Three days before Thanksgiving, I received a press release from Northwestern University proclaiming a great day in the school’s history: “Mayor Rahm Emanuel to speak on campus.”
That’s a very impressive-sounding claim until you realize that there’s no substantive link between anything the mayor does and these jobs, other than his habit of taking credit for them. Mayor Emanuel might as well send out a press release saying that the sun has risen in the east every day since he took office—an equally accurate though irrelevant correlation.
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In other words, Emanuel will essentially take money that’s been going to pay people who live in Chatham, South Shore, and other local communities and send it to Japan. All in the name of helping the taxpayer.
The spokesman added that the call center workers will “have a chance” to move into other unfilled city jobs, though there are no guarantees.
In the meantime, the real problem of economic development in Chicago is that the new jobs the mayor brags about are not being filled by people who live in the communities that need them the most. Meanwhile, the mayor replaces union jobs that bring much-needed money to hard-hit communities with low-wage, part-time ones.
