Getting Stuck In Entry Level Jobs

A two-year study of fastfood-restaurant employees has found that young people from the inner city benefit substantially from the work, despite the low wages. But there usually is no “next tier” of employment to which they can climb, with the skills they have learned in the restaurants.

This absence of employment at the next step up, according to two professors of anthropology who conducted the study, makes it extremely difficult for the inner-city youngsters, who are not well-educated, to work their way out of poverty.

“The kids have mixed feelings,” said Professor Katherine Newman of Columbia University, who studied workers in Harlem. “They feel that if they work hard at this it will lead somewhere. But their experience is that it doesn’t.”

The point of the study was to look closely at the lives of the working poor at a time when much of the attention of government and the media is focused on poor people who are not working.

Professor Newman and her colleague, Professor Carol Stack of the University of California at Berkeley, who studied workers in Oakland, said the fast-food workers were representative of the majority of the urban poor - men and women who are working at jobs that even on a full-time basis do not pay enough to adequately support a family.

What they found is that the competition for even minimum-wage jobs is intense. At the restaurants studied in Harlem, 14 applicants are turned away for every person who is hired.

In contrast to the persistent canard that poor people do not want to work, professors Newman and Stack have shown that people are fighting for jobs that, full time, pay only $8,840 a year.

Most of the 400 workers studied were in their 20s. Most were members of families that would have trouble remaining intact without the workers’ financial contributions. Many belonged to families in which there were serious and sometimes disabling illnesses. Many had endured the premature death of close relatives.

The professors found that the fast-food jobs for these young people were helpful on a number of fronts. They provided a meager but crucial income. They imposed an additional level of structure and order on their lives. And they gave them the sense of dignity and accomplishment and independence that usually results from being employed.

The workers may not be thrilled about putting on hamburger uniforms and toiling at jobs disdained by many, but they know they are doing better than those who are without work, and they nurture the slender hope that more rewarding days are ahead.

The rest of the picture is bleak. Despite their training and experience in such areas as food preparation, inventory control and customer relations, there is no demand for the services of inner-city youngsters who are too often seen merely as hamburger flippers.

And because the job market in general is so tight, the younger workers are facing heightened competition for the fast-food jobs from older, better-educated men and women who once held better jobs.

“In Oakland,” said Stack, “many of the young people are actually competing for the same jobs with elders in their own families.”

When Newman tracked job applicants who were not hired by the Harlem restaurants, she found that a year later 73 percent still had not found work.

The study by professors Newman and Stack was supported by a number of organizations, including the Russell Sage, Rockefeller and Ford foundations. A final report will be completed next spring.

Despite the obvious need for increased employment opportunities in the inner city, both researchers said in interviews this week that they expected the problem to get substantially worse. Government and the health-care industry, which have traditionally provided work for inner-city residents, are shedding workers and are likely to shed many more.

At the same time the welfare policy trend is to push as many recipients onto the job market as possible, whether there are jobs available for them or not.

If this generation is the first to get stuck at the entry level, said Stack, the next may be the first that is unable to “get its foot in the door at all.”

xxxx