New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society

7. Making Workers and Jobs

CHAPTER SEVEN Making Workers and Jobs The crying demand from neighborhood people was for jobs. —SWPC Report, December 1968 In the middle and late 1960s, the unemployment rate in the United States was at one of its lowest points in history. Roughly 3.5 percent of Americans were reported to be out of work. In New Orleans that number was only slightly higher at 4.2 percent. For New Orleans’s black neighborhoods, however, the rate hovered near 10 percent, and the underemployment rate in those areas approached 45 percent for men and nearly 70 percent for women.1 Local target-area organizations cited the lack of jobs as the most pressing limitation of residents.2 To combat this serious problem in an otherwise prosperous nation, major parts of the Great Society were focused on improving prospects for black workers. In New Orleans, Great Society job-training programs anchored strategies to improve the employability of low-income residents and to better prepare black citizens to earn citizenship. Throughout the twentieth century, manpower had been a central concern of economic policymakers. During the New Deal, the federal government openly manipulated the labor market. The Fair Labor Standards Act and the Fair Labor Relations Act recast the relationship between employee and employer by providing workers with friendlier rules governing wages and benefits. Those acts continued to regulate employ151 ment in the 1960s. Although they had disappeared by 1943, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and the Public Works Administration were unprecedented New Deal direct-jobs programs that created public jobs primarily to stimulate economic demand and alleviate high unemployment. After World War II, especially under the John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations, the state’s role in manpower changed from assuaging panic and poverty to promoting precision and growth. Although the largest expenditures continued to be benefits to unemployed workers administered for the most part by state governmental agencies, the major focus was on helping trainees integrate themselves into the skilled workplace. Hoping to create full employment and stimulate the economy, Kennedy- and Johnson-era policymakers designed programs to improve productivity and by the later 1960s to maintain urban stability. The first important Kennedy-Johnson era manpower program was the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962 (MDTA). Designed partly to help workers who had been displaced by technology, the MDTA emphasized skills replacement. In Louisiana in 1964, it was headed by State Education Superintendent William Dodd, and it had no black members on its board. The Johnson administration developed the Neighborhood Youth Corps (NYC), the Job Corps, the Concentrated Employment Program (CEP), New Careers, Operation Mainstream, the Work Incentive Program of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC), and Job Opportunities in the Business Sector (JOBS) with the National Alliance of Business. They were neither comprehensive nor unified. The manpower division of OEO labeled MDTA, Neighborhood Youth Corps, New Careers, and state-level employment services as “largely discrete programs” that lacked effective interconnections.3 During the first four years of the Great Society in New Orleans, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the Job Corps (including the Women in Community Service recruitment component), New Careers, and, especially , the CEP were the mainstays. The NYC provided jobs for lowincome high school students and dropouts, while New Careers tried to facilitate access to clerical jobs. The Job Corps brought disadvantaged youth to centralized job-training facilities, which some contemporaries likened 152 War on Poverty to a 1960s version of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Job Corps was one of the most controversial manpower programs, but after addressing some initial discipline problems, it became one of the longest lasting programs of the Great Society. In New Orleans, Job Corps had little initial impact since most of the trainees went to facilities elsewhere. The most important training program in New Orleans was the Concentrated Employment Program. One of twenty-two CEPs nationwide, the local version was an ambitious enterprise with an initial appropriation of $4.6 million out of a total national appropriation of $97.5 million. Through centers to be located in the target areas of Central City, Desire, the Irish Channel, and the Lower Ninth Ward, the CEP was supposed to provide training and placement assistance. According to the OEO, the program drew most of its funds from existing entities in an effort to streamline manpower approaches and to focus resources on target areas...