Next Avenue reports:
Another panelist, Ryan Haygood, president and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, noted that only 18 percent of all jobs in Newark, where his institute is based, are held by local residents. (In Newark, 49 percent of residents are African American; 36 percent are Hispanic.) By contrast, 33 percent of jobs in Baltimore are held by local residents and 45 percent of jobs in New Orleans are.
Newark’s 18 percent rate isn’t so low because of an unwillingness of its residents to work, Haygood noted. And it’s not because Newarkers have criminal convictions preventing them from being hired, or comprise an exceptionally high percentage of people without college degrees. “We found the same incidence of convictions as in most other U.S. cities,” he said. “The percentage of people in Newark with college degrees — one-third — is consistent with the national trend.”
No, Haygood said, the reason so few blacks in Newark are working is “that the system has been designed to produce the kind of results we see.”