Chains and Ladders: Exploring the Opportunities for Workforce Development and Poverty Reduction in the Hospital Sector

Abstract

In this article, the authors investigate the potential of hospitals to offer low-and semiskilled workers employment and adva ncement options. This study uses the job chains approach to measuring economic development impacts devised by Persky, Felsenstein, and Carlson to compare hospitals with three other industries highly concentrated in central cities and examines the practical challenges facing workforce development professionals. The findings suggest that growth in hospital employment has the potential to outstrip the impact of growth in accommodations, legal services, and securities and commodities on the well-being of low-income workers and should prompt economic development practitioners to take the sector more seriously as a locus for attention and investment. To maximize welfare gain and distributional equity, economic development policy makers must accompany investments in health care-based economic development both with strategies to promote skills attainment and credentialing among low-paid health care workers and with formal strategies to facilitate upward movement.

Policy Versus Place Luck: Achieving Local Economic Prosperity

“…• Crime: Crime has consistently been found to be a drag on economic growth (Bowes, 2007;Erickcek & McKinney, 2006;Gottlieb, 1994;Liu et al, 2010;Trip, 2007). • Health care: The presence of hospitals or other health care facilities has been found to contribute to economic growth (Nelson, 2009;Nelson & Wolf-Powers, 2010). • Institutions of higher learning: Generally, proximity to institutions of higher education has been found to be an economic driver for a variety of reasons, including their stimulative effects on hightechnology spin-offs and consumer spending as well as their attraction of highly educated individuals among faculty and students (Goldstein & Drucker, 2006;Hedge, 2005;Smilor, O'Donnel, Stein, & Welborn, 2007).…”

Shared Skills: Occupation Clusters for Poverty Alleviation and Economic Development in the US

“…Research that has begun to address this mobility includes a study of job chains in the hospital sector (Nelson and Wolf-Powers, 2010). A job chain is a series of vacancies triggered by the generation of a new position.…”

“…A growing body of literature has sought to make explicit the relationship between economic development strategies and poverty reduction (Markusen, 2004; Nelson and Wolf-Powers, 2010; Peters and Fisher, 2004). Evidence of the direct impacts of economic development on poverty levels in the United States is still limited, but currently shows mixed results on whether the poor have benefited substantially from industry cluster targeting, enterprise zones or similar incentives (Fowler and Kleit, 2010; Neumark and Kolko, 2010; Peters and Fisher, 2004).…”

The Role of the Planning Scholar

“…To this end, the activist-scholar does not enter into a partnership relationship to work with the subjects as in the community-based research role but rather is a member of the group upon which their research is focused. In planning and closely related disciplines, activist-scholars have participated in and written on the antiglobalization movement (Routledge 2008; Chatterton 2008), housing and social justice issues (Leavitt and Saegert 1990; Leavitt and Heffernan 2005), economic development and poverty reduction (Nelson and Wolf-Powers 2010), and feminist and gender equity struggles. For activist-scholars, research flows directly out of their participation in the social movement.…”