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The dearth of lower-paying, unskilled jobs has caused a rift in many low-income communities as immigrants and black Americans compete for these jobs.  Several organizations working in the greater Chicago area are doing outreach to work against the growing division between these communities.  Both the Instituto del Progreso Latino and the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council are looking to train members of both communities in higher paid manufacturing jobs. 

According to Dan Swinney, executive director of the council, deindustrialization has taken thousands of entry-level jobs from Chicago minority communities. But there is a labor shortage for skilled manufacturing jobs that pay more than $60,000 a year due to a generation of specially trained workers on the verge of retirement. “Latinos and blacks are fighting for unskilled jobs when they are more than enough skilled positions to go around,” he said.

The article also highlights the difficulties of uniting these two communities, despite the fact that they share many of the same issues and struggles:

Finding such common threads among these disparate groups of workers is one of the toughest challenges facing advocates and workers alike, said Tim Bell, executive director of Chicago Workers Collaborative, a group that works mostly with Latino day labor workers. “There is a real issue in terms of jobs, and it takes a lot of education and conscience building to overcome these animosities,” he said. “But the potential for collaboration is certainly there.”