Observer reports:

Baraka announced the Newark 2020 initiative today following the release of a new report by the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice that found a wide economic disparity between the city’s residents and the large corporate workforce that commutes in and out of Newark every day.

Newark residents hold 18 percent of the jobs in the city, a low rate compared with other cities of similar size across the country, according to the report, and although the population is majority black and Latino, 60 percent of the city workforce is white...

The report calls for raising the minimum wage to $12 and then $15 an hour, strengthening the state’s ban-the-box law and the city’s first source ordinance, which calls for employing city residents on development projects.

“Fifty years ago this month, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., looked to Newark and other urban communities and explained that the country consisted of ‘two Americas,’ divided by race,” said Ryan P. Haygood, president of the Institute for Social Justice. “Fifty years later, perhaps no other city embodies both the reality of the two Americas and the possibility of bridging these entrenched divides more than the city of Newark.”

To read the full report, please click here.