(
)
They’ve fallen through the cracks: millions of jobless or underemployed New Yorkers whose daily struggle is to find work and food.
They certainly don’t show up in the 9.1 percent unemployment rate for the city, since they have exhausted those benefits.
But the number of city residents on food stamps is on pace to jump this year from just above 1 million in 2007 to a breathtaking 2 million sometime this summer. That’s equals almost 50 percent of the city’s labor force today, which, according to the latest government calculations, shrank by nearly 200,000 people since 2011. There”s also 176,000 New Yorkers collecting Social Security disability insurance, which is up 30,000 in last 4 years.
Not surprisingly, the official economic recovery that began with the end of the Great Recession in June 2009 does not look or feel like much of a recovery to residents like Marc Capozza.
Capozza, a mid-50s professional with his MBA and a background in higher education, hasn’t had steady employment since he lost his job three years ago. He was managing a staff of 74 administrative assistants at a prestigious Manhattan law firm. By his reckoning, he has since sent out 800 resumes — and received not one offer back.
“Being a baby boomer, I was taught that you had to go to college, so I did everything society told me to do,” said Capozza, who lives in Chelsea. “I put money into a retirement fund and into a supplemental fund, and later I opened up another account when I started at the law firm.”
Now Capozza, who has exhausted his unemployment benefits, is tapping into his retirement savings to pay his bills. He earns the minimum wage in a part-time office job, 16 hours a week and collects $50 a week in food stamps.
“Who knows what’s going to happen next? The savings are dwindling. What happens when people in this situation turn 65 and [have] raided their retirement account[s]?” Capozza asked.
Capozza is one of many New Yorkers with the same questions. “Nobody is talking about how bad things really are,” said Teri Washington, who has been out of work for nearly five years.
Washington, 49, was laid off as an executive assistant in a mass firing by a financial services giant back in 2008. She later left the work force and went back to college to complete her bachelor’s degree in communications.
If Washington and the thousands of other New Yorkers who have left the work force were counted today, New York City’s real unemployment rate would likely hover in the mid-teens, labor experts say.
Washington has exhausted her unemployment benefits and does not qualify for food stamps. (That program is now formally called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.)
“Those of us who have depleted our unemployment benefits are no longer being counted as the unemployed,” said Washington, who lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. “We are the forgotten.” Her husband, a former professional in sales and marketing, also took a job hit and now works as a produce clerk at Costco.
Labor experts understand the frustration. “It is not terribly surprising after a very bad recession and a very subpar recovery,” said IHS Global Insight economist Michael Montgomery. “It kind of wears on you when it is a grinding recession that never really turns into a normal recovery. And I think that is why a lot of people are having to go to food stamps and disability benefits and the other safety-net programs.”
Omar Perez is the busy organizer of Gainfully Unemployed, a New York-area support network of 1,300 unemployed or underemployed workers. “Unfortunately,” said Perez, a practicing employment attorney, ”being jobless can lend itself to staying jobless.”
Perez sees the number of long-term unemployed steadily rising here. That has made the job hunt more competitive as employers demand higher qualifications.
“It sure is a tough jobs market out there,” Perez adds.