‘When we line up behind issues they’re going to get over the finish line’: City Council Progressive Caucus Co-Chairs on Priorities and Positioning
Lincoln Restler & Shahana Hanif (photos: John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit)
The newly-seated 51-member New York City Council has a particularly large progressive wing, with a whopping 34 members, including Speaker Adrienne Adams, signing up for the Progressive Caucus. That caucus, which seeks to pull the Council leftward and is already acting as a counterweight to a more moderate mayor, especially on policing issues, is led by co-chairs Shahana Hanif and Lincoln Restler, two Brooklyn Democrats selected by their fellow caucus members.
Last month, the two joined Gotham Gazette executive editor Ben Max to discuss the role of the Progressive Caucus, its membership and priorities and relationship with Mayor Eric Adams, as well as their individual perspectives on several key issues facing the city.
Appearing on the Max Politics podcast, Hanif and Restler explained how they are thinking about their roles as co-chairs of the caucus, discussed what it means to the have the powerful Council speaker as a caucus member, touched on housing policy, and much more.
“I want to uplift the campaign I ran to get here,” said Hanif, who represents the 39th District in Brooklyn, of being co-chair of the Progressive Caucus. Her district covers the neighborhoods of Park Slope, Borough Park, Kensington, Windsor Terrace, Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, and Cobble Hill. It’s important, she said, to make reality the anti-racist, feminist New York City she spoke of on the campaign trail, and to build power as a collective for working families.
Restler, who represents the neighboring 33rd District in Brooklyn covering Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Downtown Brooklyn, Dumbo, Fulton Ferry, Greenpoint, Vinegar Hill, and Williamsburg, said it’s an exciting opportunity to use progressive momentum in order to enact real change. “There’s real energy on the left,” he said, “I’m hoping that the Progressive Caucus can be a place to really take that energy and convert it into effective policy wins.”
Hanif and Restler said that the caucus is still establishing its policy agenda, but that housing and homelessness are clearly at the top of the agenda. The caucus will be making more noise as city budget negotiations intensify before the mayor and Council must pass a new budget before the July 1 start of next fiscal year.
The Progressive Caucus, including vice chairs Jennifer Gutierrez and Carmen De La Rosa, is exceptionally large, but Hanif and Restler do not see this as a challenge. “The size of the caucus is our strength, it is our power,” Hanif said, mentioning it had already united to oppose Mayor Adams’ homeless encampment sweeps.
Restler noted that the size of the Progressive Caucus and speaker’s membership are not new dynamics given the make-up under both Speaker Corey Johnson and Melissa Mark-Viverito, Speaker Adrienne Adams’ two most recent predecessors. The real opportunity, he said, was to have such a vibrant and diverse caucus to effectively synthesize an agenda and set priorities. “When we line up behind issues they’re going to get over the finish line,” he said, reiterating that there’s power in numbers.
When asked, neither Restler nor Hanif expressed concern about the size of the caucus diluting its platform and approach, saying instead they plan to release a “sharply and stridently progressive agenda,” and hope caucus members will enthusiastically line up to support it.
So what might that agenda include? Hanif said Gutierrez, another Brooklyn Democrat, is heading up the caucus’s policy working group. Atop the priorities, though, is addressing homelessness and affordable housing – particularly amid the mayor’s encampment sweeps, but also given the city’s longstanding housing and homelessness crisis. [Listen to the podcast here.]
Funding for the Department of Sanitation is also a priority in order to ensure there are equitable and adequate services across the city on a top quality of life issue, Restler and Hanif noted, highlighting an issue that has galvanized much of the Council in the early months of this new class. There are also plans to target maternal mortality, Hanif said, sharing excitement to work with Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, a former City Council Progressive Caucus member, who has made the issue a top priority. Reynoso has already made announcements related to making maternal care, especially for Black mothers who have much higher rates of maternal mortality, much more accessible.
“We’ve got a critical list of items that we’re going to put out to the speaker and very publicly,” Hanif said, “One of the things that we want to do differently is make the caucus much more transparent, not just for our membership but also to those watching New York City in this moment.”
