Markeshia Ricks Photo
New Haven Rising organizer Marks with the new report.
Fresh off negotiating a deal that commits Yale University to hiring 1,000 New Haveners over the next three years, the citizen activist group New Haven Rising has its sights set on wrangling a similar commitment from the city’s next biggest employer, Yale-New Haven Hospital.
A report being released this week by New Haven Rising, called “Yale-New Haven Hospital — Solve The Job Crisis,” states that in 2014 nearly half of all residents in the Hill fell below the poverty line, and only 4 percent owned their homes. The Rev. Scott Marks said part of the solution to changing those numbers lies with Yale-New Hospital, which is the second largest employer in the city, and is within walking distance of where most people in the Hill live.
“The university has taken steps in the right direction,” with its commitment to hire 1,000 New Haveners from neighborhoods of need in the city, Marks, a cofounder of New Haven Rising, said. “So now we turn our attention to the hospital.”
Marks said the group wants the hospital to develop a plan similar to Yale’s for hiring more New Haven residents.
“We’re calling on the hospital to really step up to the plate and make a real contribution to this community,” he said. “We’d like them to release their hiring data and retention rates. They’ll said that they hire a lot of people from New Haven, but we want to know how long do those people stay hired and where are you hiring them from.”
New Haven Rising, a citizens group launched by organizers affiliated with Yale’s unions, last month planned a mass march on Yale to press its job demands, with over 100 supporters planning to get arrested in civil-disobedience outside university-owned storefronts in the Broadway shopping district. Yale headed off that holiday-season inconvenience at the last moment by agreeing to the local-hiring plan; organizers then shifted the demonstration to the hospital, near which police arrested 134 protesters.
The hospital has 12,152 employees, including 4,118 medical staff, according to the report.
The report calls on the hospital to “release hiring data and retention rates by census tract and job category” for those workers while “commit[ting] to a percentage increase in full-time permanent hiring from neighborhoods of need that mirrors the increase” to which Yale has committed.
The report also calls on the hospital to make more deliberate use of New Haven Works, the training and referral agency started by Yale and its unions and political leaders in 2013 for the city’s under- and unemployed. The report further calls on the hospital to incentivize New Haveners to stay on the job and in the community through homebuyer assistance and college-scholarship programs for their kids, similar to Yale’s homebuyer and “Sons and Daughter” initiatives.
The report highlights stories of individual New Haveners looking for jobs or better-paying jobs, like Gloria Vegan of the Annex. “Last year I was laid off from my job as a Medicare Billing Specialist in Wallingford,” the report quotes Vega as saying. “I wanted a similar job at Yale but couldn’t get in the door because I wasn’t trained in EPIC. Then I did a New Haven Works paid internship at Yale with on-the-job training in EPIC. After that I applied for a full-time job, and I got it! now I work here in New haven in a better paying job with better benefits.”
“I’m very hopeful that there is going to be a coming together at the table,” Marks said. “I’ve called on the hospital for an opportunity to meet and to get together in the past, and we have been denied that opportunity.” change.
Hospital: We’re On It
Vincent Petrini (pictured), Yale-New Haven’s senior vice president for public affairs, said the hospital has a shared goal with the city of not only creating job opportunities specifically for New Haven residents, but sustaining those jobs. He pointed out, as the New Haven Rising report does, that the hospital employs about 3,000 New Haveners in what Petrini says are “well paying jobs with what we believe are excellent benefits.” The hospital hired about 600 of those employees last year alone.
“That’s our record, and we’re proud of that,” he said.
Petrini said the hospital is in fact already doing much of what activists are calling on them to do. Petrini serves on the New Haven Works board. The hospital also has a partnership with ConnCAT, which provides a training program for phlebotomists and medical coders; the program helps connect them to jobs at Yale-New Haven. That partnership is expanding to include food service too.
Since 2006, the hospital has offered a homebuyers incentive program, called Home Ownership Made Easy (HOME), which provides up to $10,000 in forgivable loans. The program offers special incentives for residents who buy homes in the Hill, which provides up to $200 a month for the first year, to offset expenses such as the mortgage, utilities and repairs. There have been 134 employee closings since the program started, Petrini said.
He pushed backed against the notion that the hospital is flush with money.
“It’s not the case,” he said. “Hospitals are actually under the gun because of cuts to Medicare. We are the largest taxpayers in state of Connecticut. We are going to pay $180 million in taxes. It is economically challenging times for hospitals, but we still remain focused on filling jobs that meet demands of our patients. Some of the jobs are more technical in nature such as physicians and nurse, but others are more general.”
“Ultimately, we all share in the goal of making sure that more opportunity exists for New Haven residents and we remain committed to that goal,” Petrini said. “We’re proud of our track record and continue to stay focused on moving forward.”
The Overall “Jobs Crisis”
New Haven’s unemployment rate has fallen from a high of 10 percent to 7.6 percent over the past five years. But, Marks said, when you start to break the city’s unemployment rates down by race, a different picture emerges.
“There is a jobs crisis in New Haven, and it is ruining the quality of life for thousands of families, particularly black and Latino residents,” he said.
Reveiz, Heard and Feldman.
Kenneth Reveiz (pictured at left in the photo), an activist with New Haven Rising, pointed out that Yale-New Haven Hospital in 2014 reported generating $2.4 billion in revenue, $161 million of which was profit. Reveiz said he couldn’t find full-time, living-wage work in New Haven after his graduation from Yale. He got by working multiple odd jobs, and lived in a $400 a month apartment with no refrigerator, no stove, and intermittent heat. Reveiz said during those times, he realized he had a better quality of life living with his mother, who raised him and his kid brother on a housekeeper’s salary, than he did in New Haven just after graduating.
“I think Yale New Haven can do a lot more to solve the jobs crisis and in fact the need to,” he said.
Reveiz story isn’t uncommon for young, educated people in the city. Abby Feldman (pictured at right in the above photo), a New Haven native, who graduated from Clark University with a degree in international development, said she returned to New Haven to be close to family. What she didn’t come back to was a job in her field. She makes ends meet by working multiple jobs including at restaurants, the occasional catering gig and assisting people who are in recovery through art.
“I work with a lot of talented people [in the recovery program] pretty much every day, and they ask me about job opportunities for when they leave program, and I wonder what will be available to them,” she said. “I live in Fair Haven. I know friends in neighborhood who are struggling. With my two to three jobs, I’m doing all right. I can pay my bills, even save a little money, but it’s hard when my friends are struggling with homelessness, not having enough to eat. I work with a lot of talented people every day that are struggling. I know that Yale-New Haven Hospital is developing and expanding in the city and as they do that they should be careful because as they do that they’re overlooking a lot of brilliant and talented people right here in our neighborhoods.”
Rodney Heard (pictured at center in the above photo), also a New Haven native, said he’s lived in the city all his life and worked his first job, at McDonald’s, when he was just 15 years old. When he became a father straight out of high school, he learned quickly how tough it is to provide for a child on minimum wage. “It was a shocker for me to realize how much things actually cost,” he said. Heard made too much to qualify for food stamps, but didn’t make enough to bring home food.
“I can’t say how much I made last year between the odd jobs I do, but I can tell you that the CEO of Yale-New Haven Hospital made $3.5 million last year,” he said. “That’s enough food to feed my kids for a lifetime, and most likely their kids. I think Yale New Haven Hospital can do a lot more to help the jobs crisis in New Haven.”