80 Million Strong Advocates For Jobs At House Hearing

I just returned from the House Education and Labor Committee hearing on youth unemployment. This hearing is the follow-up to the 80 Million Strong National Jobs Summit, which convened 100 young leaders from 30 states to discuss problems and solutions about youth jobs. Since the Summit, youth unemployment and underemployment have risen. In fact, this past summer, typically the best time for young people to find jobs, was the worst on record. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics summer youth unemployment report:

The youth unemployment rate was 18.5 percent in July 2009, the highest July rate on record for the series, which began in 1948. As with the decline in employment, the increase in youth unemployment in the summer of 2009 reflected a weak job market. The July 2009 unemployment rates for young men (19.7 percent), women (17.3 percent), whites (16.4 percent), blacks (31.2 percent), Asians (16.3 percent), and Hispanics (21.7 percent) increased from a year earlier.

Note that unemployment was up for all young people, not just specific demographics. In his opening remarks, Chairman Miller stated that "young people are the hardest hit". Simple and right to the point.

The first witness to testify, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Employment and Training, Jane Oates, said that the stimulus funds sent to states did create jobs and that a detailed report was still being prepared and actual numbers were not yet available. Anecdotally, she's received positive feedback from young people who got jobs through stimulus funds. She noted that in many of the letters she had received from young workers, there were stories of saving money for college or for helping out the family during hard times. If not for the stimulus funds, it's likely that youth unemployment would have been higher and all the negative externalities bundled with it. Representative Bobby Scott quoted a Los Angeles-based community organization's motto that the best way to stop a bullet is with a job.

Another committee member, Representative Marcia Fudge, explained that her first jobs when she was a young person were important to her, equipping her with the experiences and skills that could, and did, carry her forward. With a passion that seemed to make time stop so that we, the audience, could prepare for what she would say next, she talked about pride. The pride of working and contributing to the community in a positive way. That feeling of pride in work knows no generational boundaries. Matt Segal of 80 Million Strong, a witness at the hearing, testified to that fact when he said that the Millennial generation is enthusiastic about young people doing their part, through hard work, to get this country out of recession. He then presented some of our generation's ideas, collected from the 80MS National Jobs Summit.

Yet, one of the big questions that was not answered directly in the hearing is how to deal effectively with the transition of a fourth generation, Millennials, into the workforce. It's almost like there is an elevator so full that others are left to take the stairs, even though they contributed to the construction of said elevator. So, it sounds like we need a bigger elevator, and luckily there's the spirit to make that happen. In his testimony, Segal noted that young people are increasingly interested in public service careers and in such expanding fields as healthcare, cyber security, green jobs and social entrepreneurship.

Much of the hearing focused specifically on low-income youth and youth of color, but 80MS is talking about a broader, much more comprehensive jobs agenda that aims to incorporate our generation's varied talents and skills towards the construction of a 21st century economy. Poverty and racism are problems not unique to today's young people, but the current state of joblessness, debt and lack of opportunity for young people of all backgrounds are specific to our times; right now, we need a solution for a generational workforce problem that threatens to leave America's youth worse off than their parents.