Restler doubled down on the need to make housing a priority and said that all caucus members when surveyed agreed this needed to remain at the top of the list. “The affordability crisis that we’ve all been struggling with in New York City for decades is getting worse every year and especially for those who are most vulnerable,” he said.
Asked about legislation introduced in the last Council class but that never made it over the finish line and may be a priority for either of them or the Progressive Caucus writ large, Restler said he hopes to put real backing behind universal access to counsel in housing court.
“We believe deeply in universal access to counsel and the best way to prevent evictions is to ensure that a New Yorker has a lawyer representing them in housing court,” he said, pointing to an income threshold that he and others believe leaves too many unable to access a city-funded attorney when facing eviction.
Hanif stressed the importance of securing funding for outreach in implementing the new “Our City Our Vote” law that now allows hundreds of thousands of non-citizen legal residents to vote in municipal elections. Hanif, who chairs the Council’s immigration committee, and others are calling for $25 million in funding in the next city budget to ensure New Yorkers are aware of their right to participate and encouraged to register to vote under the law.
Assessing the mayor’s preliminary budget (he has since released his executive budget update) and the full City Council’s response, Hanif and Restler said they applaud the push to open more safe havens, stabilization beds, and drop-in centers for people experiencing homelessness.
Restler also noted the $4 billion the Council and advocates want to see added to the city’s capital budget for affordable housing. “It’s mind-boggling that we saw such dramatic cuts to the Department of Homeless Services and to HPD, our housing agency, at a time when the affordability crisis is at the forefront of all of our minds,” Restler said, in reference to Mayor Adams’ preliminary budget, later adding, “I really do hope that mayor Adams is going to see that supportive housing is the priority that he should focus on. He says he’s all about making government work. Our supportive housing system is not working well.”
Housing is often a particularly complicated and fraught area for New York City Council members, even those who claim to be boldly progressive, given tensions around development, affordability, gentrification, displacement, NIMBYism, and other forces, to differing degrees, across the city’s various neighborhoods and Council districts.
Hanif said the tensions between those forces is a real concern, and that she keeps it in mind during meetings with developers. The real estate industry-driven system is not working though, she said, explaining that her office is attempting to be thoughtful about outlining a vision for deeper affordability, greener infrastructure, preservation and retention of manufacturing zones, and more housing for homeless populations and domestic violence survivors. “We want dignified housing for every single New Yorker,” she said, while sounding cautious notes about development.
Restler discussed the need for more housing in the city and said his district has outpaced every other in New York in growth in the past decade. Through the city’s upzonings, however, he said he feels the district effectively handed over “gobs of money to developers to build large amounts of dense market-rate housing and didn’t get much in return." It’s not that a lot of growth is a bad thing, he said, referencing the transportation hubs in his district that make it make sense for more housing. But, he said, development should come with infrastructure – parks and schools, etc — and truly affordable housing.
“We need to ensure that when development is happening we’re actually getting the affordable housing we so badly need,” Restler said. “We cannot be NIMBY elected officials. We need to stand up and lead and welcome the most vulnerable among us into our community as neighbors.”
Hanif agreed, and said she has been a long-time proponent of “good cause” eviction, and the need to protect tenants not only from predatory management practices, but also from fires and other risks that make housing unsafe.
Toward the end of the conversation, the Progressive Caucus co-chairs were asked about the Rikers Island jail complex and whether they believe the caucus will remain behind the plan to close the Rikers jails and open four new borough-based jails.
“Rikers is a dumpster fire, it’s a hell-hole, the conditions there are totally inhumane,” said Restler, who doubled down on the need to close the Rikers jails and shrink the jail population, especially those being held before trial. He also referenced the Brooklyn Detention Center, which is in his district and slated to be torn down and replaced by one of the new more modern jails.
