Jobs serve as a stopgap for Chicago teen violence
But Chicago’s minimum-wage hike is a stopgap for jobs.
“Summer jobs reduce violence among disadvantaged youth” – that’s the title and conclusion of a new report by University of Pennsylvania criminologist Sara Heller, who conducted a randomized study of over 1,600 underserved high schoolers in Chicago.
An eight-week stint at a minimum-wage summer job was found to have decreased violence among that population by 43 percent over 16 months, amounting to nearly four fewer violent-crime arrests per 100 youth.
Hundreds of the Chicago teens studied took part in a city program called One Summer Plus, or OSP, where students were hired as summer-camp counselors, community-garden workers and office assistants, among other jobs, at Illinois’ minimum-wage rate of $8.25 an hour.
Heller’s conclusion suggests further city investment in “low-cost, well-targeted programs” like OSP. But while one group of teens was simultaneously enrolled in a social-emotional learning program, “jobs-related programming was enough to generate the steep drop in violence independently.” In other words, a job and access to a mentor were enough to generate healthy drops in violent-crime arrests.
“Well-targeted jobs programs” play a role that could be filled by, well, jobs.
The open positions filled by these students via government-sponsored middlemen should be the norm. Work, especially temporary work, should be easily accessible and coming hand-over-fist from real economic growth. But it’s not.
For those living in poverty, Heller’s conclusions aren’t news. Chicagoans in some of the most violent neighborhoods in the country are suffering from a chronic lack of opportunity. Over 90 percent of low-income Black teens in the city were unemployed in 2012, according to the Chicago Urban League.
A 58 percent hike in Chicago’s minimum wage – approved by City Council on Dec. 2 – will undoubtedly limit the job prospects of those individuals and communities that need them most. Not only is such a prediction borne out in study after study, but anecdotal evidence surrounding the city’s minimum-wage hike suggests the same.
A Panera Bread location cited the hike as a contributing factor to its coming closure. Home Run Inn pizza killed plans to open a new location in Portage Park. And the owner of Chicago’s beloved Rainbow Cone told DNAinfo she would be forced to cut the number of students her business employs over the summer by half.
Two of these businesses operate on Chicago’s South Side, and the now-dead pizza place would have opened its doors there, too. City lawmakers should have heeded the warning of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board: “A minimum wage hike will be one more reason for employers to avoid Chicago.”
Youth violence is an endlessly complex problem, especially in a city rife with institutional injustice, but common sense and good evidence point to economic opportunity as a necessary first step to reducing it in Chicago. Making it even more expensive for businesses to open up shop in the Second City is the last thing neighborhoods ravaged by violence and poverty need to mount their comeback.