POVERTY, ENTREPRENEURS AND UNIONS: Cool Cleveland is in my email box this morning, and in addition to linking to this weblog (which means a few of you came from there, thanks) it has two pieces that speak directly to this week's Cleveland buzz-topic: The city's poverty and what to do about it. The two pieces are Lee Chilcote's extended interview with Cleveland AFL-CIO leader John Ryan, and the short squib ("Can we talk?") about Indoor Comfort Services, a small venture started by laid-off HVAC worker Steve Lee.

As everyone keeps saying, the city needs more jobs. But one of the lessons the Census numbers should teach us is that employment, by itself, does not end poverty. Most of Cleveland's low-income heads-of-household are working for a living, even after the loss of all kinds of jobs in the last three years. The numbers for 1999 (the real Census) make the point clearly: With a far lower unemployment rate, at the top of the 1990s job market, Cleveland was just about as poor (relative to other cities) as we are today.

With a couple of kids to feed and house, a $7 or $8 an hour job doesn't get you out of poverty. But those are the job opportunities we've been creating for workers at the bottom end of the education/skills/experience continuum, which is a huge share of the city's adult residents. While we call these jobs "entry level", few of the employers -- in low-end service, retail, hotel or even health care -- can offer in-house upward mobility to more than a small fraction of their employees.

From the worker's point of view, there are three well-known ways out of this corner:
1) Get a better education that qualifies you for better-paid employment
2) Start your own business
3) Get a union and bargain collectively for a bigger share of the value you're helping to create.

Under the right circumstances, all of these approaches work. In a good economy with lots of job creation, they work really well. In a crappy job market like the one we're now enduring, it's hard to achieve short-term income gains with any approach, but education, entrepreneurship and (intelligent) collective bargaining can all help workers to make the best of their limited options... and get positioned for better times when they arrive.

The Mayor's "poverty summit" needs to talk about new enterprise and job creation, of course. But it also needs to discuss new City initiatives to empower Clevelanders to help themselves out of working poverty -- through education, entrepreneurship and unionization.

I've talked a lot about the first part of this triad, i.e. the strategic value of sending Cleveland to college (and computer training, and GED classes, and financial literacy classes, and anything else that enhances our people's ability to make and manage money). Today's Cool Cleveland piece about Steve Lee's new company addresses the second part, making the important point that Cleveland workers, as well as grad-school entrepreneurs, have skills that can be turned into businesses -- businesses designed to make their owners a living, not a fortune. And the interview with John Ryan introduces the often taboo third part -- the powerful role of unions in turning "a job" into "a decent living", and why so many low-income Cleveland workers are missing this opportunity.

Props to Mulready and the Hard Corps at CC for raising the right issues. And thanks for the link.