A coalition of 17 companies announced Monday morning a job creation program called the “100,000 Opportunities Alliance,” which has a goal of being the nation’s largest employer-led group committed to creating jobs for 16- to 24-year-old Americans.
Among the companies involved in the coalition are Alaska Air Group Inc. (NYSE: ALK), CVS Health Corp. (NYSE: CVS), J.C. Penney Co. Inc. (NYSE: JCP), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX), Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT).
The coalition will hold a jobs fair in Chicago on August 13, where the companies expect to make at least 200 on-the-spot job offers and hire a total of at least 1,000 Chicago-area youth over the next 18 months. The Chicago event will kick-off hiring and training efforts across the country with the goal of “engaging 100,000 Opportunity Youth by 2018.”
The impetus behind the coalition came when Starbucks announced in March that it planned to hire 10,000 low-income youth over the next three years. Some of those will be replacements for current employees who leave the company, but Starbucks expects the majority to be new jobs at the company’s stores. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz told The Wall Street Journal, “We’re not displacing jobs, but creating incremental opportunities in most of these companies.” The Wall Street Journal also noted that the other companies are “largely creating new hourly-wage jobs focused mostly on young African-Americans and Latinos.”
According to Monday’s announcement, there are 5.6 million American youth who are out of school and not employed, while there are 3.5 million unfilled U.S. jobs.
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