Jeff Johnson Shares Thoughts On CBC’s Jobs Tour, Engaging Youth

Media personality, political commentator and MSNBC correspondent Jeff Johnson has been tapped to moderate town hall meetings at stops on the five-city “For the People” Jobs Tour launched by the Congressional Black Caucus. He is also covering the tour for MSNBC.  In the past several years, Johnson has garnered acclaim for his penetrating oratory and adept engagement of young minority audiences in political and public affairs.

He spoke recently with Politic365 about the Jobs Tour and why the tour should matter to young Americans.

POLITIC365: I’m aware that you’re moderating the town halls at the CBC Jobs Tour and you’re also covering the tour for MSNBC. I’m interested in your story and why you chose to align yourself with the tour and why you chose to participate to the extent that you are.

I think at the end of the day, there’s no issue more important than jobs and there’s nobody more affected by the lack of employment in the United States than African Americans. To not associate myself with this tour would be an indictment because, at the end of the day, there is not a more important issue that we’re dealing with.

POLITIC365: You attended the first stop in Cleveland.  What were some of your impressions and your thoughts while you were on the ground?

I am from Cleveland, so I didn’t need to go there for this to know that Cleveland is a city that is suffering unlike most.  Detroit, Cleveland, Newark – these are all very industrial towns that have a history of manufacturing and in many cases have not been able to recover from not just the economic downturn of the last five years, but have been struggling to deal with the economic downturn – the economic shift of the last twenty.

POLITIC365: Did you leave feeling that the attendees of the Job Fair left with a sense of hope once you departed? What did you take away from the folks who attended the job fair?

I think some people were frustrated.  I think there were a lot of folks that while they appreciated being able to have access to over 200 employers, and some talked to them about job readiness and continuing education, at the end of the day, what these people want more than anything else is work. And so the CBC Job Tour has a certain capacity.  They can only connect you to as many jobs as there are available. I think that this is a step in the right direction, but to think this is going to be the “end all be all” for what people in these local communities need is not only misguided but almost insulting to work that we as a country are going to collectively have to do to encourage job growth through small business development, through expanding the capacity through existing small businesses and creating an environment where even corporations, globally, want U.S. workers, and that’s not going to happen from a CBC Jobs Tour….”

POLITIC365: You have had tremendous success in engaging young folks in the political process.  You’ve been involved a variety of different endeavors, and you’ve got the ear of young people.  Why should this initiative matter to young folks?  As a follow-up question to that, what are some of your thoughts for getting young folks engaged in this CBC initiative?

Young people care and should care because they want to work.  They should care because they want their parents to work.  They should care because they want to graduate from school in a marketplace and an economy that has employment for them that makes that investment in that degree have some return on the investment. For all those reasons and more, they should care about this, and I think that young people these days is a relative term, but you saw a lot of college students, recent college grads that were there at the job fair and concerned about getting employment … I think we’ve got to do a better job … engaging young people – and I mean teenagers and pre-teens around specific employment and really start talking about employment readiness – how do we use secondary education, undergraduate education, postsecondary education, and training to be able to make sure that we’ve got the most qualified and competent, excellent workforce the world has ever seen.  That’s why young people need to be concerned, because it’s really less about the job that they are going to get tomorrow. This is about how do they get prepared for the job they’re going to have 10 years [from] tomorrow….”

Kenneth Mallory, a political correspondent for Politic365, is an award-winning journalist and attorney who has free-lanced for several publications, in addition to serving as a general assignment reporter for the Washington Afro-American Newspaper. He earned his B.A. magna cum laude from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in addition to his J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law.

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