Camden finds you can lure employers to move into town, but that doesn't mean city residents get jobs.

When the Working Families Party and other community activists in the City of Camden in 2022 fought to secure enough signatures on a petition to require Camden's employers to disclose how many city residents they employ, the petitioners hit obstacles.

City Clerk Luis Pastoriza rejected the petition because he maintained it had too few valid signatures from qualified voters. The activists prevailed, however, and City Council adopted the law requiring employment reporting twice yearly.

"Many employers who came to Camden in recent years did so because of lucrative tax breaks that gave them a financial incentive," Antoinette Miles, political director of the NJ Working Families Party, said during the petition drive. "It's time to ask what those giveaways have done for the people who live (in Camden)."

How much have the tax breaks done for the residents? Not much, in terms of finding work at the corporations that got breaks, according to a couple of years of employer reporting.

All employers — from businesses to nonprofits to governments — are required to report if they employ at least 25 people. Getting compliance in the beginning was a struggle.

Campbell's, the food company with a long history in Camden, is the largest corporate employer, with 1,499 workers within the city's borders. How many are residents? Six of them, or 0.4% of the total.

How about Subaru of America, which got public dollars when it moved its headquarters to Camden from Cherry Hill? The automaker was the second-largest corporate employer in Camden, with 824 employees, in the first six months of this year. How many live in the city? Nine, or 1% of the total workforce.

Have the statistics guided visionaries to call for change? Not really. The city and nonprofits continue to work on training programs for city residents to make them more employable and able to compete with the stream of commuters entering and departing the city every day. 

But the twice-yearly release of the numbers generally passes with little notice.