As thousands of protesters marched through Downtown Manhattan yesterday, I had a difficult task – explain why Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was such a threat to GED students in New York City. The connection was not so straightforward, but May 12th was a day in which the parts of the City that normally operate in isolation were brought into comparison and conflict with each other. The more than 10,000 protesters made sure this was literally the case as bankers were forced to squeeze past housing rights activists and Wall Street “power-couples” shot disturbed glances at homeless rights advocates. It was a day for all the contradictions in our City to come face-to-face with one another.
I was positioned in Teach-in Zone 2, right on the edge of Pine and Water Street. My topic was education, but my approach was not typical of other education teachers. Most would discuss the high-profile cuts – big number layoffs for teachers and the next in the seemingly never ending gutting of the public higher education system. My focus was to look at smaller budget cuts. Though small, these cuts threaten to devastate critical support programs, further dislocating poor and working class New Yorkers.
Students in these non-traditional education programs need more than just an education. They also need jobs. However, given the current rate of youth unemployment and long-term patterns of discrimination a job may be hard to come by in the private sector. A recent study by the Community Service Society reported that a shocking 3 out of 4 African-American males age 16 to 24 are unemployed. Programs funded through the DYCD are therefore a crucial outlet for employment. These too are slated for cuts, to the tune of $3.2 million. Such cuts may jeopardize the City’s ability to receive Federal funding. If the cuts go through and the same numbers of youth apply for jobs, they will have only a 1 in 12 chance of receiving one.
This all leads to our Stumpf problem. While Bloomberg has become stingy with people looking for an education and with youth looking for a job, the fiscal floodgates have been opened to banks like Wells Fargo. Over the past fifteen years, Wells Fargo has received more than $122 million in tax exemptions and subsidies from the City of New York. If New York had actually collected these funds we could have funded ten years of adult education services or created thousands of more slots for youth employment.
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