Restler said he’s invested in more therapeutic capacity in the hospital system for people being held pretrial who need psychiatric services, as well as supervised release, more supportive housing, and an increase in case processing speed. “Going back to 1991 we have almost 30 years leading up to the pandemic of reductions in the number of crimes that were committed in New York City and reductions in the number of people who were incarcerated,” he said, arguing that a post-pandemic return to those patterns is possible and essential.
Hanif, who visited Rikers with a number of other City Council members and called the conditions “traumatizing,” also reaffirmed her commitment, which she said she campaigned on, to push for the closing of the jails.
As for another campaign promise to push for divestment from the police, Hanif said right now, “The appetite of the caucus is on mental health services, and robust mental health services.”
And while the City Council is one of, if not the, most progressive to date, the office of mayor took a different turn, with a more moderate chief executive. Though as Max noted and Restler agreed, Mayor Adams is a complicated political figure who doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into an ideological box, he certainly appears overall as more of a centrist, particularly on policing. Asked if the Progressive Caucus will see its role as a counterweight to Adams, Restler said, “I’m hoping that we can identify areas of common ground.” Those areas? Food justice and transportation issues to start, he said.
“The caucus’ role is to be an accountability machine to the mayor,” Hanif said. “That’s what I signed up for.”
[LISTEN to the full conversation: Max Politics Podcast: City Council Progressive Caucus Co-Chairs Shahana Hanif & Lincoln Restler]
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by Anna Kaufman
@GothamGazette
How Trash Became a Top-of-the-Heap City Budget Issue
Council Member Chi Ossé on a sanitation tour of his district (photo: John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit)
Trash has become among the most prominent issues in this year’s New York City budget negotiations, as well as the focus of larger policy debates about how the city handles its garbage and recycling.
The infamous mountains of black bags that clutter sidewalks, the overflowing waste baskets at street corners, and the litter on city streets have all been the subject of significant attention from Mayor Eric Adams, Comptroller Brad Lander, and many members of the New York City Council, including several newly-elected representatives who have taken action in their first months on the job to improve sanitation services in their districts.
The issues are an indicator of quality of life in the city and its recovery from the pandemic. They’re a matter of equity and environmental justice, health and safety. And they are a crucial front in the fight against the climate crisis.
But thus far, the new mayor and City Council have offered somewhat different visions for funding the Department of Sanitation and on related policy-making, though negotiations are ongoing ahead of the June 30 deadline for a new city budget.
In 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio made a pledge that the city would send zero residential waste to landfills by 2030. But the city has made virtually no progress on achieving that goal. De Blasio made significant but limited efforts to fix the city’s trash system. During his tenure, the city passed a waste equity law to limit the amount of waste handled by waste transfer facilities in certain overburdened communities. The city also established commercial waste zones to reduce the number of garbage trucks crisscrossing the city, which promises to cut air pollution and create a more efficient pickup system — but implementation on the waste zones and other measures has been slow or non-existent.
For example, the limited containerization pilot program was originally announced two years ago. The commercial waste zones have yet to be implemented. The city’s composting program stalled and even regular recycling has not improved – the city’s recycling diversion rate is only about 17%. De Blasio then exacerbated conditions during the pandemic by making a $106 million cut to the Department of Sanitation that led to 400 fewer sanitation workers and 464 fewer weekly corner basket pickups.
At the time, de Blasio’s moves helped prompt the resignation of his longtime crisis fixer and sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, who then ran in the Democratic primary for mayor and came in second. “This budget crisis is incredibly severe but I am disappointed to see so much of the work we have done over the last six years being walked back,” Garcia wrote in her resignation letter. “If, as is often said, budgets are a statement of values, my values require me to resign in the face of these cuts, which will harm New Yorkers.”
De Blasio did eventually restore some of the funding he cut and Mayor Adams has also added funding for the sanitation department, which has a proposed expense budget of more than $1.8 billion for next fiscal year. In April, the mayor announced $11 million in funding for street cleanings and, as of July 5, full restoration of alternate side parking, which had been curtailed by de Blasio during the pandemic (while that restoration will help with street cleanliness it raises other environmental questions given the increased car movement it requires).
