- [Announcer] Production and distribution of "City Club Forums" on ideastream are made possible by the generous support of PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(upbeat music) (Dan ringing the gong) - Hello, and welcome to "The City Club of Cleveland" where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

I'm Dan Moulthrop, Chief Executive here, also a proud member.

It's February 26th, and you're with the virtual "City Club Forum".

We're live from the studios of our public media partner, 90.3 WCPN ideastream.

I'm very grateful for their support and partnership.

Over the last year, as we've all grappled with COVID, we have dedicated a lot of time here at the "City Club Forum" to discussing how the events of the past year have exposed long-standing vulnerabilities and inequities throughout society.

And we've placed a special focus on the workplace.

Last month, we talked about the importance of summer jobs programs and how the impact of their decline, I'm sorry, and the impact that their decline has had on black and brown youth in our community.

Today we'll talk about how the pandemic has exposed deep economic and occupational inequities in Greater Cleveland and around the country.

And we'll highlight some of the work being done to dismantle structural racism in the workplace.

New research from the National Fund for Workplace Solutions suggests that workforce equity should be at the center of any plan to build an equitable economy.

Racial bias and structural inequities are at play of course from the beginning of any career path.

Black and brown workers often start off making less money and receiving fewer promotions along the way than their white colleagues, a disparity that as you can imagine, compounds over time.

These racially-driven income inequities have a cost for the entire economy.

It's not a zero-sum game, rather because of these inequities, economists estimate that there's about $2.3 trillion less per year floating around in our economy.

The National Fund for Workplace Solutions has been doing a considerable amount of work in this area and has raised more than $30 million to invest in Cleveland and dozens of other communities dedicated to connecting individuals to work, generating good jobs and fostering inclusive prosperity.

We're thrilled to have Amanda Cage, she's President and CEO of the National Fund with us today.

Also joining us, Bethia Burke, President of The Fund for Our Economic Future.

Cleveland is a National Fund for Workforce Solutions partner community, and the fund has received grants to support various initiatives, including the Paradox Prize, which promotes economic mobility for low-wage workers.

And we'll discuss that in a little bit as well.

Also joining us, Alan Nevel, he's Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity and Human Resources Officer for The MetroHealth System.

We'll speak with them about the national and local efforts to advance workforce equity and close what's the good job gap, and also we'll speak about mitigating threats posed by automation.

If you have questions for any of our speakers, text them to 330-541-5794.

Again, that number is 330-541-5794.

You can tweet your questions at The City Club and we will work them into the program.

Bethia Burke, Amanda Cage, Alan Nevel, welcome to "The City Club of Cleveland".

- Thank you for having us.

- [Amanda] It is great to have all of you.

It's great to see all of you.

If you're joining us on the radio, I encourage you to, if you'd like to see what everybody looks like, head over to cityclub.org for the livestream.

Amanda Cage, I'd like to start with you and ask you to tell us a little bit about the national picture on this issue.

- [Amanda] Sure.

And again, thank you very much for having me here today.

We started this report through an investment with JPMorgan Chase, really looking at how we can identify kind of equal outcomes in the labor market.

And we partnered with PolicyLink, Burning Glass Technologies and the Equity Institute to look at this at a national level and also to dig deeply into five cities.

So we looked at Seattle, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago and Boston.

And we started this work.

It's very important, it's very timely, but we started this work two years ago.

So we started it before COVID, we started it before George Floyd, we started it before the unemployment crisis that we're in where we've lost 10 million jobs.

And it's important to note that because all of these dynamics were true prior to these major events that have happened within this country in the last year.

But I wanted to share some of the things that came out of the National Report.

I'm happy to talk a little bit about what that's meant for the different cities as a comparison to Cleveland.

But there were some national pieces of information that I wanna share with you.

I think anybody who has watched the news or opened a paper or listened to a radio show, there's sort of been this phrase that is part of every conversation, which is that disproportionately affects people of color, whether it's COVID infection and deaths, whether it's unemployment figures, whether it's numbers of people in the essential workforce, we see this a lot.

And so I wanted to dig into what's behind that?

Because that's what this report did.

And there's some key findings that I wanna share with you.

First is about occupational segregation.

Occupational segregation in our labor market nationally, and of course this is even more intense in local communities, is very pronounced, both across industries and within a firm.

So across industries, we know that we have black and brown workers in particular that are overrepresented in industries.

We are seeing this right now, the essential workforce.

And we know that they tend to be segregated at the low end in low-quality jobs.

Second, racial discrimination, overt racial discrimination is alive and well in the labor market.

We have made little progress in recent decades in terms of minimizing the effect of discrimination in hiring and in promotion.

And that comes both through real sort of overt, again, racial practices, but also many race-neutral policies that HR departments employ that actually have very race-based outcomes.

I think this was, oops!

- [Dan] No, no, no.

I'm, yeah, no, I have a lot of questions, but no, go ahead and finish.

- [Amanda] Okay, I got a couple more things to share that I'd like to present.

