Youth unemployment: Lack of opportunity in Illinois

Illinois is in a jobs crisis, now claiming the second-highest jobless rate nationally and the highest jobless rate in the Midwest. Gov. Pat Quinn and his allies are now on the move to make the problem worse for young people and minorities. Quinn should have learned from his own dismal record. Since Quinn took office,...

Illinois is in a jobs crisis, now claiming the second-highest jobless rate nationally and the highest jobless rate in the Midwest. Gov. Pat Quinn and his allies are now on the move to make the problem worse for young people and minorities.

Quinn should have learned from his own dismal record. Since Quinn took office, Illinois has been the only state in the Midwest in which joblessness has increased. And yet Quinn and his allies are now targeting young people and minorities with a minimum wage hike that will hurt them.

The state’s most vulnerable are already suffering levels of joblessness that will scar a generation. The Illinois Senate Executive Committee passed amendment to Senate Bill 68 that would raise the state’s minimum wage to $10.65 from $8.25. It’s a political ploy that only hurts those with no voice in Springfield.

It’s undeniable that there is a youth jobs crisis at the current minimum wage rate.

Minority youths are especially hurting. Many of them leave failing school systems and enter a job market where they can’t get hired. The state provides little educational training, and then makes it nearly impossible for low-skilled young people to get hired.

The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, makes the issue clear. Hiking the minimum wage is a jobs killer.

The CBO estimates that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 will cost 500,000 jobs nationally. An Illinois Policy Institute study shows that raising the minimum wage to $10.25 would cost at least 10,500 youth and unskilled workers their jobs. Raising the wage to $10.65 will be worse. Countless unskilled workers will never be hired.

Illinoisans should not tolerate their disenfranchised communities being robbed of jobs so that politicians can score political points.

This legislation is nonsense. It is a jobs killer. Illinoisans of all political stripes should oppose it.