Adams also launched the $1.3 million “Clean Curbs” trash containerization pilot program in Times Square, which de Blasio had put in motion, and expanded it to all five boroughs with the expressed intention of scaling it further. He also allocated $17.9 million in his executive budget towards an expansion of the city’s curbside organics collection program. That program, key to a widespread city adoption of composting, is among the most pivotal trash-related debates ongoing in the city, with tie-ins to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual city spending to haul waste outside the five boroughs, efforts to combat climate change, creation of green jobs, and more.
For Adams and many City Council members, trash is being seen more as the multifaceted problem it is, from how it affects local constituents to how it impacts the planet. Adams and other officials have also repeatedly emphasized that a clean city is instrumental to the city’s economic recovery, in restoring the city’s attraction to businesses, commuters, and tourists. “Clean streets are vital to our neighborhoods, to ensure the vitality exists in our city,” the mayor said at the Clean Curbs announcement.
“Cleaner streets of course mean safe streets for pedestrians, shoppers, tourists, everyday New Yorkers, and it means a better commercial environment from our small business owners throughout the five boroughs,” said Deputy Mayor for Economic and Workforce Development Maria Torres-Springer at the announcement.
Though the mayor’s latest budget proposal increased the sanitation department’s budget by about $50 million over his February preliminary budget plan, it still reflects a $10 million cut from the budget that was adopted last year.
“New Yorkers have been, really over the last few years just seeing an explosion of litter, growth in rat sightings and incidents…A lot of this has to do with the cuts that were made to sanitation during the onset of the pandemic, and now again, we're facing cuts,” said Brooklyn Council Member Sandy Nurse, chair of the Council’s Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management, after a rally on the steps of City Hall last week where Nurse and her colleagues announced a package of zero waste legislation.
The package includes the Community Organics and Recycling Empowerment (CORE) Act, two bills introduced by Manhattan Council Member Keith Powers that would require easily accessible drop-off sites for organics in all community districts and allow for the collection of recyclable materials like electronics, textiles, and other materials which cannot be disposed of into the general waste stream. Another bill, from Nurse, would require the sanitation department to report on the city’s progress toward sending zero waste to landfills and mandate that the administration meet the zero waste goal for 2030. And finally, a bill introduced by Brooklyn Council Member Shahana Hanif would mandate universal residential composting by the end of 2023 for almost every building in the city.
Comptroller Lander also joined the Council members at the rally to urge support for the bills. As Lander noted, the city will spend well more than $100 million to export organics waste to landfills, out of a total $448 million budget for waste export in the current fiscal year.
“I don't know what more is like being that frog that stays in the pot while the water gets hotter and hotter and hotter,” he said at the rally. “To say that we can't afford to set up the system of universal composting, when we know it would save us that $100 million instead of shipping it into landfills, we can stay stuck in the past and we will fail to rise to the climate crisis.”
Organic waste that isn’t collected for composting ends up decomposing in landfills and emitting methane, a greenhouse gas that is about 25 times more potent as carbon dioxide in warming the globe. Composting, on the other hand, improves carbon sequestration in soil, prevents methane emissions and produces nutrient rich soil for fertilizer in the process.
On May 3, Lander also kicked off a month-long series of in-person and virtual town halls focused on sanitation and the city’s property tax system, along with an online survey on sanitation services.
For the Council, the focus is on both legislation and funding. Nurse and her colleagues have been calling on the mayor to increase the sanitation department’s budget with several specific demands, including a $22 million allocation to increase corner basket pick-ups.
Though Nurse did praise the mayor for heeding some of those calls, she insisted that there’s more work to be done. “I would say that there have been good steps,” she said. “I think we have a little more negotiating to do to get to the place where this Council feels that we're actually putting the resources behind the messaging that clean streets is a priority for covid recovery.”