- Go ahead, please do.

- [Amanda] Third, education and training, which I think this was one of the hardest things for us all to see, because in general, we all think that education and training is a great panacea to reducing inequality, but that's just not true.

In fact, racial inequities exist between white workers and workers of color at every level of education.

One of the pieces in each of the communities that we looked at, a black worker with a post-secondary degree on average makes less than a white worker with a high school degree.

Automation, and this is actually much more accelerated because of the move to remote work and all of the dynamics of how the COVID crisis has impacted the labor market.

Automation as a force in a changing economy really threatens workers of color at a higher rate than other workers.

And then finally, again, what you mentioned at the beginning, that these inequities don't just impact people of color and workers of color, but everybody, that these inequities are a drag on economically as a whole.

- There are a few things, Amanda Cage, that you said that I wanna sort of pull on a little bit and hear more about.

And we may come back to them, but I just wanna highlight them right now, that education and training isn't enough.

That seems like a very salient point that we need to unpack.

And also that race-neutral hiring practices are what have been designed as, and are perceived to be race-neutral hiring practices don't have race-neutral outcomes.

And I think those things are really important.

I wanna turn to Bethia Burke of the Fund for Our Economic Future briefly here to give us the sense of where Greater Cleveland and Northeast Ohio is with respect to these issues.

And I know you illuminated a lot of this in the Two Tomorrow's Report, which we've spoken about a few times at "The City Club", and other people have name-checked 1 million times at "The City Club".

(Bethia laughing) But Bethia, but that report now is a couple of years old.

So where are we?

- Yep.

Yeah, so I would start by underlining that the issues that Amanda raised in this National Report are here locally.

First on this point that you just underlined, Dan, that we expect or we want education to be this great equalizer, and that the findings in this report highlighting that it's not or like expecting that if you teach a man to fish but put them in a lake where there's no fish or where all those fish are full of mercury, that that's not enough, right?

That it is important that we're teaching people to fish, that way, we have high-quality education and high-quality skills training.

But if the job market is toxic, then that's not helping.

And that is true here in Cleveland and it's true across Northeast Ohio.

(soft music) The second is that this idea that national data is somehow different than what's happening locally, I would just underscore that it's not, that we, Amanda pointed out this, occupational segregation trend that they saw in the report.

We saw the same thing.

Some colleagues of mine did a wage analysis.

And for example, white workers earn 10 to 30% more than black workers in Cleveland in the same occupations.

So the idea that this national data somehow would be happening somewhere else, I just wanna underscore that these same trends that you see in the report are happening here.

And we also see that in things like the unemployment rate, there's a great disparity between black and white workers in employment, and overall earnings, not just in the same occupation.

I know we're gonna talk today about what we can do about it, and the third thing I would say as we get into this conversation is there's lots of things already happening, but also more that we can do to dismantle and to change these trends, and I'm looking forward to talking about that more today.

- Excellent.

Bethia Burke is the President of the Fund for Our Economic Future.

She was referring to Amanda Cage, the President and CEO of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

Their report by the way is called Race and The Work of The Future, if you're interested in finding it for yourself to take a look at things.

Alan Nevel runs HR and Diversity and Inclusion for the MetroHealth System.

Alan, you're relatively new at MetroHealth.

Diversity and inclusion with respect to hiring practices I know has been something that your boss, Akram Boutros, has made a priority in his time.

What have you seen working well at MetroHealth?

- [Alan] Well, I think first off, we have to, in any organization, we have to realize that we don't know what we don't know.

So being, coming aware of that conscious level of incompetence and then seeking knowledge.

So first off, we had to really look at, again, many of the things that my colleagues have spoken of already, were there HR policies, practices, systems that resulted in micro-inequities for some and micro-advantages for others?

And how does that translate into for us our customer experience being that experience that our patients have, and also the employee experience?

So we've done a lot of work in terms of looking at our job descriptions, for instance.

instead of focusing strictly on a degree, we've made them experience-equivalent for instance, and we did that several years ago.

Also in terms of the pay gap, because when we look at that occupational segregation in just about any organization, people who are black and brown tend to be at the lower portion of the pyramid, and it becomes more and more Caucasian as you move up, and in many instances, more and more male.

Within healthcare, we have a strong number of both men and women, but again, it becomes very homogeneous in terms of race and ethnicity as you move toward the top.

So what we've done is we've established a series of goals that are communicated both inside and outside of Metro.

If you go out to metroHealth.org, you can see what our goals are.

We have nine very specific goals in terms of improving our representation in terms of underrepresented minorities, and we've taken that to heart, along with providing education to those hiring managers so that it becomes part of their DNA.

They immediately think diversity in terms of their hiring practices, ensuring that they've got diverse slates of candidates.

And we're seeing the fruit of those efforts already just since we really changed the trajectory of our focus shortly after the death of George Floyd.

- You changed your, the MetroHealth had already had a focus on diversity and- - Absolutely.

