Predatory training programs and DEED’s Positively Minnesota create pipeline to unemployment while alluding to the changing meaning of Shovel Ready Jobs. A shovel ready job doesn’t mean work for unemployed or the under-employed – this is another form of attraction with state and local corporate welfare. (Also read, “The Myth of Shovel Ready Jobs, Again.“)
by Donald W.R. Allen, II – Editor in Chief/The Independent Business News Network
"Sssssss!"
The Center for Responsive Politics reports that President Obama has become the first politician in history to raise $1 billion in his political career.
Imagine how much more he could have raised if people hadn’t lost it all in the Democrats economic plan.
Obama said the stimulus would put nearly 400,000 people back to work rebuilding America. But in the year after the stimulus was passed, the U.S. construction industry shed about 900,000 jobs, or 14 percent of its work force. The industry still hadn’t recovered two-and-a-half years later. The biggest winner in the Stimulus were public school teachers, read: How Stimulus Fails.
With the current state of construction jobs, and the fact about a million opportunities have been lost in that field, I ask you to explain the reasons training and why it’s important to fund “training” for poor communities members in poor communities that data shows probably will never get a sustainable job in the construction field?
It’s also important to crush the myth of what a shovel ready job means. Some think a shovel ready job is a job that can employ the unskilled laborer creating opportunities for the unemployed and the underemployed to obtain meaningful work on construction sites throughout Minnesota.
This is not the case.
Shovel Ready Jobs, as explained by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development on their website, “Positively Minnesota,” explains:
Shovel-ready sites are in growing demand among companies and site selection consultants, and they are an increasingly popular tool for communities to attract new business and industry.
While definitions vary from state to state, the term ‘Shovel-Ready’ generally refers to commercial and industrial sites that:
- Have had all of the planning, zoning, surveys, title work, environmental studies, soils analysis and public infrastructure engineering completed prior to putting the site up for sale.
- Are under the legal control of a community or other third party. (This doesn’t always work out as seen by the TCF Stadium, Target Field and possibly the Vikings Stadium – as it pertains to jobs, if any.)
Nowhere in the DEED explanations does it talk about jobs. So basically, a Shovel Ready Job is not s “shovel ready job,” but an opportunity for businesses to come into a pre-fab opportunity perfect for development.
Here’s another thing. The title reads, “Mayor Rybak: Governor’s Right-Sized Bonding Proposal Will Create Good Jobs,” – Nicollet Mall rebuild will create hundreds of construction jobs and help create thousands more on Minnesota’s Main Street. On January 17, 2012 – Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak praised Governor Mark Dayton’s bonding proposal that will create more than 21,000 desperately-needed jobs in the building and construction trades and will lay the groundwork for thousands more.
Okay, where are the jobs? The challenge presents itself as a system that is not actually about putting people to work, but only spread rhetoric about the possibilities of developer treasure chests.
If “shovel ready jobs,” meant work – or jobs, why is Minnesota’s unemployment numbers for under served communities so high? Why hasn’t the focus on compensated work therapy programs been established? More importantly, why aren’t employers hiring from north Minneapolis? Someone has to ask the questions?
Maybe we can ask the many crews working in north Minneapolis on various projects, with no local or minority representation how did they get the work?
Again, in simple clarity – the “shovel ready job” myth is busted for another time
USA RADICAL BLACK 
Posted on May 28, 2012
0