Uptown Radio

Unemployment number don't always include part-timers or freelancers. Graphic designer Alex Profera (pictured above) has been looking for full-time employment, but is not counted as underemployed because of his freelance hours. Photo by Andrew Parsons.

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Last month’s unemployment number may have helped renew optimism in the economy, but that number is only a portion of the total Americans who are currently jobless or without full-time work.  Many economists even believe that this number doesn’t completely reflect the labor market anymore.

BY ANDREW PARSONS

Last month’s unemployment number may have helped renew optimism in the economy, but that number is only a portion of the total Americans who are currently jobless or without full-time work.  Many economists even believe that this number doesn’t completely reflect the labor market anymore.

Every month when the federal government releases its jobs report, politicians and pundits focus on one magical number – the unemployment rate. But many economists don’t think it completely reflects labor market anymore. Bernard Baumohl, an economist at the consulting firm the Economic Outlook Group, said he’s tired of hearing about it.

“It’s almost a useless indicator these days because just a lot of people are leaving the workforce and setting up their own jobs,” said Baumohl. “I think we have to be careful in using the unemployment rate as a gauge of what’s going on in the job market.”

The problem is that the unemployment number isn’t a accurate representation of how many Americans are really looking for full-time work. For the past decade, companies have been relying more on temporary employees and freelancers who also are looking for jobs. Freelance fashion designer Carolyn Ksenyak is one of them. She lost her full-time job about a year but now pieces income together by freelancing.

“I some times work 4 days a week and sometimes I would work 1 day a week so it is really not consistent,” Ksenyak said. “Like this week has been nothing which has been awful.”

On weeks where she freelances, she collects only a portion of her unemployment benefits. But the fact that she works at all means, she isn’t always counted as unemployed. Heidi Sherholtz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said that whether she’s unemployed or part-time actually depends on the week.

“She’d be different from week to week,” said Sherholtz. “So in the weeks where she was looking for work but didn’t have any paid earnings she’d be counted as officially unemployed. In the weeks where she got paid for some work but didn’t get up to 35 hours, she would be classified as involuntary part time.”

On the other hand, is graphic designer Alex Profera. According to labor statistics he counts as full-time, self-employed. Like Ksenyak, he was laid off about a year ago and has been freelancing ever since. The difference is that all of his projects add up to more than 40 hours a week.

Even so, he’s still looking for a full-time job. “I’m usually always looking for work, usually nonstop basically since 2010 after I got fired after that other job,” Profera said.

The monthly unemployment numbers don’t necessarily capture what Profera and fashion designer Carolyn Ksenyak are going through. Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at University of California at Berkeley, saidthat the only place to see the whole picture is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means going to the website and clicking through to all the numbers including the unemployment rate, the underemployment rate and the size of the labor market among others.

“And if you do this by age, cohorts and gender and stuff, then it really gives you a picture of what’s going on,” said Allegretto. “And what’s going on is that the labor market is still very tepid for workers.”

Tepid, but according to all indications slowly improving. The next jobs report will be released on the first Friday of March.

A still from 1978's Piranha(above). John Sayles wrote many B-list movies such as Piranha to help fund his more personal projects. The Anthology Film Archives is showing some of Sayle's B-list work through next week.

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Independent filmmaker John Sayles may be know for classics such as 1979’ s Return of the Secaucus Seven and 1996’s Oscar-nominated Lone Star. But to raise money for his own projects, Sayles wrote screenplays for hire on many schlock classics of the 1970s and ‘80s, including Piranha, Battle Beyond the Stars, and The Howling.  This weekend, the Anthology Film Archives on the Lower East Side is hosting a retrospective of director’s work. Fans will have a chance to revisit his best-loved B movies and the curious can see them for the first time.

BY WILL SLOAN

Independent filmmaker John Sayles made his name with movies like 1979’ s Return o the Secaucus Seven and 1996’s Lone Star, which was nominated for an Oscar.

But to raise money for his own projects, he wrote screenplays for hire. These included many schlock classics of the 1970s and ‘80s, including Piranha, Battle Beyond the Stars, and The Howling.

This weekend, the Anthology Film Archives on the Lower East Side is hosting “From the Pen of John Sayles,” a retrospective of Sayles’ early workwork. Fans will have a chance to revisit his best-loved B movies…and the curious can see them for the first time.

Believe it or not, Piranha did not win any Oscars. But Sayles biographer Gavin Smith says Sayles wrote Piranha and movies like it to be practical.

“They were a good way for him to break into the movie business, to make a little bit of money, meet a lot of people, to make connections, and I think he figured out that he could make a film,” says Smith.

With Piranha, the 28-year-old Sayles made an important ally: he wrote it for producer Roger Corman, a behind-the-scenes impresario who has mentored some of Hollywood’s best-known filmmakers. His name appears on early work by Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and Francis Ford Coppola, among others.

