Our nation’s post-pandemic success hinges on an economic recovery targeting those hit hardest by the recession and overlooked by the pre-pandemic economy: children, youth, and their families, particularly in communities of color.
Before the pandemic, children and young adults had the highest poverty rates of all U.S. age groups — with disproportionately high rates among children and young people of color. Young workers, particularly Black youth, faced extraordinarily high pandemic unemployment rates: Job loss peaked at over 30 percent in May 2020, when most young workers would typically pick up summer jobs. Women, Black and Latinx workers, who are overrepresented in the low-wage workforce, already faced economic insecurity before the pandemic. Forty percent of this workforce was raising children, and nearly a quarter was under age 25.
Unemployment is but one way the pandemic has strained families. Research shows the harm of unemployment can linger, hindering reemployment and career advancement, hampering short- and long-term economic security, and creating other long-term issues for entire families.
Healing requires strategies to turbocharge reemployment and prioritize families and young people most affected. Those strategies must include a permanent large-scale national subsidized employment program, which is included as a component of Biden’s proposed American Jobs Plan, to tackle long-term unemployment and underemployment. Congress and the administration should seize this moment of opportunity, as the president’s American Jobs Plan moves ahead in the legislative process, to go big on an investment in subsidized employment programs targeting the hardest-hit communities.
Subsidized employment (SE) programs create jobs for individuals that have been shut out from work opportunities due to discrimination, disinvestment or economic downturns. Well-designed SE programs connect people to quality jobs, supportive services, educational advancement and career pathways. Subsidized employment is good policy at the individual and national level: it can support families; create opportunity for youth and adults impacted by the criminal justice system; reduce racial and ethnic economic disparities; buoy communities; and build local economies.
We’ve learned three lessons while implementing and advising on subsidized employment:
First, subsidized employment can be implemented at scale and in a range of contexts. While subsidized employment goes back to the New Deal and the Great Depression, it hadn’t been used at a large scale for several decades before the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Subsidized employment proved its value during the Great Recession recovery: red and blue states used the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Emergency Fund to place over 250,000 workers — including young workers, long-term…
Read More: Subsidized jobs: Key to an equitable economic recovery