Low literacy limits half of Phila. workforce, study finds

More than half of Philadelphia's working-age adults, about 550,000 people, cannot handle the basic arithmetic and reading necessary to succeed in the majority of jobs in the city.

"If you have low literacy, you have a labor market that doesn't welcome you," said Paul Harrington, a labor economist who created a study of workforce readiness for the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board.

The study will be released tomorrow.

The average Philadelphia score for prose literacy - meaning the ability to read simple instructions and pull some facts out of a paragraph - is 260 out of 500.

Yet people who are health-care technicians, secretaries, teachers, engineers, architects, scientists, computer technicians, drafters, managers, librarians, bankers, insurers, security guards, repairmen, and community organizers - the majority of jobs in Philadelphia - need higher scores, from 277 to 336, to accomplish their tasks.

In Philadelphia, 75 percent of the jobs require that level of literacy. Yet half of Philadelphia's work-age adults cannot handle the tasks.

The situation is even worse in math, with nearly two-thirds of Philadelphia's work-age adults at basic levels or below, the study shows.

"Philadelphia is a city of extremes," Harrington said.

The extremes that he is talking about are between the categories of Philadelphia jobs, with most requiring very high literacy or accommodating very low literacy. There are also extremes in math levels, with some adults being proficient while the majority are befuddled by simple arithmetic.

And finally, he said, this leads to extremes in income, with the less literate likely to live in poverty, with all the accompanying problems.

"The gaps in earnings have really gotten much broader," he said.

While Harrington's study was conducted exclusively for Philadelphia, the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics provides some comparisons using 2003 literacy data.

Among the nation's major cities, Philadelphia is about average, with 22 percent of work-age adults achieving only the lowest literacy level. New York and Boston are slightly worse, and the District of Columbia, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston are slightly better. Los Angeles is considerably worse, and Phoenix and Baltimore are considerably better.

The Harrington study of Philadelphia, which marries the 2003 national literacy data with 2005 local demographic information from the U.S. Census, comes at a time when national attention is focused on workplace training as part of President Obama's stimulus plan.

Even though adult literacy is a key component in employment, it sometimes falls through the cracks, said Sallie Glickman, chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board.

That's because adults are no longer part of the public school system and because workforce training often focuses on a particular skill, such as welding, rather than basic reading and math. The most effective programs link literacy with job requirements at a factory or office, or in a career center.

"This is a big problem," she said, "but we can address it. If we can address this, so many other things will be impacted in a positive way."

Glickman estimates that $12 million a year for seven years (or $84 million) spent on work-specific intensive literacy courses would net more than $370 million in taxes and savings in the city as workers earning more would pay more in taxes and would require less of the city services connected with poverty.

Workforce literacy is becoming a point of emphasis in the Philadelphia region.

In mid-July, Philadelphia's Urban Industry Alliance and the Manufacturing Alliance of Philadelphia will begin a job-ready program that will include basic adult literacy.

"Manufacturers have been complaining for years because they can't find workers with good basic skills and shop-level mathematics," said Steve Jurash, who heads the alliance.

The Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center was host to a group of state labor officials and manufacturing executives Thursday in a session designed to update the participants on efforts to increase education - from high school to community college and beyond - in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, said Anthony Girifalco, the group's vice president.

While the study's release may capture headlines, the findings do not surprise James Clark, Aker Philadelphia Shipyard's training manager.

In 2008, 313 people completed applications for the shipyard's apprentice program. Of them, 280 showed up to take an entrance test that required basic 10th-grade literacy. Only 125 passed. The top 15 began training in January.

"I believe there is definitely a literacy problem," he said.

Valerie McClain-Simone, human resource manager at PTR Bailer & Compactor Co., says that applicants at her Philadelphia manufacturing company do not know how to convert inches to feet, or decimals to fractions. "There is a huge deficit," she said.

Literacy challenges, said David Donald, chief executive of PeopleShare Inc., a Center City staffing agency, mean that workers cannot find jobs.

"Companies are increasingly requiring people to use a computer just to apply for a job," said Donald, who serves on the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board. "We know some people don't know how to use a computer."

If literacy is a problem for employers, it is a bigger problem for those who cannot read.

Steven J. Gianfrancesco, 50, of Center City, is about midway through literacy classes on the way to his GED.

Two years ago, at age 48, he was finally literate enough to pass the driver's test. More than once he quit a job because his supervisors wanted to promote him, but he knew he could not handle the reading.

"You try to hide it in everything you do," he said. "I always felt like I was in a corner, that I could never stand out."

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Go to http://go.philly.com/literacy for more information on literacy efforts in Philadelphia.