Jobs: A Citizen Voices Issue Framework

In this view, Philadelphia has not deployed its resources - human, historic, financial and

educational - as well as it could to compete in the global marketplace. This is the main reason not enough Philadelphians hold living-wage jobs.

To proponents of this choice, the steady, decades-long decline in the city’s job base isn’t merely the work of irresistible market forces. Governments played a role. The federal government massively subsidized the flight of capital to the suburbs. The city government was painfully slow to figure out what had hit it and compounded the damage with high taxes and a stubbornly anti-business mentality.

So, in this view, governments should play a role in bringing jobs backs, by creating smart

incentives to counter the old obstacles to growth, by marketing the city‘s advantages to employers, by partnering with key businesses to spawn growth in the job sectors where the city holds a comparative advantage.

This choice sees it as vital for a city with the high-tax, high-cost reputation of Philadelphia to offer businesses tax breaks, loans and other special attention to clinch decisions to locate or expand. But it wants the city to be strategic in handing out such help, giving it to businesses that can feed off - and feed back into - the city’s existing clusters of economic strength. These include

education, health care and pharmaceuticals, law, tourism and the port.

The city can also work with business leaders to create reinforcing partnerships between such clusters (education and health care, for example).

Even huge public investments in helping corporations can be justified, in this view, if the potential to exploit one of Philadelphia’s advantages is enough (e.g. the Kvaerner shipyard deal).

City government, in this view, should focus on meeting the particular needs of businesses in these growth clusters, whether it be in workforce training, labor costs, regulations, safety or infrastructure. To do this, it will need considerable, consistent help from state and federal governments; in this view, those governments should provide the help as a matter of enlightened self-interest, since a collapse of the city’s economy will do the state and region no good.

Dollars invested wisely in such government/business partnerships pay multiple dividends, this choice contends. They create "buzz" about the city, attracting further investment. They spur development of ancillary small businesses that provide goods and services to the big ones. No matter where the jobs are based they sprinkle income throughout the city’s neighborhoods, creating markets for retail and service businesses.

• Promote Philadelphia’s assets - location, history and culture, higher education, massive labor pool - aggressively throughout the region and nation.

• Offer tax breaks and other incentives to lure or maintain key corporations. Expand "empowerment zone" style programs to enhance the appeal of business sites in rundown areas.

• Get state and federal regulators to reduce the environmental costs attached to redeveloping old factories.

• Create a joint business-government team that can pitch to potential employers,

providing information, connecting them with resources and clearing away regulatory hurdles.

• Where it makes sense, offer employers incentives to hire people coming off welfare.

• Continue whittling away at city taxes and improving its regulatory climate.

• Continue and expand the Rendell administration’s stress on the tourism industry, capitalizing on the city’s historical, entertainment and cultural assets. Turn Philadelphia into an "18-hour city."

• Create government-backed training programs that train workers in the skills needed by specific key industries (e.g. hospitality academies, the Kvaerner program).

• Mediate with unions to encourage the flexibility in work rules and pay that a potential employer needs (e.g. Kvaerner)

• Set up alliances to connect university researchers to entrepreneurs who can turn their ideas into money and jobs.

• Support riverboat gambling as a boost to tourism.

• Help the Phillies and Eagles build new stadiums.

• From its location to its universities to its port, Philadelphia does have real advantages over other cities that it only needs to promote more aggressively and strategically.

• In a competitive global economy, large corporations will demand incentives to move into or stay in the city. Despite what critics of such deals say, Philadelphia can’t afford to "unilaterally disarm" when other cities and states continue to offer them.

• Paying a premium to attract a major new employer like Kvaerner is worth it. The city’s payback includes enhanced tax revenues directly from the business, spin-off effects on the local economy and a sense of "buzz" about the city that attracts other employers.

• Large employers are more likely to provide "living wage" jobs than small ones.

• High labor costs are a drawback for Philadelphia; without union bashing, government should do what it can to provide potential employers with a pool of reasonably priced labor.

• Like it or not, some Philadelphians do not have sophisticated job skills, and jobs in a service sector like tourism or hospitality are perfect for them.

• Part of the reason jobs fled Philadelphia is the antagonistic attitude city government took towards business, regarding it mainly as a cash cow to milk for tax revenues. Treating businesses like valued partners, whose concerns about taxes and regulations need to be heeded, is one way for City Hall to lure some jobs back.

• "Corporate welfare" to companies like Disney, Kvaerner Simon DeBartolo and the Eagles is wasteful and unjust. It just rewards them for doing what they would have done anyhow – and doesn’t commit them to doing what benefits the public. Such resources would be better spent helping small businesses and workers.

• All tax breaks and incentives amount to pointless tinkering at the margins. The only tax strategy that will encourage job creation is to cut city spending and taxes sharply across the board.

• The market determines which businesses succeed or fail, and government has no power to reverse the market’s judgments. If a business plan doesn’t make economic sense, propping it up with government aid amounts to throwing away taxpayers money.

• Splashy, Center City economic development projects don’t do much to help people in the neighborhoods. These companies bring in workers from elsewhere or hire people from the suburbs.

• Why should the public pay for workers to be trained in the specific skills required by one company? Such training is the responsibility of the employer.

• Government shouldn’t help businesses that will offer only low-wage, non-union jobs.

• The idea that Philadelphia could become a tourist destination on a par with Washington, San Francisco or New Orleans is a pipe dream.

• What big businesses call "red tape" are really the rules that protect the environment and the interests of the corporations’ workers and neighbors.

• The social costs of riverboat gambling are extreme; the economic benefits are illusory.