In March, Nurse rallied outside Brooklyn Borough Hall with several elected officials including Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, Comptroller Brad Lander, State Senator Brad Hoylman, and Council Members Bottcher, Chi Ossé, Julie Menin, and Alexa Avilés, calling on the mayor to “Get Sanitation Done,” a play on Adams’ “Get Stuff Done” mantra. The officials advocated for a full restoration of the sanitation department budget and pushed back against cuts to the organic waste collection program, demands that were reflected in the Council’s official preliminary budget response and later in the mayor’s executive budget.
In the NYC Speaks survey of roughly 43,500 New Yorkers, conducted by HR&A Advisors in partnership with Adams administration, when asked about infrastructure investments to improve their neighborhoods, better sidewalk and street conditions (10,594) and trash collection (9,509) were among the top answers.
Data from 311, the city’s helpline, bears out people’s concerns about trash. In 2020, there were 76,742 calls made related to the sanitation department. That number leapt to 202,943 in 2021, and has already reached 77,383 this year so far.
“It's important to bringing people back to the office, to bringing tourists back to the city, and psychologically, I think it's an important issue for restoration of confidence in local government and in the general quality of life in the city,” said Kathy Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a business group, in an interview.
“Trash is one of the issues that intersects with people's day-to-day lives,” said Council Member Erik Bottcher of Manhattan, after last week’s City Hall rally. “They see it on the corner, on the sidewalk, and they're tired of living this way. In the budget, we have an opportunity to address those concerns.”
Bottcher is one of the new Council members who came into office with a significant focus on sanitation issues. In his first month in office, he released a detailed sanitation plan for the entire borough and with sweeping citywide proposals as well including universal organic waste collection, containerization, piloting pneumatic tube technology, and sanitation “Strike teams” to respond to 311 calls in real time, among other ideas. And he was among the officials celebrating the containerization pilot launch with Adams in Times Square, which is partially in his district.
More than just an unsightly problem, the city’s trash is a major environmental issue. Loose litter clogs storm drains and leads to flooding. The waste that doesn’t get recycled must be trucked out of the city to landfills. And there’s the added greenhouse gas emissions from the lack of organics recycling.
“As a New Yorker, as an individual, the amount of trash on the streets really upsets me,” said Bottcher. “As an environmentalist, it enrages me, because we are slouching towards an environmental disaster and we're moving way too slow to address it.”
“When people talk about why they don't want to come back to New York City, trash is one of the first things they mention. So why are we cutting the sanitation budget? It doesn't make sense,” he added.
During the pandemic, the other boroughs saw an increase in trash production compared to Manhattan, where residents were more likely to have left the city and business districts remained largely empty as many people worked from home.
“This is one of the unifying issues that New Yorkers feel deeply about and care deeply about,” said Council Member Hanif, after the rally, “whether it's like literally picking up the black bags, from our sidewalks to rat mitigation to adding more litter baskets.”
The piles of bags on the sidewalks, at times falling into the streets, have long been the focus of people who decry not only their unsightliness and smelliness, but their contributions to the city’s rat problem, as well as their impediments to pedestrians, especially those with impairments, strollers, or other mobility circumstances. Calls for containerization, as is often seen in European cities, largely fell on deaf ears until de Blasio eventually offered a small pilot program largely reliant on private actors like business associations. While that program has been broadly praised, there are challenges to scaling it at a citywide level.
“It's not a one-size-fits-all, that's for sure, and it never is in New York City,” said Council Member Nurse, in an interview on the Max Politics podcast in February, during a wide-ranging interview on her perspective as sanitation committee chair. “[C]ontainerized waste I think would make our streets safer, more aesthetically pleasing. I think it will encourage better behavior. And I think it will make collections and servicing more efficient. So as a concept, I think it's the right direction. The way it gets brought down to the ground, I think is challenging,” she said. But Nurse said putting trash into containers is a key part of the future of how New York City must modernize its approach to garbage, recycling, public space, and more.
As Hanif noted, districts in Queens and Brooklyn that were disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and saw some of the worst health outcomes are also the districts that have historically been burdened by environmental injustices. Those districts tend to host polluting infrastructure like waste transfer stations and are also the last to be considered for programs such as the composting initiative.