We had always had, yeah.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

We had always had a focus, but if you think about it in terms of trajectory, we were always moving in this direction.

- [Dan] Mm-hmm.

- [Alan] But with the death of George Floyd, we found ourselves in the midst of two pandemics, the pandemic called COVID and the 400-year pandemic of systemic racism and social injustice in this country.

And with those two things converging, we knew that many of our colleagues across the system as well as the citizens in the community were in pain and were suffering.

So we made a concerted effort to really change our trajectory and lead not only in this locale, but also take more of a regional and national leadership role in terms of changing the narrative.

- Alan Nevel is Chief Diversity and Human Resources Officer at the MetroHealth System.

Amanda Cage, I wanna come back to you now, what you had laid out before in terms of the four areas of occupational segregation, so-called race-neutral policies and education and training being insufficient, as well as automation.

I know we need to come back to automation, but that idea that education and training around diversity is insufficient, say more about that.

What does that, it's totally dismaying, and I'm (laughing) struggling with it.

- [Amanda] Yeah.

And it's a very powerful narrative in our country.

Right?

We've had a really, and your area has been deeply affected by this.

The economy has changed in very drastic ways, right?

Globalization, automation, all of these different sort of factors.

And our answer to that has been nationally, well, workers are broken or they're behind and we have to catch them up, right?

Somehow if we just like train them better and get training in their hand and make sure we're upgrading people's skills, they'll eventually catch up and this will all be taken care of.

And that's what, there is a piece of that.

But if it's one of like nine factors, right?

And we put all our eggs in that basket, and it's just not enough.

As Bethia has said, you can train people up, but you're still putting them into sort of a toxic labor market where it's difficult for them to make strides.

- So how do we detoxify the labor market, Bethia Burke?

(Bethia laughing) - [Bethia] What a question, Dan?

Well, I think it starts with what Amanda just said.

So we have this emphasis on closing the skills gap which removes responsibility from anybody else in the system other than educators and people to do something about the wage disparities.

And as Alan just said, it also is incumbent upon employers to look at the composition of their workforce, to look at what they're paying people, which occupations people are in and ask if there is a disparity, and I'll tell you, the data says that in most places, there's a disparity, that's how you get to the aggregate numbers.

If there is a disparity, why?

Is it who you're hiring?

Is it who you're hiring for which jobs?

Is it who you're promoting?

Is it the starting wage that you're giving somebody is different depending on who they are when they walk in the door or what they ask for?

So I think that one of the most important things that we can do to detoxify the labor market is to ask others beyond the job seeker and the education system, both of which are important, but ask people beyond those two, what else do we need to do to close the inequities?

- I wanna switch gears to some very practical pieces that employers can take on for themselves, Bethia, 'cause as you've suggested, like that's what this really requires.

And we'll move to some systemic solutions in a second.

But Alan Nevel, you mentioned earlier about removing, when you're doing a job posting, taking the college degree off of it, or the the education level and using equivalent experience as the primary sort of driver there.

Can you talk about that and unpack that a little bit?

Because some of these things in job descriptions and job postings, it's so deeply ingrained in our society that a bachelors is required, master's preferred.

- [Alan] Yeah.

I think one (laughing) explanation that I have for it is you're hiring for someone to manage your team.

And you've got two choices.

You've got the person who just recently completed their MBA but they've only managed one person in their career, and they've been in the workforce for say, five years, versus somebody who is a seasoned veteran, if you will, with 10-plus years of experience managing diverse teams, having plenty of responsibilities but they only have that bachelor's degree, or perhaps not that degree at all, which one are you gonna choose?

Because ultimately, you're looking for somebody to literally hit the ground running.

Most organizations don't have a lot of time for someone to manage that change curve.

They're looking for results right away.

So if you think about that, most people would choose the person with more experience.

And I think in a lot of instances, you also need to understand the why around that.

That person may have 15 years of management experience, wanted to complete their degree, but there are a host of other factors that may have prevented them from doing so, because right now we're talking about economic equity, but if you look at all the different social determinants of health, which we know disproportionately impact people of color, there may be a lot of other things going on.

You might be head of household responsible for not only your children but also your parents and your grandparents.

There are a host of other factors, including food insecurity, all of those things that may have prevented you from obtaining that degree.

So what we try to do is bring you in, and we spend a lot of money every year on tuition reimbursement.

If you have a desire to go back to school and complete your degree or get an advanced degree, we're here to support you in that effort.

- Alan.

- Can I?

- Oh, go ahead Amanda Cage.

- [Amanda] I just wanna get in on that.

And I actually dropped my staff, which I love to lift, and especially for all you business employers out there and business owners, I just wanted to share how stark this is around sort of racial inequities.

So if you put a bachelor's degree on a job description, I put in a bachelor's degree requirement, you are immediately eliminating 68% of African Americans, 79% of Latinx folks, 73% of rural Americans and two thirds of our nation's bedrooms by putting a bachelor's degree requirements on a job description - Enough said.

