by PPL's Executive Director, Steve
Cramer
One benefit for me at
PPL is the frequent opportunities to hear and talk about challenging
issues facing our community. At one such meeting of business, political
and community leaders in April, Harvard professor William Julius
Wilson presented a devastating picture of employment prospects facing
low-skill, poorly educated workers in a globalizing economy. Wilson
argued that without renewed commitment to help such workers gain
basic skills, intentional steps to connect them with the world of
work, and support to make holding a job possible despite challenging
life circumstances, their futures are bleak. He also asserted the
prospects for such a renewed commitment, under current political
and budget conditions, are similarly bleak.
What Minnesota is willing to do to help people go to work remains
a work in progress. Without dramatic reversal of recent budget priorities,
it will be hard to argue this state has made it a priority to elevate
work over welfare, and the prospect of real economic self-sufficiency
over deepening poverty.
PPL has extensive experience with the workers Professor Wilson spoke
of, whose prospects are affected by legislative decisions. In some
situations we provide direct employment opportunities for ex-offenders
or new immigrants. These participants earn income, gain work skills
and histories, and eventually move to better positions. In other
programs the focus is on classroom education to help people, often
mothers enrolled in MFIP, gain the skills they don’t have
but need for success in the workplace. In all cases these employment
training efforts are bolstered by support services focused on the
non-workplace aspects of life — housing, child care, health
care, nutrition, family matters — which, if in turmoil, quickly
lead to trouble on the job.
Challenges facing people we work with are unimaginable to anyone
who hasn’t experienced life under extreme economic and social
duress. To overcome such circumstances education, skill training
and supportive services aren’t “nice to have”
features of employment efforts, they are essential. They mark the
difference between a series of dead-end jobs or the chance to earn
a decent living. Yet these are among the very programs most under
the knife recently at the Capitol.
Belief in the importance of work is a quintessential Minnesota value,
a value that crosses partisan divisions. But for policy and budget
decisions stemming from this shared value to have relevance, legislators
must be of one mind about two facts. First, rhetoric extolling the
importance of work won’t overcome the barriers to holding
a job facing the hardest to employ in our community. Only investments
of the type Professor Wilson came to our state to talk about will.
Second, for work to make a real difference in the lives of poor
Minnesotans, our aspirations must be that employment elevates their
economic status well beyond poverty-level income.
The future Wilson outlines faces a growing number of adults and
children in our state. But we aren’t helpless to respond.
Many more people can receive the help they need to join the mainstream
if another quintessential Minnesotan value, offering a hand up in
time of need, shines through.
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