Jobs -- City-Funded Jobs for City Residents

The fastest way to get good jobs to city residents is to get them their fair share of city-funded jobs. 

• Update and enforce the Equal Employment Opportunity Program, including re-establishing the Human Rights Commission to monitor enforcement of this and other civil rights laws.
• Expand and enforce the Living Wage Law to cover all workers with city departments and contractors, including beneficiaries of economic development incentives.
• Create Community Hiring Halls that make city job-seekers the first source for qualified new hires on city-funded jobs.
• Create a Community Full Employment Program with the goal of providing a useful, living wage job to every working age person willing and able to work who cannot find private employment. Pending a state or federal full employment program, the city should enact a demonstration program, using what funding is available, to use revenue producing public enterprise, as well as public service jobs, to employ unused resources (labor, physical plant) to satisfy unmet needs (child care, youth recreation, snow removal, smaller school class sizes, replacement of imported consumer goods that can be made locally, recycling and reprocessing waste into raw materials, housing rehabilitation, energy conservation, city parks restoration, and so on). Like the city "work relief" projects of the early Great Depression years that demonstrated the need and feasibility of what became the federal Works Progress Administration, where cities and counties designed public works and public service projects that were 90 percent funded by the federal government, the city should plan such projects now, begin to employ the unemployed to the extent local resources permit, and seek state and federal funding for them.