It seemed like the right move early in the pandemic — retraining thousands of San Antonians who’d been thrown out of work by the COVID-19 downturn, preparing them for higher-skilled, better-paying jobs.
True, those of us without a lot of faith in city government were skeptical. We questioned its ability to pull off such a big, complex initiative.
Our skepticism overlapped with that of people who thought government shouldn’t be engaged in wholesale job training, that it was best left to a network of employers, nonprofits, foundations, high schools, community colleges and universities.
But the loss of about 140,000 jobs in the spring of 2020, a cataclysm the likes of which we’d never seen before, made us swallow our concerns. Mass unemployment has a way of making you rethink what role government should play in the economy.
The early days of Train for Jobs SA, which cost the city $65 million, weren’t encouraging. When the program launched in September 2020, many of the unemployed who wanted in couldn’t get through by phone, and the website kept crashing.
More importantly, after the technical problems were fixed, participants only trickled in. Those who get in work toward GEDs or industry certificates. Some get on-the-job training. And they all receive weekly stipends of $450. Yet by this past November, only 795 people had completed training through the initiative.
Not to harp on this, but let’s take a moment to harp on this: As Mayor Ron Nirenberg called for the creation of Train for Jobs, whose champion was the grassroots community group COPS-Metro, he created a big problem that would haunt the initiative throughout its first year. He set expectations insanely high — 10,000 unemployed workers to be prepared for better jobs in 12 months.
Raising expectations
Not to harp on this, but let’s take a moment to harp on this: In July 2020, as city staffers pieced together Train for Jobs, they said it would train “up to 10,000” people by September 2021; Mayor Ron Nirenberg latched on to the detail and repeated it publicly, creating a big problem that would haunt the effort throughout its first year. Staff and Nirenberg set expectations insanely high — 10,000 unemployed workers to be prepared for better jobs in 12 months! Nobody remembered the “up to” part.
But that’s history. Train for Jobs stopped taking new applicants Dec. 31 as planned, and its training efforts will be over by the end of this year.
Next up is its successor, called Ready to Work, which will be paid for with an estimated $200 million in sales tax revenue over four years. Voters cast 79 percent of their ballots in favor of the funding in November 2020, a stunning result. Nirenberg was the initiative’s biggest champion.
By then, the San Antonio area’s unemployment rate was dropping from a record high of more than 13 percent in April 2020. But it was still an unnerving 6.4 percent. The public mood: Government intervention in the labor market? Bring it.
We’d quickly gotten used to all those extra unemployment payments and Paycheck Protection Program loans for employers, the explicit aim of which was to keep employees on the payroll. In other words, we were more comfortable with government spending for the benefit of workers.
Today, the padded unemployment checks are gone; labor shortages are roiling most industries, forcing employers to increase wages; and San Antonio’s jobless rate fell to 4.1 percent in November.
So it’s fair to ask: Given that we’re past the economic crisis, how much interest will there be in Ready to Work?
Actually, its tea-leaf reading isn’t bad.
For one thing, it turns out Train for Jobs was a late bloomer. Interest surged in its last few months of enrolling participants. Currently, the program counts 4,579 people who are either receiving or have completed training.
Nearly 70 percent of them are women, about 65 percent are Hispanic and 15 percent Black.
Nearer the target
Mike Ramsey, director of the city’s new workforce development department, said as many as 8,000 enrollees could complete the program by the end of this year. Even if that’s overly optimistic, the numbers are edging closer to Nirenberg’s unbalanced target of 10,000.
The city hired Ramsey in August. The Louisiana native, a one-time high school teacher, previously headed the workforce development department at St. Petersburg College in Florida.
He scrupulously avoids the mayor’s unforced error in the expectations game. I asked him how many people he hopes will complete Ready to Work over the next four years. He engaged in a little duck-and-cover, saying, “We’re going to try to train as many as possible.”
His department is currently negotiating with organizations that Ready to Work will rely on for enrollee intake, case management and marketing. He’s looking to take the program plan to City Council in February for approval. If all goes well, Ready to Work will begin taking in participants in April.
The program is more ambitious than its forerunner. Participants can either do on-the-job training, get the equivalency of their high school diploma or pursue associate or bachelor’s degrees. They’ll also receive support services, such as career counseling and job placement help, and referrals for financial help with child care and other necessities.
The aim is to land them in good-paying jobs in health care, information technology, financial services, manufacturing and a handful of other fields.
Last month, the city eased the income requirements for participants. It’ll be open to people earning as much as $32,000 per year, which is 250 percent of the poverty line. That’s up from an earnings cap of no more than $26,000. So it will offer longer-term training and education for more people.
S.A.’s low-wage trap
Which gets at the real difference between Train for Jobs and Ready to Work: The crisis the latter is addressing isn’t the incineration of more than 100,000 jobs in a matter of weeks. It’s going after the deeper, slower-burning crisis of generational poverty.
San Antonio has been one of the poorest big cities in the U.S. for a long, long time. Nearly 18 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to the census. Too many workers were struggling to pay their bills way before COVID-19 showed up. The pandemic just exposed that reality for all to see.
As thousands upon thousands of hotel, restaurant and bar workers lost jobs, no one could ignore how dependent San Antonio was on its leisure and hospitality industry to keep a huge slice of population working. Many of these jobs are lower-paying and don’t require a lot of education or special skills.
The industry remains one of the city’s biggest, employing 131,500 people as of November, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s clawing back from the disaster nearly two years ago, its workforce increasing 17 percent from November 2020 to this past November.
Ready to Work could offer one way out of the low-wage trap many workers are in.
The pool of potential applicants who meet the program’s income requirements is big.
Ramsey gets the last word here.
“I think there’s still a lot of people who need help,” he said. “There are people who may not be unemployed, but there’s a whole lot of underemployed people here.
“As more and more good jobs become available, jobs that pay a living wage and have great benefits — that are attractive to these workers who want economic mobility — I believe they’re going to see the program as a great steppingstone to help them get there.”
greg.jefferson@express-news.net
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