These Detroiters aren't looking for jobs. Why might surprise you

John Gallagher | Detroit Free Press

Even as the nation enjoys a historically low jobless rate and downtown Detroit booms with thousands of new workers and dozens of new projects, the long-term lack of work opportunities for Detroiters threatens to hold back the city for years to come.

Almost half of Detroit’s working-age residents aren’t even looking for a job — at 53.4 percent, it's the lowest workforce participation rate in the nation and a symptom of poverty and poor educational attainment.

Tyrone Burks and Isaiah Phlegm put a human face on some very bleak statistics.

Burks, 37, spent 10 years in a state prison for a sexual misconduct conviction. Released in 2013, he has worked temp jobs since, but struggles to find better full-time work.

“It’s been real hard finding people that’s willing to give a person a shot to basically get back into the community. That’s been the hardest,” he said. “I have gone on interviews and as soon as I explain the situation it becomes like, ‘Ah, OK, we’ll see.”

But his obstacles only begin with his incarceration history. Having dropped out of high school, Burks is under-educated. While he completed his General Educational Development (GED) certification in prison, the rough equivalent of a diploma, many of the jobs available in Detroit require more education.

He recently finished pre-apprenticeship training to be an electrician at the Randolph Career and Technical Center in Detroit. But the sort of skilled trades jobs he’s looking for generally want an even higher level of training and experience.

Transportation also is an obstacle. Burks doesn't have a car and hasn’t been able to get his driver’s license back because he owes traffic fines and penalties. “A lot of the jobs that wanted to hire me, the first thing they ask is, 'do you have your license,' ” he said.

Phlegm, 28, faces the same sort of challenges as Burks.

“A lot of people don’t want to give a felon a chance to do what’s right,” he said. Phlegm was released from prison in January after serving two years for a concealed weapon charge. “What I feel, you’ve got to give everybody a chance. I know everybody wants somebody with a clear record. But everybody’s ain’t bad. People make mistakes. You do your time, you pay your debt to society, I feel like you should have a chance to do what’s right, especially if you’re trying.”

Like Burks, Phlegm recently completed training at the Randolph Tech Center, working a warehouse job from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and then attending classes at Randolph in heating and air conditioning for a 12-hour day.

Keeping that sort of schedule is typical of citizens trying to re-enter the community, said Dan Varner, CEO of Goodwill Industries of Greater Detroit, which works with ex-offenders.

“Some of the most motivated members of the workforce you’ll ever see are people who have overcome those barriers,” Varner said. “Returning citizens who are now employed are among the most loyal and hardworking folks you’ll ever get on your workforce.”

The career counselors at the nonprofit Southwest Solutions on Detroit’s west side have been working with both Burks and Phlegm to try to help them find jobs and resolve their challenges.

Their experiences are all too common for some 3,300 Wayne County residents returning to the community from prison each year. Of those citizens, 70 percent are still unemployed three years after their release, said Jeff Donofrio, the director of Detroit's workforce development office in Mayor Mike Duggan's administration.

Some hard numbers to swallow

Even after years of attacking joblessness, it remains far and away the key challenge holding back Detroit’s full recovery. And past incarceration is only one part of the complex problem.

Failure to finish high school makes a major difference. The poverty rate among Detroit residents who fail to finish high school was 52.1 percent in the latest government data; the poverty rate for Detroiters with a bachelor's degree was 12.6 percent.

And marital status contributes, too. Among women participating in the workforce, the unemployment rate with a spouse present was 10.8 percent, but 23.1 percent for single moms. Everything from a lack of a car to unaffordable housing can make it harder to find or keep a job.

The city’s official unemployment rate stood at 7.4 percent in April, well above the Michigan rate of 4.7 percent. But even more telling is the little-known statistic known as the labor force participation rate. Capturing the percentage of adults either working or looking for work, the rate in Detroit stands at just 53.4 percent, far below the national average and the lowest among 40 cities reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Economists say a low participation rate in the job market reflects a large population of poor people, elderly residents and young people with low educational attainment. It also tends to correlate with a high unemployment rate, since low labor-force participation occurs when jobs are scarce.

