Hip Hop show and Rally for Youth Jobs, Fri Oct 16& 23rd
Posted by raleighfist on October 7, 2009
Black Workers For Justice Youth…
Conscious Fighters Concert
Series
hip hop & spoken word show
Fri, Oct 16th, 8pm-11pm
$5 donation (in advance)
Fruit of Labor World Cultural Center
4200 Lake Ridge Dr. Raleigh, NC
919-876-7187
Health care now!! Jobs Now!! Living Wages Now!! End Racism!!
Come out & enjoy positive, progressive, and socially conscious live music and poetry. Speak out about community issues. All ages welcome
Picket Rally for Youth Jobs!!
Date TBA
Employment Security Commission, headquarters
corner of Wade Ave and St. Mary’s St
This is particularly urgent for young workers as highlighted by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert this week. (www.nytimes.com/2009/08/1
Herbert wrote, “Two issues that absolutely undermine any rosy assessment of last week’s employment report are the swelling ranks of the long-term unemployed and the crushing levels of joblessness among young” workers. … The plight of young workers, especially young men, is particularly frightening.
The percentage of young … men who are actually working is the lowest it has been in the 61 years of record-keeping, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
“Only 65 of every 100 men aged 20 through 24 years old were working on any given day in the first six months of this year. … For male teenagers, the numbers were disastrous: only 28 of every 100 males were employed in the 16 through 19-year-old age group. For minority teenagers, forget about it. The numbers are beyond scary; they’re catastrophic.”
Herbert called the 0.1 percent unemployment drop in July “wildly deceptive,” because the decline was “not because more people found jobs, but because 450,000 people withdrew from the labor market. They stopped looking, so they weren’t counted as unemployed.”
Larry Hales, youth organizer for FIST, said, “Young workers, in particular youth of color, are demanding meaningful jobs and education, not jail or the military. The ‘free marketers’ disrupting health care town halls hide their antiworker economic policies that increase poverty and unemployment.”
