High unemployment, toxic environment – one solution

After Congress reached an agreement on the debt ceiling two weeks ago, President Obama said he and his cabinet are turning their attention back to creating jobs.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: They are redoubling their efforts to focus on what matters most to the American people. That is, how are we going to put people back to work? How are we going to raise the wages? Increase their security? How are they going to recover fully as families, as communities from the worst recession we’ve had since the Great Depression?

But this rhetoric isn’t new – throughout the recession, politicians have been promising more jobs – including in Oakland where the unemployment rate is 16.3%. That’s nearly double the national average.

Well, in Oakland, politicians actually put money where their mouths are – the city has received more than $140 million in stimulus money over the past three years for workforce development and energy efficiency. Part of that money went to the Cypress Mandela Training Center in West Oakland. Their mandate? To launch a Green Jobs Training Corps.

RON DELLUMS: Simply stated this is a program that embraces a very fundamental idea. Fight pollution and fight poverty simultaneously.

Former Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums kicked off the program three years ago. He said the goal of the Green Jobs Corps is to help Oakland’s low-income youth get jobs improving their environment.

Now that the threat of a double-dip recession is looming, KALW’s Callie Shanafelt went to see if these programs are meeting this main goal.

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CALLIE SHANAFELT: After graduating from high school in Oakland, Noel Yakubu worked a few different jobs. Dead-end jobs. He was usually fired after a couple of months.

NOEL YAKUBU: Yeah … I was a very lazy worker. I had no motivation to do my job. You know I was angry about a lot of stuff. I didn’t have discipline inside myself.

Yakubu’s mother worried his friends would get him in trouble, so she sent him to live with his father in Ghana.

YAKUBU: And I saw how they lived over there. You know they had a lot of blackouts, so I was like, “Man, there’s something I gotta do to change.”

Yakubu started thinking about solar panel installation and other solutions to Ghana’s energy shortages. When he returned to the States, a mentor told him he could jump-start his career in renewable energy at the Cypress Mandela Training Center.

It’s a large building in West Oakland’s warehouse district – a place whose very origins represent its mission: to make the most out of hard situations. After the Loma Prieta Earthquake collapsed the Cypress Mandela Freeway in 1989, people in the neighborhood, like Art Shanks, wanted the rebuilding jobs to stay local.

ART SHANKS: A person starting in construction can start back at that time it was like $16 or $17 an hour. And that’s with just a high school diploma so most college graduates wasn’t making that kind of money.

Shanks and others built the center to train their own. And it worked. Their students landed those jobs – and more – placing 90% of program graduates in living wage gigs in the construction industry.

SHANKS: In here, we call this our tool identification room. And in the tool identification room you can see the multitude of trades that students will learn from. First electricians, the carpenters, all the different woods...

Today, Shanks is the program’s executive director. He leads me into a room that looks like a large garage. The walls are lined with pipes, wrenches, ladders, hammers...

SHANKS: They will learn both metal and wood …

... hazardous waste clean up ...

SHANKS: They will learn everything about lead….

There are classrooms for improving math skills and learning construction codes. Plus a room where carpentry students build a house in three days.

SHANKS: You name it, they’re gonna learn it here in 16 weeks.

And after those 16 weeks they’re guided into union apprenticeship programs.

SHANKS: Here you can see on the Bay Bridge Project, one of our students that graduated out of the program seven years ago was deemed a superstar of the whole project...

More recently, the center got a boost when the City of Oakland was granted federal stimulus funds to create green job training programs.

SHANKS: So now you can see this here is what an 18-year-old kid out of the program created. You can see the solar panel here, which is bringing in power on the side…

Students can now take an extra 10-week course to earn a green building certification.  

SHANKS: Now, he can push this outside and have free power. So that’s pretty neat.

Recent graduate Sean Jones comes to the center’s job club on Fridays for help finding work. He says the program was just what he needed after graduating from high school. But…

SEAN JONES: It wasn’t for everybody. We started off with over 90 students or so. Our class graduated with like 20.

The impoverished community Shanks is trying to serve struggles with more than just joblessness. He says he sees issues with anger management, punctuality, confidence, and substance abuse. So the center offers life skills classes along with the vocational training.

SHANKS: Particularly since most of the kids now come from fractured families or single parent homes. So it’s very critical for students that don’t have those parents that have those good foundations, that a program exist like this that can teach those life skills.

As a result, a morning at Cypress Mandela can sound a lot like a military bootcamp.

GROUP: Good morning, sir!