Hanif introduced the bill last week that would create a universal composting program, something that she said is desperately needed if the city wants to meet its zero waste goals. “I think the delay in making this real continues to put us in investing in landfills and incinerators and that continues to push us back from achieving real environmental justice in the city,” she said.
[LISTEN: Max Politics Podcast: The Future of NYC Trash, with City Council Sanitation Chair Sandy Nurse]
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Employers Reconsider College Degree Requirements in Post-Pandemic Economic Recovery
Opening for business (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photography Office)
The pandemic has produced both soaring unemployment in New York City and a host of booming industries hungry for employees. Business leaders and the young administration of Mayor Eric Adams, alike, are looking to spend significant resources to connect candidates to jobs in traditional and emerging sectors. But executives are beginning to see one long-time driver of economic inequality as a particular barrier to tapping New York's 250,000-strong unemployed workforce: the college degree requirement.
Mayor Adams, a Democrat, has made workforce development a central component of his effort to steer the city out of the economic crisis, create upward mobility, and empower communities of color often left behind. While employment in the city has improved since the worst days of the pandemic shutdown in 2020, it still lags behind the state and national rates. Core industries like tourism, food service, and in-person retail have been hit hard while a number of burgeoning sectors – like tech, life sciences, and renewable energy – have seen runaway growth.
"A major goal of the mayor's…is to make sure that we are in fact connecting New Yorkers to quality jobs and to the types of skills training and opportunities that are needed," said Maria Torres-Springer, the deputy mayor for economic and workforce development, at a recent public talk.
"They've always been needed but, given what we're facing post-pandemic, are extremely urgent," she added. Her remarks followed an expert panel Wednesday focused on employers' role in workforce development, hosted by Accenture, Google, and the Center for an Urban Future at Accenture's midtown offices.
A four-year college degree is a near-ubiquitous requirement for moderate- and high-pay jobs. While a number of workforce training and career pathway models focus on underrepresented communities, only 20% of Hispanic New Yorkers and 27% of Black New Yorkers ages 25-64 have a bachelor's degree, largely barring them en masse from entry into good jobs – even after receiving training. That's compared with 45% of Asian residents and 64% of white residents.
The degree screen has contributed to workforce inequality across sectors for decades. According to a new report from Center for an Urban Future, a research and advocacy group focused on economic mobility, while 22% of the city's workforce in 2020 was Black, Black people made up less than 10% of employees in the securities, advertising, publishing, and tech industries.
"You can have all the competence and skills and…just never get hired," said Jukay Hsu, founder and CEO of Pursuit, a tech-skills training provider, during the panel.
Before taking office, Adams added "workforce development" to the deputy mayor's title to emphasize its centrality in his agenda, and in economic development more broadly. In the economic recovery "blueprint" spearheaded by Torres-Springer and released in March, the administration set goals to align public and private workforce development programs, invest in collateral support services, K-12 and higher education, adult education, digital literacy, and worker protections. While much of the plan reflects campaign promises – like developing CUNY-employer career pipelines, and a one-stop-shop jobs and training portal – though many of the details around implementation have yet to come.
For example, in his executive budget released toward the end of April, Adams included $33 million for the Department of Education "to launch new career pathways programs starting this September focused on high-growth sectors like health care and technology." How that money will ultimately be spent, if approved by the City Council, remains to be seen.
But building up the city's talent base does not, on its own, address long-standing discrimination against women and people of color in the workplace.
"If [we] focus just on the skills gap, what we all I believe fail to fully recognize is that there is a historic intergenerational set of barriers that are faced by New Yorkers, people of color in particular, older people, people with disabilities, the justice involved, just to name a few," said Torres-Springer.
The administration's approach to workforce development, while still nascent, is focused on building partnerships with employers and job trainers in growing sectors, and connecting career pathways to real estate-based economic development projects.
That means making "the types of connections that are needed so that New Yorkers, our young people, CUNY graduates, adults, can benefit from the jobs we hope will come from those investments," she said of recent advancements in off-shore wind and life sciences projects.
