The staggering problem of chronic unemployment among minority men was starkly presented in a report from the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It found that in Los Angeles and New York City about 30 percent of 20- to 24-year-old black men were out of work and out of school in 2014. The situation is even more extreme in Chicago, where nearly half of black men in this age group were neither working nor in school; the rate was 20 percent for Hispanic men and 10 percent for white men in the same age group.  In Chicago, as elsewhere, the crisis of permanent joblessness is concentrated in minority neighborhoods where it feeds street violence, despondency, health problems and a socially corrosive brand of hopelessness among the young. The problem extracts a heavy social cost in those neighborhoods and threatens the viability of entire cities.  The outrage is that there are strategies, which Congress has rejected, that could help rescue a generation of young men from failure and oblivion. Among these is the employment subsidy program that was passed as part of the Recovery Act in 2009. It created more than 260,000 temporary jobs for young people and adults. Governors and employers were ecstatic. But Republicans in Congress denounced the program as useless a year later and blocked proposals that would have extended it.  With that rejection, the country missed a crucial opportunity. The Economic Mobility Corporation, a nonprofit organization, released an analysis in 2013 that looked at the program’s outcomes in California, Florida, Mississippi and Wisconsin. By subsidizing the hiring of temporary employees, the federal government lowered labor costs and kept some employers afloat through the recession. The program made a measurable difference in the lives of workers, 37 percent of whom performed so well that they were hired permanently after the subsidy period ended.  These promising results suggest that carefully targeted subsidies that place unemployed people into private-sector jobs can be a potent tool in reducing the devastating unemployment in minority areas of big cities where young people are disconnected from work and civic life.  Subsidized work programs have been used to create temporary jobs as far back as the 1930s. The programs typically placed most workers in public jobs that did not involve any connection to the private sector. In the 2009 program, however, a majority of the participants in the four states studied were placed with private businesses.  The program, used in 39 states and the District of Columbia, varied in structure and eligibility requirements but generally sought to give unemployed people real work experience. The study found that subsidized work programs can set people up to earn more money later in unsubsidized employment, perhaps because they give people an actual work credential. Strong evidence of this was found in Florida, where people in the program experienced an average increase of $4,000 in pay from the year before the program to the year after — as compared with an average $1,500 increase for workers in a comparison group who were not in the program.  The program also improved the unsubsidized earnings of two groups that would ordinarily have difficulty getting a foot in the door: the long-term unemployed and people with criminal records. These findings make a strong case that subsidized jobs are an effective way of helping the long-term unemployed re-enter the labor force and helping businesses find good, motivated workers.  Other researchers are eager to see if these findings are replicated in additional studies. But carefully developed subsidy programs are worth pursuing even if they do not produce big earnings gains. Getting jobless young people into the world of work is valuable in itself. Work reduces alienation, gives people a stake in society and allows children in poor communities to absorb the ethic they need to be successful.  If Congress fails to take on this crisis, as it has failed on so many issues, the states should step up and invest in subsidized work programs, especially in minority communities suffering from employment levels not seen since the Great Depression.
A subsidy program that Congress let expire is just the kind of thoughtful measure needed to help combat the devastating joblessness in minority areas.