Push hard to create more good NYC jobs
So far, Mayor de Blasio has made universal pre-K a reality and launched an ambitious plan to build and preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing. The next plank of the mayor’s inequality agenda should be a strategy to create middle-class jobs.
The good news: More New Yorkers are employed than ever before, and the city has added more than 100,000 jobs in each of the past two years. Of those jobs, city Controller Scott Stringer found, a growing share are in fields with middle-income wages, such as hospitals and entertainment.
But too many of the jobs being created are still in industries that pay very low wages. Between 2011 and 2015, restaurants, home health care and grocery stores — where average annual wages are under $26,000 — accounted for 102,000 of the new jobs in the city. New York also has been creating high-paying jobs in sectors such as tech and advertising, but many are out of reach for those without a bachelor’s degree.
The result is that large numbers of people in the five boroughs are working but not earning enough to live comfortably, let alone get ahead.
New York is hardly the only city experiencing a hollowing out of middle class jobs. But the problem plays out on a more profound scale here given the city’s skyhigh cost of living. Fortunately, the de Blasio administration can boost the number of middle-income jobs. Some strategies: Support modern manufacturing. Manufacturing is still a crucial source of well paying jobs, with the average worker earning $56,000 annually. And for the first time in decades, manufacturing is adding jobs: After losing an average of 8,370 positions annually from 2001 to 2011, manufacturing employment in the city has since increased by 3,900. There’s clear potential for additional growth, especially in sectors like food and 3D printing.
City officials should target the kinds of companies that have been fueling the recent revival: small firms making niche products and investing in new technologies. This means rethinking current incentive programs that don’t always benefit small companies.
Move beyond manufacturing. Still, manufacturing accounted for only 0.8% of the 513,500 new private-sector jobs added citywide over the past five years. It’s time to create new pipelines into fast-growing tech and creative industries that haven’t always been perceived as middle-class sectors.
The de Blasio administration is taking steps to help New Yorkers access tech jobs, but there are clear opportunities to scale up these efforts and create similar pathways to a range of other highgrowth industries that have largely been out of reach to New Yorkers from low-income backgrounds.
Help small firms scale up. Over the past decade, New York has witnessed a remarkable entrepreneurial boom. Now it’s time to help small companies with the potential for middleincome job growth expand to the next level. Consider: investing in export assistance programs; helping more small firms break into the corporate supply chain, and sending counselors into the field to visit small businesses.
Improve infrastructure. So much of New York City’s core infrastructure — from subway signals to water and sewer lines and public school buildings — is in urgent need of repair. A major campaign to modernize this aging infrastructure would create construction, engineering and design jobs.
Such efforts promise to fulfill the words of Jane Jacobs: “A metropolitan economy, if working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middleclass people, many illiterates into skilled people, many greenhorns into competent citizens . . . Cities don’t lure the middle class. They create it.”
Four strategies