That says everything right there (laughing) Alan Nevel, are there other, in the other practical pieces that you've introduced in hiring practices and protocols that are truly shifting not to perceived race-neutral, but maybe race-positive kinds of practices?

- [Alan] Well, I think one of the things that Bethia had read mentioned earlier is around the fishing analogy.

So I like to use the fishing analogy around, are we fishing the entire pond?

Are we just fishing a portion of the pond?

So for many hiring managers as well as recruiters, you go to where you're most comfortable.

If I'm comfortable recruiting from a particular institution or from a particular geography, that's what I will tend to do.

So what we've been very intentional around is fishing in other ponds, if you will, or fishing in the entire pond, because all too often, you will hear hiring managers say, well, there aren't enough, fill in the blank, out there that have this particular skillset.

And you could say, not enough women, not enough people of color.

You can pick any one of the 40-plus characteristics of diversity and try to use that as an excuse.

And we're really calling people on that.

And what's been great is you combine that with the education to raise that level of consciousness.

People are just naturally saying, I'm gonna make sure that for this job, I have a diverse slate of candidates, and I'm going to look broadly beyond what you see on that resume, because ultimately, for a recruiter of mine, when they're looking at a resume and screening that candidate, they don't have the depth of knowledge around what is that job like on a day-to-day basis?

What's the good and the bad and the ugly around that job?

I think that's where we connect those life experiences that that individual may have that don't-show-up on that resume, those intangibles.

Amanda talked about military veterans.

Very rarely do we find the mindset of taking all those experiences that occur in the military, teamwork, leadership, all those things, they don't necessarily get translated really well on a resume, so we will sit that resume off to the side and pick someone else when in fact that person probably has what it takes to be not only successful, but continue to grow through your organization.

So I think it's really raising everyone's level of consciousness.

- How do you coach your recruiters and others or advise others to become aware of their own implicit biases when screening, when going through a stack of resumes, or when you're sitting in an interview?

- [Alan] What we've done within MetroHealth since the death of George Floyd, my HR team, so my entire team, not just the recruiters, but we've taken all of them through over 12 hours of deep immersive training.

And I think what's different now versus the way inclusion, diversity and equity were practiced in the past, we've gone directly to racism.

Typically, you dance around that because that's the uncomfortable stuff.

That's the stuff that results in a lot of silence on a call, a lot of silence in a meeting.

We've gone directly there and we've literally ripped the bandaid off, and in our deep immersive education, we've looked at Emmett Till.

We've looked at "Strange Fruit".

We've seen images.

We've heard from leaders who have really shared their story, and one of the things we're really proud of is we've captured those things on video.

So we have a "Healing Begins With Listening" video series that we released that's available both internal and external that shows the pain and heartache associated with systemic racism so that you begin to not only hear, but you then listen with empathy.

So that empathetic listening leads to opening yourself up to learn in order to behave differently.

We really think that your thinking ties directly to your behaviors and results in very different outcomes for you.

- Alan Nevel is Senior Vice President, Chief Diversity and Human Resources Officer at the MetroHealth System.

I wanna talk about some larger systemic things we've been talking with Alan, specifically about things that can be implemented internal to an organization.

Bethia Burke, the Fund for Our Economic Future focuses a lot of its research and advocacy around shifting the whole structure of the way our community works.

Paradox Prize has been really focused on that.

Can you briefly describe the Paradox Prize connected to what we're talking about here and help us understand what learnings you've had?

- [Bethia] Sure.

Paradox Prize aims to break the paradox of no car, no job, no job, no car.

So it stems from the reality that where our employment base has grown is disproportionately disconnected from where people live, and in particular where concentrations of communities of color are, and that puts a big burden on people.

So for example, it can take, our anecdote that we use a lot is it can take 90 minutes, 89 stops and two transfers to get from the Central Neighborhood out to Solon, which is one of our largest employment centers, largest growing employment centers.

- [Dan] Just say that again, 90 minutes.

- [Bethia] Yeah.

- 89 stops.

- [Bethia] 90 minutes, 89 stops and two transfers.

Now that was a couple of years ago, RTA has redesigned its system, so I don't wanna put that on India Birdsong, the CEO over there, but that's a real commute that people were facing.

And then when we talk about things like how you grow in a career pathway, well, one of the things you have to do to grow in your career is to get extra training a lot of times.

If you're spending three hours a day commuting, you're probably not having enough time or energy to take that extra class or to advance in your degree, even if you are worked for a great company like MetroHealth that has tuition reimbursement.

So this related system, this transportation system really affects what happens in the workplace, whether a person can show up regularly on time and really grow in their job.

The Paradox Prize work is really trying to identify ways to compliment our existing system, because the public transportation system shouldn't be asked to do everything.

And we don't really have innovation dollars, and in a lot of our public systems, but transportation being one of them.

And so this was a way to stimulate new ideas to try and provide different kinds of ways of getting around to people and seeing whether it helped them both reduce commute times, but also to get more jobs.

