“I like to decorate,” Khadija Collins exclaimed, her excitement evident as she showed a photograph on her phone of a bathroom she transformed with fall-colored flower arrangements and decor at the barbershop she co-owns with her husband.
Because of her love for decorating, Collins said she often finds part-time employment at dollar stores as a cashier, which lets her earn an income while her 5-year-old daughter, Dream Bella, is at school.
However, after leaving her most recent position at a Dollar General store, Collins said she has been looking for work for two months.
While she enjoyed her former role, she struggled to get enough hours because the positions are often seasonal and, after the holidays, her hours were significantly reduced.
“It wasn’t enough work,” she said. “That’s probably the third job I’ve had, I want to say in a year and a half, where they like, downsize you, they start you off with four and five days, maybe 35 hours a week, and then you only get like 12 hours a week.”
Now that she and her husband moved to a home in Dolton, they need the extra income to cover their bills, she said.
An analysis of state employment data underscores the challenges in securing stable employment, especially in many south suburban towns that have unemployment rates significantly higher than the state average. These areas, with predominantly Black populations, face unique challenges such as lack of transportation, disinvestment and a fluctuating job market, experts say.
Collins, who is on the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, said she received a text alert from the program that notified her of a job fair held Tuesday in Robbins.
Lawanda Gosa, community outreach director for Robbins, said the job fair was the third she organized in the last year.
While the previous fair concentrated on providing resources to residents, Tuesday’s event shifted its focus to job opportunities with immediate interview prospects, Gosa said.
“I had more resources at that job fair than I had actual job vendors,” she said. “A lot of people coming in, they really want the interview on the spot. So this time, we wanted to just really focus on interviews for jobs.”
Collins stopped at each table at Tuesday’s job fair in her search for a retail position, seeking something more consistent than her usual cashier roles. She noted her greatest challenge in finding employment has been the fluctuating labor market, which complicates the search for steady work.
“The companies that I would work for would say that they don’t have enough money to pay for the employees’ hours, so you really get overworked, and then the holidays end and it’s like nothing,” she said.
Gosa said job seekers in the south suburbs face difficulties because the region lacks a significant presence of businesses and corporations, with many residents facing unemployment or finding work farther away with limited transportation means.
Illinois has the third highest unemployment rate in the country, with a long-term average rate of 6.75%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of July, the state’s unemployment rate rose to 5.2%, up from 4.4% in July 2023.
However, data from the Illinois Department of Employment Security on municipalities with populations of at least 25,000 reveal primarily low-income areas with minority populations in the south suburbs have some of the state’s highest unemployment rates.
Kyle Moore, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank tackling inequalities in the workforce, said racial disparities are evident in state employment trends.
“The ratio of black to white unemployment in Illinois is about 2.2 to 1 … Black workers are a little more likely than white workers to be unemployed,” he said.
According to the July data, Harvey has the highest unemployment rate at 10.8%, while Dolton follows closely with the third-highest rate at 10.1%. South Holland, Calumet City, Lansing and Evergreen Park also have unemployment rates well above the state average.
But while unemployment rates are at their lowest since the pandemic, Moore said workers employed in retail or manufacturing jobs still seeing high levels of turnover.
“Even if the unemployment rates are lower, they may just be industries where there is a high amount of turnover,” he said. “It comes down to those sort of long standing structural trends … and that occupational segregation that may see certain groups more represented in certain occupations than others.”
Liz Agbarah, senior director of development at Proactive Community Services, a nonprofit offering employment preparation and placement in the south suburbs, said unemployment rates in these areas largely resemble those in Chicago.
But while government resources are funneled to Chicago to assist with housing, employment, youth development and violence reduction, Agbarah said the south suburbs are largely left out of those funding conversations.
“The south suburbs of Chicago really is kind of becoming an extension of the South Side of Chicago,” Agbarah said. “And so if you start looking at rates of homelessness, rates of HIV, the same rate of drug use and misuse, the same rate of unemployment. It’s the same as it is in south Chicago. It just looks a little bit different.”
Still, Agbarah recognizes the needs in the south suburbs differ from those in the inner city.
“In the city there’s not the lack of transportation. That’s huge out here,” she said. “You’re really well connected in the city. And it’s not like that in the suburbs. And affordable housing is really hard too, if you don’t get a place to lay your head at night … it’s really hard to make it to work.”
To combat consistently high unemployment rates in the south suburbs, Agbarah said the nonprofit takes a holistic approach, addressing individuals’ needs in housing, transportation and employment.
After organizing job fairs in Robbins over the past few years, Gosa said another barrier for many in the community is finding employment with a criminal record.
“It’s hard for some people to break a habit or addiction that was something in their background that they just can’t get out of,” she said.
For some, the fluctuating job market and the overwhelming volume of applications, combined with automated systems that often filter out candidates, make finding even entry-level positions challenging.
University Park resident Rashaun Hodges, 40, has experience working in warehouses for 15 years, but came to the job fair in Robbins because he was struggling to find employment. Hodges believes he was unfairly fired from his former position at an Amazon distribution center where he worked for the last two years, and has since been living on unemployment.
After sending out applications to a number of companies that he said turned him down without an interview, Hodges said he believes his age could be deterring employers from looking at his application.
“They want, I guess they said, the younger you are the faster you are,” he said. “I’m 40 years old, so the challenge I’m feeling right now, because I kind of got turned down, I feel like something is going on in my background that I don’t know of.”
Collins said she experienced similar issues when finding employment, and came to the Robbins job fair with hopes of landing an interview with UPS.
“I know they’re always hiring, but every time I apply online, I can’t get in, they never call me back,” she said.
Other organizations in the Southland partner with Proactive Community Services to help unhoused or unemployed individuals not only find a job, but also develop a community, Agbarah said.
“When clients come to us, they really have lost their community somehow,” she said. “And that’s how people remain successful and are able to stand on their own.”
smoilanen@chicagotribune.com
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