“The Great Recession and the Battle for Good Jobs in the Black Community.”

Dear Friend of the Institute:

As part of our fall 2009 series of Labor Breakfast Forums, we are pleased to announce a forum entitled

“The Great Recession and the Battle for Good Jobs in the Black Community.”

The event will be held on Friday, December 4, 2009, from 8:30 to 10:15 AM, at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute, 25 West 43rd Street, 18th Floor.

The speakers slated for this important discussion are: Steven C. Pitts, author of Job Quality and Black Workers-A Multi-City Report and labor policy specialist at the Center for Labor Research and Education, University of California, Berkeley; and David Jones, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Community Service Society of New York (CSS).

While some economists have begun to discuss the formal end of the Great Recession, most also recognize that the economy will likely enter a jobless recovery worse than those following the recessions of 1990 and 2001. This situation promises to have particularly damaging impact on the Black community which entered this recession with disproportionately high level of unemployment and low-wage work. Racially stratified labor markets existed prior to the Great Recession; economic growth policies which ignore this reality will simply reinforce these racial hierarchies.

What sort of legislative policies could help to remedy these problems?

What new forms of organizing within the black community are needed to wield greater power locally and nationally to improve the quality of jobs held by Black workers?

What role should organized labor and other allied movements play?

Steven Pitts and David Jones will engage these and other crucial questions in what promises to be a timely and important conversation.

Please be sure to RSVP to Eloiza Morales at 212-642-2029 or eloiza.morales@mail.cuny.edu by Monday, November 30, 2009.

We look forward to seeing you.

Sincerely,

Paula Finn, Associate Director

Editor, New Labor Forum

Rich Blint, Coordinator of Special Projects

Center for Labor, Community & Policy Studies

The Murphy Institute is part of the School for Professional Studiesand the Graduate School and University CenterThe City University of New York