Beverly Gray worked at Corman’s so-called “factory,” New World Pictures in the 1970s. She recalls that for most of those famous filmmakers, their work with Corman was trial- by-fire. “It was just understood going in that it had to be fast and it had to be cheap. Roger would come in at the beginning and see if you had what it took, and if you did, he’d leave you alone,” says Gray.

Gray has also written a biography of Corman, and says that John Sayles was an especially keen student of the Roger Corman school of film production. “He learned how you advertise a movie; how you sometimes take a title you want and make a movie around it; how you create a poster image…He knew all of that smart stuff on how to sell a movie from Roger.”

But Corman didn’t wipe out Sayles’ personality. Gavin Smith says Sayles’ screenplays have his sense of humor, and a trademark deadpan approach to outlandish stories. ‘A real effort to sort of take the subjects seriously in order to make them, in a way, realistic, to follow a more realistic logic. There’s a certain scientific basis certainly in Alligator or Piranha for how things unfold.”

The Piranha paycheck allowed Sayles to direct his first movie, Return of the Seacaucus Seven. Today, he still subsidizes his income with screenwriting – including uncredited work on E.T. and Apollo 13. For his personal work, Beverly Gray believes Sayles’ philosophy has remained consistent. “He’s a true Roger Corman heir – keep it small,know what you want to do, make it your movie.”

“From the Pen of John Sayles” runs at the Anthology Film Archives until February 29th.

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New research says those drawn out ‘awws” and tough-talkin’ inflections of the New York accent may soon be something you hear only in the movies. While you may still hear variations of that accent across the five boroughs, that ‘New Yawk” drawl, like so many regional accents, is changing.

BY PAUL SMITH

Drop your bagel. Spit out your coffee. New research shows the New York accent– with its drawn out AWWWS and tough talkin’ associations – may soon be something we mostly hear in the movies. You can still hear variations of the accent across the five boroughs, but like so many American regional accents, it’s changing.

You can spot New Yorkers on screen right away: the accent is part of their characters.  Like Olympia doo-caucus in 1988’s Working Girl. 25 years ago, Doo-caucus’s character was already a throwback, and that’s even truer now, says. Linguist Kara Becker, of Reed College. She spent the last couple of years in New York listening to how people talk. Becker focused her research between 14th Street and the Brooklyn Bridge.

“What we found on the lower east side was that a few features we associate with the New York City accent are not being used by groups we expect to be using them,” says Becker.

She’s talking about people under the age of 50. She says their vowel sounds are different from those of older generations.

Becker traces this shift to the World War II era. Before then, lots of people here spoke with a kind of New York accent—including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was born well-to-do in the Hudson Valley, and had what was considered an upper class accent. Becker says that after the war, the prestige of the New York accent began to wane. It became associated with working class people in popular culture. That’s when mass self-consciousness kicked in.

“It’s a place where we say there’s a high amount of linguistic insecurity meaning there are speakers who have New York accents who might seek out a dialect coach or make a real effort to lose their accent,” says Becker.

That’s what Queens native Jo Ann Smith did in the 70s, when she landed a job as a secretary at NBC. Soon after she got there, she had a heart to heart with her boss.

“I told her I was insecure that I didn’t have this college degree,” says Smith. “She said, ‘Oh I don’t have a college degree either. The most important thing for you to do is to read the New York Times every day and you must get rid of that New York accent. If you want to get ahead, you just got to get rid of it.’”

She took accent reduction lessons and her Queens drawl vanished. Back then she paid $20 per class, the equivalent of nearly $100 today.

Voice coaching is still a lucrative business, says Patricia Fletcher, who teaches from her home studio on the Upper East Side. Go see her for an accent exorcism and she’ll probably begin by working on your jaw.

Fletcher has a business to run, but she says eliminating an intrinsic part of someone’s personality can be heartbreaking.

She’s been a coach for so long, she can often tell what your voice sounds like just by staring at you on the subway. She says native New Yorkers have muscular jaws, but they’re active speakers in general. “The kind of stereotypical picture we have is a stereotype for a reason,” says Fletcher. “So, often the talking with their hands and being very muscular in the delivery.”

Lots of Fletcher’s clients are actors who want to sound like New Yorkers. Some of them already are. Once, actress Drea de Matteo, a Queens native, came to Fletcher to shake off her accent. But when she got cast as Adriana in the Sopranos, Fletcher helped her find it again.

The Department of Transportation has been using materials like this promotional chart to survey people's biking habits in neighborhoods where the city will install the first bike share stations. Photo by John Light

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BY JOHN LIGHT

Portland Oregon got its first bike share in 1994, followed in recent years by Denver, Minneapolis and Washington DC. Last year, Boston got a bike share. And this summer, the popular program comes to New York.

All it takes is a credit card and any New Yorker will be able to use any of 10,000 bikes that will be available around the city. But New York is not just the latest but also the most diverse city to try bike sharing.

