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The leaders of some of New York’s largest employers are pledging to hire 100,000 low-income and people of color over the next decade.
Executives from 27 companies — including JPMorgan Chase & Co. JPM, +1.26% CEO Jamie Dimon; IBM Corp. IBM, +1.72% CEO Arvind Krishna; Goldman Sachs Group Inc. GS, +0.53% CEO David Solomon; Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, -0.60% CEO Jeff Bezos; Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -1.99% CEO Satya Nadella; and Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, -0.10% GOOG, +0.10% CEO Sundar Pichai — are launching the New York Jobs CEO Council as a collaborative effort to address systemic economic inequality.
“These are well-paying jobs that will help New Yorkers gain access to economic opportunity and a path to the middle class,” Dimon, a co-chair of the group, and City University of New York Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Monday. About 25,000 CUNY students are expected to benefit from the jobs and apprenticeships.
“Many New Yorkers are stuck in low-paying jobs that could be lost in the future or are struggling to navigate the labor market” during the current economic crisis caused by the pandemic, Dimon said in a separate statement. “We are using our collective power to prepare the city’s workforce with the skills of the future and helping New Yorkers who have been left behind get a foot in the door.”
The program will target Black, Latinx and Asian workers, and seeks to hire based more on skills than college degrees, focusing on entry-level tech jobs such as computer programming.
Dr. Gail Mellow, the former president of LaGuardia Community College, will lead the group.
New York has been particularly hard hit by job losses amid the pandemic, with an unemployment rate of nearly 16% in New York state and more then 20% in New York City.