- Bethia Burke is the President of the Fund for Our Economic Future.

If you have a question about equity and workforce development, you should text it to 330-541-5794.

That number again is 330-541-5794, to text your question.

You can also tweet it at The City Club, we'll work it into the program.

I'm Dan Moulthrop with "The City Club Friday Forum".

And as I said, our topic today is workforce equity, workforce development, equity, and really grappling with the reality that we really don't have a whole lot of equity.

And we have a lot of work to do right now.

- [Amanda] Yeah.

- Amanda Cage is also with us.

She's President and CEO of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

And Amanda, you've been talking about the national picture broadly, but, and you mentioned the work that you're doing in cities such as Dallas, Boston, Seattle and San Francisco.

And I wonder if you can tell us, so what you're seeing implemented at a community-wide or city-wide level that is actually making a difference.

- [Amanda] Yeah.

So I will say what's interesting about those five cities in particular is they're five powerhouse cities, right?

If you were going to name cities that are doing all the right things around economic growth, you would come up with that list.

And yet when we did dig into the disaggregated data, it really told a story of not one economy, but sort of a tale of two labor markets, three labor markets, some places, four markets, because you really have to drill down into what's happening with different communities within those labor markets.

And so that was a lot of work to really look at that.

And they brought together, each of these communities brought together stakeholders and conductors to look at that data together.

And as that's said, whether you're working within a firm or working in the community, once you start doing that census and looking at that data, it's surprising to people how deep those inequities are, and being able to sit with a group of people to digest that and figure out what you're going to do together as a community is really critical.

- [Dan] What are those cities doing as a community?

- [Amanda] Yeah, yeah.

So I'll tell you, first of all, nobody's figured it out, right?

We have not solved this problem anywhere.

And I think in our field, we love to do things like, tell us who's doing it great and what the best practices are and we'll replicate it here.

That doesn't exist, right?

There's just no replicating.

There is a lot of deep, as Alan described, a lot of deep internal work that needs to be done to surface what that looks like in a local community.

I will tell you the thing that came up, right?

And it's a little different than the traditional, oh, let's train workers and figure out how to get them jobs.

There was built off of that.

So there's still a lot of, we have industries, high-growth industries, IT, manufacturing where we are missing people of color and women, and how do we get them into those programs?

And so those programs still exist.

I think people are thinking much more broadly about how to make people successful in those programs, which means oftentimes changing the culture within those industries and changing the culture within those firms.

For some places, it was about leadership.

So for example, Seattle, a lot of their focus isn't about policy or program, it's about how decisions get made with community.

So really thinking about leaders of color and how to amplify their voices when talking about policy and direction of the city, how to build that leadership group.

So again, not at all about a policy or program, but more about how leadership is involved in making decisions.

In places like Chicago and San Francisco for example, things that came up was that there really is a power imbalance between workers and employers and much more focused on what do we need to do to strengthen the floor for workers who are at the bottom in terms of making sure that they know their rights, thinking about collective ways to work with those folks to organize.

So very different.

Boston, looking at how do you diversify the building trades?

Very different strategies that came out, very practical strategies that came out, but it sort of emphasizes that even though these programs, these problems are national, their solutions are very, very local.

- Amanda Cage, how much does it matter who is in the C-suite?

- [Amanda] I think it does matter who's in the C-suite of companies.

No, in my mind, it matters who's at every single layer of that company (laughing) right?

So we we have a funnel problem and definitely we need more leadership at the C-suite of firms.

We know there's all sorts of research that shows like once you get a woman into a CEO role, that changes the demographics of what's happening at that firm, that is truth for sure.

But I will say that where I think a lot of power lies is that mid manager, sort of that level of leadership that Alan described within his firm, the hiring managers, the people who are running units, the directors, because they have a lot of impact in terms of the hiring process which brings people in and on, but also in how we support workers once they get there to take those pipelines that everyone believes that they have, but they're totally clogged, and really create space for people to move up in the company.

And there's ways that we can think about doing that differently.

So it's not just the C-suite, it's everybody up and down.

- Alan Nevel, how are you seeing this play out locally?

- [Alan] There are a number of local programs that we're involved in.

First off, we're very proud of the relationship we have with Cuyahoga Community College, better known as Tri-C. We've jointly launched a Job Access Center.

And that Job Access Center is designed to provide opportunities for both employees of the MetroHealth System as well as citizens of the community to kinda get that jumpstart to further their education, which ultimately will increase their socioeconomic viability.

And we actually offer free classes.

So one of the things that we know that is a barrier for people of color is that digital divide.

So we offer free classes on computer literacy, and not just how do you leverage the Microsoft office suite?

Let's start out with, this is a mouse.

This is a keyboard.

Let's start with the basics to get people up to a level of competence, because we understand that everybody is approaching this coming in from a different direction.

So we've got a program through the Job Access Center that we're very proud of.

Again, with these free classes, you can actually get a Google IT Certification for free.