All participants must be clean and sober. Shanks regularly tests students for drugs. Graduate Tony Lanz says initially it was hard for him to stop smoking weed for the program, but the instructors offered a persuasive argument against substance abuse.

TONY LANZ: To be a hard worker you have to have healthy lungs, you have to have that stamina. And doing drugs you can’t have that stamina. Because you think you might be in shape but when you get to a hard day of work and its 90 degrees outside that’s when you separate the boys from the men. And men don’t do drugs.

Lanz says the lessons he’s learned from his teachers have taught him not just to be a better worker, but to be a better parent.

LANZ: My children are like sponges. Everything they see they take in. Everything they hear they take in. So the use of foul language is like zero-tolerance in my house.

Lanz actually had a tough go of it after graduating from Cypress Mandela. More than a year later, he was working as a security guard because he couldn’t find a job in construction. Then he got a call from Shanks who told him to go to a job interview with the Environmental Protection Agency.

LANZ: He told me that I wasn’t going to fail in life. As long as he knew my first and last name and he knew where I was located, I wasn’t gonna be a failure in life. So I want to thank him for that. He stayed on my back a little harder than other students. At times it got kind of rough and irritating but...

Lanz, Noel Yakubu, and three other graduates got jobs in West Oakland.

LANZ: I’m making pretty good money. I’m able to take care of my kids and take care of my family.

And he’s able to work in his own community.

LANZ: This is my work right here, man. This is me. This is what I’m doing right here.

In the first week Lanz ran into four people he knows in the neighborhood.

LANZ: No, this is actually lead remediation.

In West Oakland’s Prescott neighborhood, lead levels in the soil are two to five times above the federal safe level. To fix this in the past, workers would haul out the contaminated soil and replace it with new soil. It was expensive, loud, and wasteful.

SITE LEADER: Mix this around tree roots. Use this tool, tell me if you like it.

LANZ: Thank you.

SITE LEADER: If you do, we’re gonna get some more.

Now, Lanz and his team are mixing fish bone waste from canneries in Alaska with the contaminated soil to neutralize the lead. They then cap it off with grass so that it is safe for children to play on.

MAGGIE O’DONNELL: The largest piece of equipment we’re using on the entire remediation is a rototiller.

That’s Maggie O’Donnell, the EPA contractor for the site.

O’DONNELL: We’re trying to avoid noise disruption, large equipment disruption.

Over the next two years she’s in charge of decontaminating 150 residential lots, affecting about 1,000 residents. And she hopes to hire the workers she needs from the training center.

O’DONNELL: Did you bring your resume?

JONES: Yeah

O’DONNELL: Okay, great. Sean? That’s a nice Irish name, Sean.

JONES: Yeah I have a little Irish in me.

Sean Jones hands O’Donnell his resume in hopes of being one of the next workers on the lead remediation project.

O’DONNELL: I’m hoping for some of these guys, this is a career path. With the skills they’re acquiring on this project, they will be able to become entrepreneurs, they can take it on the road, they can go into homes, they can train homeowners how to do it themselves.

With the downturn of the economy three quarters of graduates found construction jobs in the last three years – down from Cypress Mandela’s typical 90% placement rate. But center director Art Shanks says the green certification means graduates are more likely to be hired for work at green building job sites, like Kaiser and Highland hospitals.

SHANKS: So they can go anywhere. And from carpenters to laborers to cement masons to ironwork, they’re all trained in green. Which, like, that hospital, the steel that goes into, it’s recycled steel.

According to a recent study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, more than 50,000 trained workers will be needed for energy efficient construction jobs in California in the next decade. However, the report concludes that with so many journey level tradespeople already out of work, it would be better to train the seasoned workers in green technology instead of investing in new workers like those getting trained at Cypress Mandela. Still, Shanks thinks it’s important to prepare for the mass retirement of baby-boomer workers.

SHANKS: If we do not capture the youth that are coming out of high school – ‘cause they’re not all going to college, let’s be for real they’re not even graduating from high school – and don’t get them trained and certified, then we will have, indeed, a shortage.

One person he doesn’t have to worry about is Noel Yakubu. He has a job, and an idea of what he wants to do with his future. When he finishes work on the lead remediation project, he plans to put his solar panel installation training to use.

YAKUBU: It’s really important to me because, back in Ghana, when I had seen what was going on over there, and I felt like I was helpless. Now I’m actually doing something to help my community.

And he hopes to train others in Oakland to improve their environment as well.

In Oakland, I’m Callie Shanafelt, for Crosscurrents

Callie Shanafelt is a reporter with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. What are your views on the green jobs initiative? Is it still the career of the future? Let us know on our Facebook page.