Torres-Springer didn't address the degree divide directly. But asked how the city can encourage alternate pathways like apprenticeships, she said: "It always starts with the kind of deep listening with employers to get at the root of why isn't there more, why aren't those programs bigger, why aren't those programs more enduring, how do we bring more employers to the table?"
According to Shanika Hope, Google's director of tech education, employers look at a four-year college degree as a "proxy" for career readiness. "That's an important signal but there are other signals and pathways that we need to explore," she said.
Accenture, Google, and other large companies have been employing to varying degrees apprenticeships, paid internships, and on-the-job training to give potential employees the requisite experience outside of the traditional college experience.
According to Google's 2021 annual reporting, only 4% of its U.S. employees are Black and only 6% are Latino. Roughly half are white and 42% are Asian. Only a third of its U.S. employees are women. Google has over 12,000 full-time employees in New York State.
A few years ago, Accenture did an internal study of its hiring needs. It found half of its North American jobs could be done by a person with no college degree, according to Stuart Henderson, the company's senior managing director overseeing the Northeast.
"That's a pretty extraordinary number for a place which spends a lot of time fighting for the very best people coming out of the very best schools," he said. "It was a big wake-up call for all of us."
Accenture set a goal this year to hire 20% of all new employees this year through its apprenticeship program. A majority of participants come from communities of color, Henderson said.
Hsu raised concerns that this type of "backdoor" entry into the workforce creates a subordinate tier of employment that helps companies meet diversity goals while perpetuating racial and gender inequality.
"I think that, oftentimes, these terms and those apprenticeships aren't very meaningful and they're more optics than actual substance," Hsu said. "And I think that's a dangerous path to go down."
It's critical that these opportunities do not become "a second system by which people are entering the company, where they're contractor jobs, not full-time jobs, low-paying jobs, without benefits," he said. "They aren't real jobs."
Lisette Nieves, president of the Fund for New York City and author of multiple books on career readiness, countered that notion by pointing out that the traditional entry into companies is steeped in privilege. Apprenticeships offer another foot in the door. "There has to be multiple doors into a company and the one-door myth is problematic," she said.
In Accenture's case, Henderson claimed the apprenticeships were meaningful because they had buy-in at the most senior level (from Julie Sweet, the chair and CEO), paid market wages, and often led to full-time jobs.
The panelists agreed there need to be industry-wide reevaluations of job requirements. For Hope, of Google, "that's a long game" that will require changes in internal hiring practices and cross-sector collaboration.
"When you go and look at a lot of Google job postings, we talk about things like 'the equivalent.' We're not there yet," Hope said. "We're really trying to be more intentional, but there is more work that has to be done."
Disparities in STEM graduation rates also means fewer women are able to take advantage of the growth in new sectors, like technology.
"The participation of women in the graduating classes of computer science over the last 30 years has gone down dramatically," said Judith Spitz, founder of a workforce development organization for women in tech called Break Through Tech. In 1985, women made up 37% of students graduating in computer science, she said, a rate that has since been cut in half. The result is about 1 in 100 women with degrees going into a tech-related field.
She talked about the importance of credential-building outside the four-year degree with models like the "sprinternships" she runs – a combination of rapid career development workshops and three-week paid internships – to help women get their foot in the door and build their resumes.
The Adams administration is looking to make major investments in CUNY's career readiness programing, which Torres-Springer called an "undertapped" resource. The largest urban public university system, CUNY serves one of the most diverse student bodies, with a third of students born outside the mainland United States and half of students coming from households with annual incomes below $30,000. CUNY, while under-resourced, has proven to be a major driver of socioeconomic upward mobility for New Yorkers. Efforts are ongoing, including from Center for an Urban Future and the City Council, to help get more CUNY enrollees to the finish line of a degree.
But investments in CUNY, alone, will not be enough to overcome institutional discrimination. That will require a concerted effort within companies to change hiring practices and intentional public policy to lower barriers, according to several of the panelists.
"Even the talented students that have the credentials are not getting hired when they're from public universities," Nieves said.
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
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