We have STNA, State Tested Nursing Assistance programs, that you can take those classes and ultimately have a good-paying job immediately.

So you may aspire to become a nurse but you don't have the financial wherewithal to go directly to nursing school, you can get your STMA certification, begin working and then leverage, like I said, our tuition reimbursement.

We also are part of the Health Care Sector Collaborative, which is here in Greater Cleveland made up of all of the major healthcare systems.

And that work launched back in August of 2019, things moved a little slow due to COVID in 2020 as it did for everyone, but we're about to launch a bootcamp, and there are three sub-teams that drive the work around this Health Care Sector Collaborative.

We all realized across all of these healthcare systems, we all have open jobs every month, and we're looking for talent to fill those jobs.

So rather than competing against one another, how about if we all work together?

It doesn't matter whether you take a job at MetroHealth or UH or any of the other entities, we wanna make sure that we're raising the economic status of all of our citizens in the community.

So we formed these partnerships that didn't naturally exist before, and I think 2020 with the turmoil of that year, it's caused all of us to really come together in even a more intentional manner to address this.

The last thing that I wanna just mention on is that we we've got.

- I just wanna jump in for a second here, Alan, because the idea of the three major hospitals collaborating to source talent, that's like the Browns and the Steelers being like, I don't know, you want Baker or you want Ben?

Like whatever, that's cool.

(Alan laughing) - [Alan] Exactly.

Exactly.

But at the end of the day, it's about, we love this town.

We love this community, so we have to invest in it together.

The last thing I wanted to mention is we are the only healthcare system in the nation that has a STEM high school located on its main campus, the Lincoln-West School of Science and Health.

And we recently graduated our third class in that school.

We've been in existence since 2016.

And the vast majority of our students are students of color, many of whom English is not their native tongue, and giving them the opportunity and the access.

And I think when we talk about our economic futures, we have to start with our youth.

That's my opinion.

And having these students on campus being able to see, touch, feel people who look like them who are in careers that they aspire to goes a long way.

One of the things that we do with our students is we immediately connect you with a mentor who follows you through your high school years and often to college, secondary schools, whatever, a technical school, but we wanna make sure we maintain that connectivity with that student, and she or he has the opportunity to then work for the MetroHealth System if they so desire.

So I think the key around this is investing in our youth as well around these opportunities.

Our kids are able to take an internship making $15 an hour.

- So this is a good reminder, Alan Nevel, that this is not a sort of silver bullet done overnight kind of thing, but rather a generational journey to implement almost incremental change that eventually will feel like it's society-wide.

Turning to questions from our listening audience, Bethia Berg, would you talk a little bit about how workforce automation is feeding increased discrimination or is having disparate impacts?

- [Bethia] Yeah, I think that a lot of this is also in the National Funds Report, but that the jobs that are most at risk for automation are also those jobs that are disproportionately held by people of color.

And so we have to worry about that because that's gonna start cutting off a lot of people from the labor force now and in the coming years.

- Amanda Cage, would you some- - [Amanda] Yeah, I would just add to that, for those of us in the workforce development field, the future of work we've been talking about for a long time, and it was like the future of work out here real quick.

Anything that could be automated, we just spent a year where we can't be with each other.

So there was all the incentive in the world for people to automate as much as they can.

And simultaneously, we just saw that the infrastructure was broken.

Whether you're, who got to work remote or what students had access to classrooms, like there was just a nationwide audit of our infrastructure around technology and we failed.

We failed big time.

So I think this is going to be an ongoing issue, not just for the workforce, but for all aspects of our society in terms of getting people the digital skills and really dealing with basic digital literacy to get people all on the same level.

- Speaking of automation, another question from our audience, some recruiters use technology and artificial intelligence to complete a first level of resume screening.

Can that technology be programmed for race-neutral screening?

But we already determined that race-neutral isn't really race-neutral.

And we know there's a lot of problems with the algorithms.

Can you use tech for any of this, or is this ultimately like a human problem that needs to be solved by humans?

Amanda Cage?

- [Amanda] Yeah.

I'll say technology can be used as a tool for good or for bad.

One of the things in the workforce development space, technology as a tool to filter, especially entry-level jobs just became a massive barrier for folks who couldn't navigate that technology.

So we're sort of always dealing with the other end of that, helping people, like we would have programs to help people like break through that system, whatever it was, because there's always sort of like tricks around making sure you can get through the portals.

In terms of artificial intelligence, whatever biases that we have, we tend to build into our technology.

I've seen some firms that are doing amazing work, trying to to strip back of that, it's those examples.

So firms who are trying to present people's experience instead of their educational credential, 'cause whether or not they have one and where it's from tend to be very clear markers to folks.

And if we can strip away some of that identifying information and get to whether or not people actually have the skills and experience to have the job, technology can be used for that as well.

So it really is, I think of technology as not being bad or good, but how we use that technology.

- Another question, Alan Nevel, go ahead.

- [Alan] Yeah.