A professor at Virginia Tech named Ralph Buehler had his students interview people who used Washington DC’s bike share. Overwhelmingly, the short term users– bikers who rent a bike for just one ride– were white were young, they were male, and they were very highly educated — 43% had masters degrees. Dr. Buehler thought these statistics might be a reflection of bikers in America overall, not just bike share users.

“I think some of the things that we pick up here are probably what we pick up, not just in bike sharing, but in general in cycling in the US,” he said. “It may not be a problem or an inequitable issue within bike sharing but within bicycling in the US at the moment.”

Aware of these findings, the New York Department of Transportation has been trying to be inclusive as they plan their bike share. Part of this effort includes holding evening meetings in the neighborhoods that will get bikes.

Last Tuesday, the DOT hosted one at Hunter College’s 25th street campus, on the East River. True to Dr. Buehler’s study, the people at the meeting are mostly young and white. But the DOT says it does recognize that others may want to get involved.

Seth Solomonow, a spokesperson for the DOT, suggested that the bike share could be a cheap way for people living in New York’s lower income, nonwhite communities to get around.

“One of the key elements of bike share is that it is really so affordable,” he said. “We were talking about the cost of a metro card being about $95 for a month. That’s what we’re talking about for membership for an entire year. And you could have unlimited free trips of basically from half an hour to 45 minutes for an entire year for that investment.”

Nine different nonprofits on the Lower East side have formed an organization, called Local Spokes, that focuses on biking. The organization has surveyed over a thousand Lower East Side residents. Douglas Le, one of the groups leaders,  said that issues of access are associated with income level,  but that other factors like race were less important.

“We did find that lower income folks face different challenges than higher income folks,” said Le. “We didn’t see as much of any kind of destinction between, you know, Asian, versus latino, versus black or white, or the surveys that were done in Chinese or Spanish versus English.”

The neighborhoods that Local Spokes works in are at the nexus of the new bike sharing system. But Le is concerned that some of the lower income residents of his neighborhood may not be able to use the bike sharing system that they live within. One of the issues, he says, is credit cards. Most bike share systems require a credit card for payment and to establish the for identity of the user.  Jon Orcutt, the Director of Policy for the DOT says the city program is working on it.

“We don’t want lack of a credit card to be a barrier for New Yorkers accessing the system. So we’re looking for a variety of ways to do that,” he said. “We’re talking with the housing authority about how housing authority tenants could participate, since the authority knows who their tenants are.”

Another issue that both the DOT and Local Spokes are looking into is the price tag. Le says that it would be easier for many New Yorker’s to pay in installments.

“Though $100 is affordable for most families in the city, it may not be affordable up front,” said Le. “So can they pay it throughout the year?”

And even if those issues are figured out, the bike share only reaches so far. DOT eventually hopes to expand the program east into Brooklyn and north into Harlem and the Bronx, but Jon Orcutt, the DOT’s director of policy, said it could be years before that happens. The first priority was the city’s business district.

Still, Le said it’s nice to see that the department is making an effort to communicate their plans to residents. They’ve held information sessions in Spanish, Mandarin and Cantonese. The sessions haven’t been well attended, but Seth Solomonow said there are more foreign language sessions in the works.

“I think in a place like New York you can’t make everyone happy, and they know that more than anyone,” said Le. “But I do want to acknowledge that DOT has made an effort in terms of being transparent about their process.”

The DOT has yet to set an exact date for the opening of the program this summer. Until then, it will be holding information sessions and gathering input on their website. Whether New York’s bike share will turn out to  be  any more accessible than any other cities remains to be seen.

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A bit of advice for the unemployed – use your free time to indulge your childhood passions. Producer Andrew Parsons recently found a former graphic designer at his new job on an air crafter carrier… refurbishing antique fighter planes for the Intrepid Air, Space and Sea Museum.

BY ANDREW PARSONS

Peter Torraca restores old airplanes at the Intrepid Air, Space and Sea Museum. On a recent day, he was busy patching new skin onto a 1960s era F3H Demon. The plane was huge and barely fit the 60 foot long restoration tent on the aircraft carrier’s flight deck.

Torraca was never a navy mechanic and never worked with fighter planes. But aviation is a childhood passion of his, passed down to him from his father.

“My dad, he wanted to be a pilot. He started building model airplanes,” said Torraca. “From birth I was just surrounded with balsa dust, all the ephemera that goes along with the model aviation world.”

Torraca’s love for aviation led him to get a pilots license and buy a plane during the 20-year period he was a graphic designer. But when Torraca was out of work in 2010, he was restless. His wife suggested he volunteer at the Intrepid working on the planes. Since he had some experience already, he excelled and was hired. It was a welcomed but unexpected career switch.

“I’ve been building model airplanes since I was seven and this is a dream,” said Torraca choking up a bit. “This is a dream come true.”