Unemployment among black youths: a policy dilemma

Abstract

tory in the United States, but they have seldom equipped workers for lifelong advancement in skills, earnings, and occupational mobility. Instead, most of these policies have focused on short term economic goals. Only in periods of low general economic activity marked by rising levels of unemploy ment has the federal government de veloped manpower measures directed toward helping people find work and improve their skills and earnings. For example, during the years of the Great Depression, which caused mass unem ployment, the administration of Presi dent Franklin D. Roosevelt undertook large-scale intervention in the labor market by creating jobs through the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the National Youth Administration—all of which continued into the early years of World War II. And during the early 1960s, when unemployment reached the highest level since World War II, the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson developed new manpower policies to meet the special needs of workers who were displaced by automation. These policies called for the training or re training of workers for new occu pational opportunities. One of the mea sures, the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962, shifted its focus from adult workers to youths because unemployment among the young, espe cially among young members of racial minorities in urban areas, had emerged as a major social issue and because the levels of unemployment among adult workers had begun to decline in 1963. Few contemporary social problems appear as intractable as unemployment among blacks, especially among black youths between the ages of 16 and 24. Some groups of young people have been served through a variety of man power programs instituted under the Manpower Development and Training Act and the 1964 Economic Opportu nity Act and finally brought together under the Comprehensive Employ ment and Training Act (CETA) in 1974. (See Table 1.) Some CETA programs, for example, the Job Corps, have strict Unemployment among black youths: a policy dilemma