2014 NJ Senate debate: on Jobs

Cory Booker: $1,000 tax credit for job-training apprenticeships

Booker and Scott are unveiling a proposal that would promote apprenticeships in highly-skilled trades, a move designed to help fill millions of technical jobs in the construction, manufacturing energy and telecommunications industries, while also creating jobs for younger Americans, especially minorities struggling to find work.

Booker and Scott's LEAP Act (Leveraging and Energizing America's Apprenticeship Programs) would provide tax credits to employers who offer apprenticeships to younger job applicants. Companies that offer apprenticeships to people under age 25 would receive a $1,500 tax credit and a $1,000 credit for apprentices above age 25. Apprenticeships, unlike office internships, offer a combination of on-the-job training and instruction in highly-skilled occupations.

Cory Booker: Great Recession decreased hourly wages overall

Occupations in fields such as construction and manufacturing, with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13--the middle third of the pay scale--accounted for 60 percent of job losses during the worst part of the recession. As the recovery progressed, however, those jobs didn't come back. Instead, it was lower-wage occupations--those with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83--that accounted for 58 percent of all job growth.

Cory Booker: Gender wage gap problematic; minority wage gap worse

Our work will not be done until we live in a nation where equal work means equal pay. And that's why, as your Senator, I will work to make the long overdue promises advanced by the 2009 enactment of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act a reality by supporting further efforts to close the income gap between men and women, including the Paycheck Fairness Act and raising the federal minimum wage.

Cory Booker: 1/3 of all NJ development is in Newark, where only 3% live

BOOKER: Well, politics is a zero-sum game. The spirit of Martin Luther King taught me that love multiplies and hate divides. We've got too much division going on in our politics. Where people come together, you make remarkable results. Well, Chris Christie and I disagree on most things. But if we just sat back in our relative partisan positions, we wouldn't have gotten anything together. The fact that we've come together right now has created the largest economic development period in Newark in over a generation. In fact, we are 3% of the state's population with a third of all the development in New Jersey is going on in Newark, in commercial multi-families. Our biggest boom, period, because we found ways to get together.