Jobs: A Citizen Voices Issue Framework

In this view, the most pressing jobs problem facing the people of Philadelphia is that those who want to work or own small businesses face too many barriers to success.

Given its limited resources, government’s first priority in the jobs area should be to ensure that small businesses and workers have the supports they need to make a living, proponents of this choice contend. It is both more just and more effective, in this view, to focus government’s help on those who need it more than big corporations.

In this view, corporations – thanks to their influence with politicians – tend to hog the attention and resources government has to offer for job creation. Such "corporate welfare" benefits primarily corporations themselves; any benefits accruing to workers, neighborhoods or small businesses are incidental and unreliable.

Politicians, this choice believes, have an unfortunate penchant for focusing on high-profile deals because the measure success by the number of ground-breaking photographs in which they appear. Helping dozens of small businesses take root and grow may be less flashy, but more beneficial in the long run, this choice believes.

Moreover, in this view, individuals don’t much care whether a potential job is based in a particular political subdivision like the city of Philadelphia. In fact, this choice notes, the Philadelphia region as whole doesn’t have a shortage of jobs. The particular problem of city residents is the barriers that keep them from getting and holding the available jobs – whether in the suburbs or the city.

The questions such workers or would-be workers care about most are: Do I have the needed skills? Can I get to the job site in a reasonable time? Who will care for my children while I’m working? Does the job have the wages and benefits to support my family?

In other words, what workers need city government to help them with are: job training aimed at their needs, not those of specific employers: reliable, affordable mass transit; quality, affordable child care; and policies nudging employers to treat workers fairly.

Similarly, small businesses deserve a variety of supports from city government, including help getting the financing often denied enterprises in the city, support in maintain clean and safe business corridors, technical advice, easing of red tape and access to qualified workers.

In this view, job development work at the grass roots may be less glamorous than big-ticket, headline deals, but it yields a more bountiful harvest.

• Design job training programs – K-12 and adults – that focus on flexible skills workers can take from job to job, rather than on meeting the needs of a particular employer.

• Expand and improve SEPTA, particularly to connect city residents to suburban jobs.

• Work with state, nonprofits and corporations to increase affordable, quality day care.

• Continue rules that require contractors doing work for the city to pay at least the prevailing regional wage.

• Pass "living wage" laws.

• Have the city government support affirmative action to the degree constitutionally possible.

• Use city’s leverage as a depositor to persuade banks to offer more financing to small businesses in the city. Use government resources as seed money for small business financing pools.

• Reduce the red tape that chokes small businesses.

• Help upgrade and promote neighborhood retail districts, and provide them with the basic safety and maintenance services they deserve.

• Improve the vocational education offered by the public school system.

• Limit the tax breaks and other forms of "welfare" given to large corporations. Where such deals makes sense, insist companies commit to hire local people, pay living wages, be a good neighbor, and guarantee to stay in the city for a fixed amount of time, at penalty of repaying all benefits if they leave earlier.

• Change welfare-to-work policy to allow people to pursue education and advanced job training, rather than taking the first jobs that come along.

• Too many of the jobs that government pays a high price for in "corporate welfare" are low-wage, low-benefit jobs that can’t support a family. If it decides to hand out corporate tax breaks, government needs to cut a better deal for workers and neighborhoods.

• Give government aid to a corporation, and it goes to help the bottom line and distant shareholders. Give it directly to workers, and it helps the people who make the city work.

• Most workers will change jobs and careers several times in their life; they need job training that will help them through those changes, not training specific to one company.

• Racism is a big reason some city workers and businesses have not succeeded as they might. Government must do what it can to redress pass injustices and level the playing field.

• Good mass transit puts thousands of city residents in touch with jobs they couldn’t get to any other way. City Hall shouldn’t care that many of those jobs are in the suburbs.

• Corporations and nonprofits have shown they can’t create a day-care system adequate to the needs of working parents. Government has to step in to fill in the gaps.

• Small businesses are the most powerful generators of new jobs; government investments in them return more bang for the buck.

• Gimmicks like riverboat gambling would destroy families and neighborhoods in return for paltry, low-wage jobs.

• High taxes already inflate disastrously the cost of doing business in Philadelphia, without placing additional burdens for job training, day care, mass transit etc. on government.

• The rate of small business failure is very high, for reasons government aid can’t fix. It’s the market’s way of sorting good ideas from bad. Government spending meant to help small businesses evade the inevitable market judgment is a foolish waste of limited resources.

• A jobs strategy that favors workers’ needs over employers is doomed to fail in a global market where almost all competitors have lower labor costs than Philadelphia.

• Generalized job training too often prepares people expensively for jobs that don’t exist.

• New economic realities have placed the kind of high-wage, high-benefit jobs for which this choice is nostalgic beyond the reach of many Philadelphians.

• The tax and spin-off benefits of major corporate startups and expansions do justify the government help that cynics call "corporate welfare."

• A living wage law would scare businesses away from Philadelphia.

Workers’ rights. Entrepreneurship. Small is beautiful. Neighborhoods. Corporate responsibility.