I just wanted to chime in real quick.

I think a lot of times, we look at technology as being the savior, if you will, to all of our problems, when ultimately, we can't hold that tool whatever it is accountable, we can hold ourselves accountable.

So I think you have to have the right blend.

Ultimately, we've gotta own this.

Everything that has transpired over hundreds of years to get us to where we are this moment, we have to own it together.

And we can't look at a tool as being the thing that's going to get us out of this.

It requires multiple partnerships like what you have on this call right now, we're all working toward the same goal, same thing in terms of all the health systems here in town, getting together to address our workforce needs.

That's what's required.

- Well, you mentioned, Alan, before, the word partnership is really important here.

And you mentioned that the sector partnership in healthcare that is reaping rewards right now and dividends for the community, it's worth pointing out to our audience that those kinds of partnerships, those sector partnerships also exist, Bethia Burke, in manufacturing and other sectors as well.

- [Bethia] Yes.

So Alan mentioned Cuyahoga Community College.

We have Magnet and the Greater Cleveland Partnership working in the spaces of manufacturing and IT.

And I'll say that I think that it's important to underline all of Alan's points that I think, I believe that people who are running companies and people who are managing humans care about their workforce, right?

It is that we have this narrative that it's a skills gap, and therefore that's what we've been heavily focused on, but if we think differently about what as these sector partnerships are, about what the causes are and where we have influence, that that's where we can open up new ways of doing business that these sector partnerships are working on right now.

- So humans do care about other humans, Bethia Burke, but let me ask you this question from one of our listeners, if education and training and HR practices aren't moving the needle enough on worker outcomes, it sounds like the onus falls to workers to organize.

Will there be local supportive efforts to build worker power through organized labor and other avenues, for example, the recent Amazon workers' strikes and other attempts to organize for better working conditions when all else fails?

And also, I think it's worth noting that often these worker or these labor-organizing efforts sometimes often are emerging as a result of discriminatory practices as a response to perceive discriminatory practices in the workplace.

But Bethia, talk a little bit about how you see that locally and then maybe we can also talk nationally a little bit.

- [Bethia] Yeah.

I think that this is an area where it's sort of ebbed and flowed over time in the history of the United States, right?

The degree to which we listen to worker voice, and that as we lift up and see more clearly the disparities that people are facing, yeah, in some cases you're gonna have places like MetroHealth that are gonna take action and do what they can internally and externally to drive to close those.

And when we don't, when we have companies or the sectors that aren't being responsive, then I think it is really important that the people who are working in these conditions, that people who are facing unfair practices have the ability to highlight it and speak up, because ultimately, they're an asset to the company and that they need to be listened to in the same way that, well, I was just gonna make a bad analogy, so I won't.

But I think that people have to be listened to.

- Amanda Cage, when you think about the emergence of new labor-organizing efforts, and it does seem like there's this sort of resurgent power of organized labor right now, do you see it related to these very issues of discrimination in the workplace, race-based discrimination in the workplace?

- [Amanda] Oh yeah.

I think it's related to race-based discrimination in the workplace.

It's also related to the fact that over the last three or four decades, we've seen a roll back of a lot of what we consider to be basic labor law in this country, and that has showed up in a lot of different ways.

I started my career as a union organizer.

I call myself a retired union organizer.

And one of the things I feel like I always have to bring to this conversation, and we are in a moment where there is more of a interest than we have seen historically, even at the height of the unionization, it was 30% of the workers in this country who are organized.

That means 70% work, right?

So when you're thinking about 70% of the labor market, there has got to be ways where we operate outside it within the context that we have, which is employers, hiring managers, directors to deal with these issues - Alan Nevel, you were trying to get in on that.

- [Alan] Yeah, if I see.

Yeah, if I can chime in on that, I think what Amanda raises is a very solid point.

Ultimately, I think it goes to the culture of your organization and your leadership.

When George Floyd was murdered, we immediately reached out to our employees to find out what was on their hearts, and minds and not just related to racism and social injustice, but what can we do within the four walls of the MetroHealth System in order for you to be at your best on a consistent basis?

And I think in organizations where you listen, that's where you're going to get that type of partnership between management and labor in order to to fix things.

I think you have to create a psychologically and physically safe environment for folks to be comfortable speaking up.

And ultimately, with all the challenges within every one of our organizations, we have to do it together.

So when you have a culture where everyone has the opportunity to speak up, then you have that level of partnership.

- Clarifying question here regarding our conversation about listing the degrees as requirements on job postings, Alan Nevel, are you suggesting that jobs such as teaching should not ask about a degree?

(Alan laughing) That's the question.

- [Alan] I think, okay, so I'm gonna flip that question back on that viewer.

I would say, obviously there are certain roles where you have to have a degree.

A physician needs to have a medical degree.

A nurse needs to have some nursing degree, may not be a bachelor's in nursing, may be an LPN, what have you, but I think there are a lot of roles within healthcare that people don't really think about.

