FROM BAD to WORSE

December 5, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

For poorly educated, recovery from recession may be out of reach

McClatchy Newspapers

KANSAS CITY, Mo.

Among the sons and daughters of the suburbs and the country-club set, the recession turned good times to bad.

Their less-accomplished peers, who didn’t make it through college or who never even made it to campus, have seen dismal prospects go from bad to awful.

These are the workers for whom the misery of the recession comes in torrents.

In better times “they’d get the worst jobs,” said John Hornbeck of Episcopal Community Services in Kansas City. “Now the barrier is just a flat-out lack of jobs, period.”

Certainly millions of the young and lightly educated find ways to make a living at the menial end of the job market. But the struggles of those who can’t get work pose an extra burden for the rest of us — in the form of fewer people paying taxes, more needing government handouts and, perhaps, a threat of growing crime.

“These people run through their unemployment. ... Then some of them get into legal trouble,” said Christopher Jencks, who studies poverty issues at Harvard University. “Some end up stealing stuff, overdose on drugs. All kinds of bad stuff.”

At the bottom of the recession in 2009, unemployment swelled to about 10 percent. But for blue-collar folks, the rate was closer to 17 percent.

For a less-definable class of young people who merely aspire to blue-collar work, the buzz-kill economy looks especially bleak.

This group lacks both formal training and the so-called soft skills — things like the ability to look a boss in the eye or the understanding that they should show up at 8:50 for a job that starts at 9 a.m., not 9ish.

They make up a disproportionate number of the 6.8 million Americans who aren’t just unemployed but who have been on the hunt for work for a year or longer. The previous high for the long-term unemployed, since the number was first tracked in 1948, was 3 million during the dreary days of the early 1980s.

“The old manufacturing economy honed physical skills such as lifting and manual dexterity,” wrote Richard Florida in “The Great Reset.”

“But two sets of skills matter more now: analytical skills ... and social intelligence skills.”

The long-term jobless rate ignores those who’ve taken unending job rejections as a sign to simply stop asking.

“We hear, ‘They just need to pick themselves up and get a job,’” said Dennis Chapman, the development director at City Union Mission in Kansas City. “That’s easier said than done.”

One study in Missouri found that each high school dropout costs the state $4,000 a year in lost taxes and higher Medicaid and prison costs. Another estimated that the U.S. economy would miss out on $335 billion in lifetime earnings compared with what it would reap had the high school dropouts of 2009 earned their diplomas.

Jencks, the Harvard poverty scholar, is quick to point out that experts have yet to find a consensus on whether rising joblessness cranks up crime rates. For the most accurately tracked crimes like murder, the correlation is weak. Lesser crimes are tracked less closely, but as Jencks observes, “If you look at people in trouble with the law, an awful lot of them are out of work.”

More critically, Jencks said, is that those at the bottom rungs in an extended recession may be so cut off from a work-a-day existence that they won’t bounce back even when the job market turns around.

Statistics show they tend to delay marriage but not children. So this downturn might amp up the number of single moms who, on average, are more likely to lean on their families and the government to make the rent and stock the pantry.

At a key time in their lives, these would-be workers aren’t developing work habits. And they’re not making the connections to the mainstream of society they’ll need to achieve independence. They risk, Jencks said, slipping into a permanent situation that doesn’t fit with any American sense of success.

“After having been rejected 25 times, it gets hard to make the 26th call,” he said. “They’re the people who would have got factory jobs years ago. But they may be in danger of falling out of touch with the rest of us.”

Schakia Odums was always a decent student, pulling down mostly B’s.

As she neared graduation from Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts in Kansas City, Mo., in spring 2009, she pictured herself going to college, hoping to secure an accounting degree from Grambling State University or the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

But her family couldn’t get the money together. Her efforts at nailing down a scholarship — her 16 on the ACT would make acceptance to many colleges iffy — produced nothing.

So she went to Louisiana, where she’d spent her grade-school years, to live with her father and work for several months carting food orders to cars at a Sonic franchise.

Then she returned to Kansas City to be with her mother and spent four months working at a KFC restaurant. But she felt as if she was being asked to do too many things and left.

She launched a frustrating search for some other way to make a living in telemarketing or “customer service.” She was told again and again she didn’t have experience.

So in September, she went to see a military recruiter. Now she’s excited about joining the Army and about the promise it offers her of training as a dental hygienist.

The idea of combat “doesn’t bother me as much as it might bother someone else. ... Anything that takes my mind off things will be good.”

The demand for workers with minimal education and skills has been steadily dropping at least since the 1970s, as the U.S. economy has slowly shed its manufacturing jobs.

“It used to be that the high school degree was your ticket to a manual job, a semiskilled job that paid really well and bought you and your dependents a middle-class existence,” said Joel Devine, a Tulane University sociologist. “Not anymore.”

In a good economy, said career marketplace director Benita Ugoline at the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, “people with spotty work histories or little education and little skill development” work for janitorial services, hotel housekeeping, temporary security jobs.

But she said even those jobs will stay beyond the reach of people who are shut out of the job market now if they can’t improve themselves.

The jobless rate for people without high school diplomas or their equivalent is 50 percent higher than those with diplomas, three times that of college graduates. For blacks without high school diplomas, one in five couldn’t find any work last year.

If you don’t have a general-equivalency diploma, Ugoline said, you’ll be ignored by employers now and for years to come.

It’s not just the certificate but the skills it represents. Somebody who can’t get online, can’t submit an electronic r sum that was put together and stored on a memory stick — is just too far behind.

And if this recession leaves a young man or woman with a big gap in work history, that will last into a rebounded economy. She says people need to get that GED, or vocational training, both to boost their skills and to show employers they didn’t just let the years pass without accomplishing anything.