It is particularly worrisome for Detroit because at a time when baby boomer workers are aging out of the workforce, employers need all the new candidates they can find.

"Over 50 percent of our workforce is eligible to retire here in the next five years," said Diane Antishin, vice president and chief diversity officer for DTE Energy. "We see this huge bow wave of retirements coming at us. The question becomes how can we help some of those people who are experiencing barriers to employment find their way into these great family-sustaining jobs?"

A closer look at barriers

Race and poverty remain central to the problem.

“We shouldn’t shy away from the obvious,” Varner of Goodwill Industries said. “We’ve got a large community of color in the city that’s been disenfranchised over the years. And so frankly they’ve got more barriers to entering the workforce.

“You’ve got a significant number of folks who didn’t get a great education. We see high school graduates who are reading at a fifth- or sixth-grade level. We’ve got folks with significant needs around foundational skills, literacy, numeracy, kind of work-readiness that we’ve got to wrap our arms around as well.”

There are, in fact, many jobs in Detroit, but there’s a mismatch between the skills needed for them and the skills of Detroit’s population. About two-thirds of Detroit residents — some 115,000 people by one recent estimate — commute to the suburbs for work each day, often in warehouse, retail or other service jobs. Only about 65,000 working Detroiters actually work within the city limits.

Meanwhile, close to 200,000 suburbanites commute into the city every day where jobs, especially in the greater downtown area, require the education and skills many Detroiters lack.

“There’s a mismatch,” said Donofrio of the city's workforce office. "Those entry-level positions just don’t exist in the city, which is a reason why a lot of folks are not even entering the workforce, because they can’t have easily accessible entry-level positions into career pathways.“

Clearly there are no single answers, no silver-bullet solutions to the problem. Like other postindustrial cities, Detroit has been trying to solve joblessness for decades.

Perhaps the difference today is that everyone involved in workforce development understands the problem must be attacked on multiple levels.

“You can talk about transportation as a barrier, child care, housing stability," Donofrio said. "But you really have to peel back the onion to see how they all interact with each other.”

So job training programs like the ones Burks and Phlegm have completed aren't enough. Issues around affordable housing, personal debt, child care and more must all be addressed to make a dent in the problem.

With so many Detroiters lacking access to a car, public transit must improve. Job training programs, of which there are many good ones, need better links to actual companies so that trainees aren’t cast adrift once their program ends. And so much more.

What the numbers mean

Detroit’s 53.4-percent labor force participation rate means that almost half of adult residents in Detroit are not even looking for work. And while government statistics show that other older cities like Cleveland do only a little better than Detroit, many other cities show far higher rates of their residents in the workforce, including Chicago (65 percent), Minneapolis (74.8 percent), and Seattle (75.3 percent).

Poor educational achievement explains a lot of the disparity. In Detroit, roughly one in five adults hasn’t completed high school — 21.9 percent. The high-school dropout rate in Seattle is 6 percent, in Boston 7.5 percent.

And even among high school dropouts, Detroiters fare worse compared with residents in other cities. The poverty rate among high school dropouts in Detroit was 46.7 percent, according to the latest government data, while the figure in Chicago was 30.4 percent and in Seattle 32 percent.

That translates into lower income for Detroiters. The median income for all Detroiters was $24,033 in the most recent BLS data, while the figure in Pittsburgh was $35,419 and in Chicago $37,763. In tech-savvy cities like Seattle, home to Amazon, the median income in the latest BLS data was $50,832, slightly more than twice Detroit’s level.

Donofrio of the city’s workforce office said the city can boost its labor force participation rate up to about 60 percent by continuing to chip away at the many barriers to employment. If the city reaches that goal, another 30,000 to 40,000 Detroiters would be in the workforce, earning perhaps $500 million to $1 billion annually.

That amount of new income would go far toward alleviating many of Detroit’s ills with poverty, housing affordability, tax foreclosure, child care and elder care and other problems.