Everybody isn't a doctor.

Everybody isn't a nurse, everybody isn't a nurse assistant.

We have folks in HR, for instance, we have folks in finance and supply chain.

And I think we have to think outside the box around those roles because those are good-paying jobs as well.

So to answer the question around, do you have to have a teaching degree to be a teacher?

There are plenty of kids who've had to have homeschooling with the outbreak of COVID.

A lot of moms and dads are at home being teachers while still doing their day job (laughing) and- - What are you talking about, Alan?

- What are you talking about?

- [Alan] So yeah, I think that's my response to that question.

- Yeah, I'm pushing the envelope of self-taught.

We're just trying to figure out how far the kids can get with that.

Another question for all of you, but Amanda Cage, we'll start with you, public school districts are often the top employers in the city, or the largest employers in the city who are the connectors that school districts can reach out to to diversify the workforce.

Obviously as well, this would have huge impacts because teachers in the classroom and leaders in education, if they're diverse and they look more like the students, students see themselves in those leadership roles.

- [Amanda] Yeah.

And Alan, you can pitch in on this from the healthcare perspective 'cause I think it's two books within healthcare and education, which is you have that talent inside already.

When you look at all the paraprofessionals in school districts, and especially in big urban school districts, when you look at folks who, again, early childhood teachers, when you look at the lowest-paid group of educators is early childhood folks who are sort of segregated within that preschool and as opposed to the K through 12 trajectory.

There are a number of sort of throw-your-own programs that have been really successful.

I live in Chicago, and Chicago has a program that really looks at folks who already work within the school system who are interested in getting involved in teaching and how to help them on that career trajectory.

And this has everything to do with your internal programs.

So like we said, a lot of educational programs in companies focus on their white-collar, already high-skilled workers, right?

If you take some of those opportunities in terms of tuition reimbursement, in terms of helping people make those connections and create them within all aspects of your, in this case, the company is a school, it really does diversify the folks who are able to move into those jobs, and healthcare is the perfect example of that.

There are a lot of really great programs that move folks from other aspects of the healthcare ecosystem into some of those patient-facing more technical jobs.

And there's a lot of technical jobs that are available, good middle-wage technical jobs that are available within the healthcare system - Alan Nevel, anything to add there?

Okay, I guess not.

I think we've lost Alan on the audio connection for a second.

Bethia Burke, as we wrap up, I wonder if you can give us a sense of where you see this work progressing, what we can look to or what we should be paying attention to as indicators that we're moving the needle as a community.

- [Bethia] Yeah.

I think importantly, we shouldn't rely on annual data that shows closing wage gaps because that's income gaps 'cause that's gonna take a long time.

We should keep looking at that and we should look at it every year.

And we should recognize that it's at least probably a 10-year journey to try and really see movement in those disparities.

And so it's critically important that we look to leadership from, in particular, I think we've talked a lot today about the private sector, for what people are doing to change where they're sourcing from, how they're working with other companies on a better career paths, we didn't touch on today, but that the middle-wage jobs had dropped out, so it's really hard to progress from a low-wage job to a high-wage job.

But through company partnerships, you can build some bridges that you might not be able to do alone.

So where are we?

I think what we need to look to and what we need to hold to the degree we can people accountable for is commitment to change, and then demonstrable action that change is happening, and then we'll start to see, we hope, some movement in the numbers.

- Alan Nevel, briefly, as we wrap up what are you measuring?

What are the things that we can measure as a community?

- [Alan] I really think there are a number of them.

In terms of the ability to, and I think it's going to require business and education, and Amanda was kinda going there before, I think, to come together.

One of the things that we do with the Lincoln-West School of Science and Health, we actually get involved in curriculum design, because we know what those jobs look like that are out there, that those kids aspire to.

So let's partner with the schools to develop the curriculums that allow them to compete for those roles when they come into play.

So I think it requires a lot more partnership.

And then in terms of measurements, really what will enable us to move the needle is when we see for instance, hiring managers automatically hiring for diversity, because they know the power of it, and it goes viral.

There are a couple of things that are going on that I can't speak about right now within MetroHealth where we're seeing leaders automatically behaving the way that we desire them to, and it's going viral.

I see you developing diverse teams and seeing good business results, then Bethia sees that and she takes on, and then Amanda takes on.

So I think there's a viral nature to this.

- And we'll be keeping our eye on that viral nature.

Alan Nevel is the Chief of Human Resources and Diversity at MetroHealth.

Bethia Burke, President of the Fund for Our Economic Future, and Amanda Cage of the Fund for Workforce Solutions.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

- Okay.

Thank you very much for having me.

- Our forum today is at the the John W. Barkley Memorial Forum.

He was a "City Club" member for 70 years.

We are so grateful to him and his law firm, formerly Squire Sanders & Dempsey, and his family for their support and engagement with "The City Club".

And thanks also to the Deaconess Foundation for their collaboration in planning this forum.

I'm Dan Moulthrop, this forum is adjourned.

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