits, the President said: “I guarantee you we’re going to accept responsibility in this Administration for finding jobs for all of the 10.1% of the labor force without jobs.”

As part of its attack on joblessness, the Administration eliminated what it called the ineffective federal jobs program under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, enacted under President Richard M. Nixon, and replaced it with the Job Training Partnership Act.

CETA had grown to an $11-billion-a-year operation under President Jimmy Carter. Reagan’s replacement spends $2 billion a year, mostly in block grants to states, and relies mainly on local government and business officials to run the program.

In addition, the government spends $718 million for a summer youth program, down $32 million from last year, and $716 million for the Job Corps, which helps educate and train impoverished youth between ages 16 and 21.

Total spending on these programs amounts to $3.4 billion. The estimated number of participants: About 2 million of the 17 million people who cannot find steady work.

‘De-Emphasis on Aid’

The Administration’s jobs programs cuts reflect what Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution called a “general de-emphasis” on helping the unemployed. This includes changing the eligibility criteria to make it more difficult for laid-off workers to collect unemployment insurance benefits.

Meanwhile, tax code changes have lowered income taxes for those in the higher brackets. The overall economy continues to grow and employment figures look good--in the aggregate.

“What we are left with,” said George Washington University’s Levitan, “is that most of us are making out quite well and we will be happy and thankful to our Great Communicator. And we will leave some people behind.”

Officials at the Labor Department asserted that the Administration is doing a lot to pull the jobless along. Several said that “geographical mismatches” between employers and employees who do not want to move make their task harder. Others said the federal budget deficit constrains spending on jobs programs and called on the states and private industry to do more.

Carolyn Golding of the Employment and Training Administration said there is a “trade-off to be made on how much burden you want to lay on taxpayers. . .and how much capital to invest” in jobs programs. “Employers are going to have a big stake in that.”

Defending the elimination of CETA, Dolores Battle, administrator of the Office of Job Training Programs, said it had become “a pork-barrel thing at the local level” that was riddled with waste and placing people in meaningless, temporary jobs.

Replacement No Better

Many unemployed people say, however, that current efforts to retrain them are no better.

Under the federal program, communities must form Private Industry Councils and monitor job trends so that they can steer people toward expanding occupational fields. Generally, such jobs are in service industries, such as hotel and restaurant operations, medical care and transportation. Several Pennsylvania men said, however, that after they were laid off from heavy-industry jobs, they were retrained in similar occupations and still could not find work.

Take Computer Classes

Here in Manhattan, Munoz, the placement agency owner, said many unemployed people enroll in computer classes in her office building when they might do better by learning how to lay bricks.

Yolanda Ramsey, 18, of Jersey City, N.J., is one who is now trying that kind of practical approach to her future. She dropped out of high school in the ninth grade two years ago because “every day it was the same routine. I just got tired of it.”

After one short-lived job that paid $130 a week and a series of unsuccessful interviews, she is about to join the Job Corps to get a high school diploma and training for work as a security guard. “When I come back,” she said, “I’ll be a different person.”

While Ramsey pursues her dream, many economists fret over the possibility that the economy will turn down and make an already bad situation worse for people like her.

“If the economy were to go into recession,” said Ruhm of Boston University, “you can imagine what would happen to the hard-core unemployed.”