Some victories for the city

Against the background of long-term joblessness and dispiriting statistics, the city has notched some victories lately. Three show the way the city is attacking joblessness by getting into the heart of the hiring system.

One victory came over driver responsibility fees, which range from $100 to $2,000, and were passed in 2003 to help plug a big hole in Michigan’s state budget. The fees came on top of the money owed for traffic tickets.

While the fees raised a lot of money for the state, they fell heavily on poor people, who couldn’t afford them. Donofrio said that 18 percent of Detroit’s adult population, about 76,000 people, had outstanding debt stemming from the driver responsibility fees. The amount of debt in Detroit alone from the fees added up to $120 million.

State lawmakers recently agreed to abolish the fees and wipe out the debt as of October. And Detroit officials went a step further and lobbied to have it happen sooner, winning approval for the fees to be waived immediately if someone completes an approved 10-hour job training program.

When Mayor Duggan announced one training program in April, about 1,500 Detroiters signed up within the first 24 hours, Donofrio said. The job training includes instruction on how to prepare for a job interview, how to put a résumé online and how to manage personal finances. Since the launch, 3,774 people have enrolled and 526 have completed the requirements.

“We’re looking at getting as many people through the door early as possible so they can get their license back and start getting on a better path this summer either to work or to a better job,” he said.

Another victory came when a problem with record keeping at Detroit Public Schools was solved. Some employers, like Henry Ford Health System, had complained that it took weeks or months to verify that a job candidate had earned a DPS diploma because the records were all still kept on paper in a warehouse.

To resolve that backlog, about 500 volunteers from businessman Dan Gilbert’s Quicken Loans have been working thousands of hours to digitize the records.

“It was a common problem that no one was talking about,” Donofrio said. “But you can imagine how many people have graduated from DPS, done everything right, and either they’re getting jobs rescinded or hiring managers who know how difficult it is to get this kind of record are looking at two candidates that are generally equal saying, ‘I’m going to go with the non-Detroiter because I don’t have to deal with this problem.’ ”

And in a third victory, some employers including DTE Energy, have agreed to move "the box" asking applicants about their criminal backgrounds to later in the hiring process instead of on an initial job application. That allows DTE to consider such background in the context of a qualified candidate's total picture, not as a stigma that automatically disqualifies.

"This is a progressive step," Antishin said. "I like to say that being found guilty of a felony shouldn't be a life sentence to unemployment. We are working to have a culture of second chances available to people here at DTE."

At first glance, digitizing DPS records and ending driver responsibility fees may not seem to have much to do with workforce development. But those are the sort of hidden challenges that hold back job growth in the city.

The city also is learning lessons from programs that work in other cities, like the experience at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

The Johns Hopkins story

Johns Hopkins Hospital, nationally recognized for hiring ex-offenders, began several years ago to focus on that population as a way to better engage with its hometown.

It has reported that a five-year study of almost 500 ex-offenders hired at the medical center showed lower turnover compared with general employees. A detailed study of 79 ex-felons hired showed 73 still working for the hospital after several years and just one termination. Ex-felons actually posted better overall job performance than the general run of employees.

To make it work, the hospital designs its programs for ex-felons with special attention to their needs. It screens and interviews carefully, uses internships as trial employment and deploys coaches to help employees overcome obstacles either on or off the job.

Donofrio of Detroit’s workforce office said employers like Sakthi Automotive in Detroit that have taken a chance on citizens returning from prison echo the Johns Hopkins experience.

“They tell us that returning citizens are some of their best employees — most dedicated, have the lowest turnover rate — because they know they may not have other chances,” he said.

Extra coaching on life issues is important for long-term unemployed people because so many of the obstacles to employment in Detroit are found not on the job but at home.

It's the interplay of issues like child care and elder care, disability, lack of transportation, personal debt, housing issues, substance abuse, and other challenges that all contribute to keeping Detroiters on the sidelines instead of in a job.

“This is a huge issue and one that I think is undervalued by folks who talk about workforce frequently,” Varner of Goodwill Industries said. “Let’s be clear — most people want to work. It is the gateway to the independence and dignity that every human aspires to as an adult.”

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.