Entrepreneur traded oil barrels for money bags. Im ali velshi and this is real money. Americas job market continues to boom even if most americans arent feeling it. The economy created 257,000 new jobs in january. And big positive revisions to november and december, added to the number of jobs created at the end of 2014. Just take a look at november. Revised upwards to 423,000 net new jobs. Thats the strongest hiring since 1997. And yes. The Unemployment Rate ticked up by 110 10th of one percentage point. But it ticked up for the right reason, people entering the look for work. I say to you, look instead to the number of jobs created every month and that was positive news. One other, average Hourly Earnings up by an annual rate of 2. 2 . Now stagnant wages have made this job recovery feel hollow to many people. Now one months uptick is not a trend. But if wages keep moving higher in the months ahead this job recovery might start feeling real to americans. In the meantime, there are still plenty of people trying to make ends meet five years after the recession ended and a growing number of them arent waiting for someone to hire them. Diane eastabrook has this from chicago. Cora wisenberg heads to a second interview at a nonprofit. Im feeling confident im feeling good about it. So im hoping for the best. Reporter still wisenberger says competition is cutthroat so she has a plan b if she doesnt get the job. The more you go into things with a positive attitude the more successful you will be. Support from individuals in her support group wiseenberger is thinking about starting her own support group. There is a little preservation in that i have my i have the ability to generate my own income. Wisenberger could join a growing number of americans, about 18 million, who have become solopreneurs, increasing 12. 5 over the last few years. Ists not a job as we its not a job as we think about it but its getting a job done and its important that we recognize this is happening. While the tough job market has prompted some workers to strike out on their own zeno says many are doing it by their own choice. Access to Health Insurance under the Affordable Care act is helping people to do it as well as technology. Many are doing it with a laptop and cell phone for just a few thousand dollars. A lot work from home. 39yearold Kelly Dietrich runs his Internet Business from a desk a few feet from his dining room table. His Company Makes training videos for inexperienced political candidates. Dietrich says going solo gives him more time with his family and more freedom of choice in his work but he admits there are drawbacks. You dont know if this dream is going to succeed or fail. I cant guarantee a paycheck for next 12 months, two years. Regularly posting might mean three times a week. As cora wisenberger waits for the nonprofit job shes taking a class in marketing. She might launch the consulting business on the side. This is second time ive been unemployment in two years. This is the opportunity to take things into my own hands. And she says possibly build a more secure future diane eastabrook, chicago, al jazeera. Secretary of labor, these numbers are good, not as good as novembers numbers are but look if we are in the 225 to 250 range most people would say thats good job creation. We saw that 2. 2 tick up in wages, not a trend but lets go back to wages. It is what you and i talk about every month. In order to get people to a place where theyre feeling good about their wages weve been setback for so long that jump would have to be fairly substantial. How does that play out . Is it reasonable to expect that people will see increases this year and translating into individuals feeling better about this economy . There are a number of things we can do to pick up the pace of wage growth. Tight labor markets is a very good way to pick up the pace of wage growth. Its all about leverage. In the depths of the Great Recession there were about seven job seekers for every job opening. Thats not leverage for workers. Were down to about 1. 8, 1. 7 job seekers so moving in the right direction. That translates into better leverage. Theres still some slack there. There are a number of things we can do, a number of states have increased the minimum wage, that helps some segment of the economy. Helping people who work overtime who have been underpaid as a result of an outdated regulation, were helping millions of Home Health Workers as well so there are those interventions as well, and theres always what i call the education dividend. The reason the president is talking about Free Community and the way we have redoubled our investment in apprenticeship that enables people to have the skills of today and tomorrow. The education dividend is undeniable. The more education you have the better the chances are. We just saw the education rate for, people who dont see that and thats good that were moving forward on that but lets just talk about the math and again conservative economists often talk to me about the fact that you cant do what the president and you are doing touting these great numbers of wage of job growth, and get the same wage growth you want. You trade one off for the other. Tell me your view on that. I dont agree with that. First of all, lets level set here. The three months before the president takes office, we lose 2 million jobs. Were now at 59 consecutive months of improvement of jobs. The leading sector in the last year was business and professional services. Those are well paying jobs. Accountants, architects, consultants making good wages. One of the highest areas was education and health. Another, very good sector. Construction is ticking up, over 300,000. And by the way business and professional services that was over 700,000. Ughyou know, and manufacturing where is the disconnect . Youre outlining things that make sense, creating higher paid jobs, when do we get back to a point that a guy like you i know feels very passionately and personal about it, we are paying wages that make sense and they are feeling what the numbers tell us that this is a strong and growing economy, the truth is the numbers indicate a strong and growing economy, but if you are not at the lower end of this, you are not feeling it. We have discussed this multiple times, making sure that the tail wind were seeing and the prosperity were beginning to see, results in shared prosperity. You look at the president s budget and what the president said in the state of the union weve had six consecutive months over 200,000, we havent seen that since the late 90s. I can give you data point after data point of things we havent seen in ten to 20 years. But the difference between the economy at the end of the Clinton Administration and the Economy Today is that were not seeing the shared prosperity we saw at the end of the Clinton Administration. Right. And that is a big part of the unfinished business. Secretary always good to talk to you. Absolutely. United states secretary of labor. Politicians like to say they feel our pain but one governor actually knows what its like to be unemployed. When you are out of work for six months it changes your relationship with your family and friends. It changes your image in the mirror. Some of the confidence moves away. John hickenlooper governor. Hit you know how they say that everybody has a pupose in life . Well at one time i felt that selling cocaine was my purpose. We was starving just looking for a way to succeed. The first time i seen rock cocaine was 1980. The murder rate was sky high. South of the 10 freway, was kind of a no mans land. You know. Were selling it to the blacks. So you go into these neighborhoods theres no cops, you can sell where you want, and when they start killing each other, nobody cares i was going through like a Million Dollars worth of drugs just about every day. Its like gold. We can make a fortune. He was maybe the biggest guy in l. A. Freeway rick was getting his dope from a very big operator. I think were into something thats bigger than us. Something we really cant deal with. They had been trafficking on behalf of the United States government. She could prove what she was saying. Crack in the system todays employment report includes the not so surprising news that the oil and gas industry lost 1900 jobs in january. Analysts expect to see bigger layoffs in the months ahead. The reason of course is that Falling Oil Prices are forcing Oil Companies to cut costs and that means financial pain for thousands of workers. One man who understands the pain better than most is john hickenlooper, the governor of colorado. Thats why he lost his job as an exploration geologist, in the 1980s. Back then he reinvented himself. I caught up with the governor in dabo switzerland at the World Economic forum. I asked him why he gave up on energy and switched to brew pubz pubs. The recession in the 1980s was every bit as bad as for everyone else. We saw a brew pub, and i thought i would drive 20 minutes out of the way to taste a beer this good. I was a geologist, i didnt know anything about business so we opened the first brew pub, the first restaurant that bruce bruise brews its other than beer, in colorado. We worked like any entrepreneur for the first year, we opened one in fort collins and colorado spription, springs. They took off. I couldnt get my own mother to invest. My sister jane invested 10 grand. I wanted to make sure i didnt lose her investment. When it took off i thought oh my god i dont have to work anymore. We had made good investments. I tell people the price of oil went from about 38 back then down to 6 and when it didnt recover never got above 8, 8 or 10, i went from going from one liquid to beer with co2 in it. But if the price of oil had been even and we sold our beer lets see we would sell four bucks in a pint, we were getting about 750 a barrel for our beer in the tavern. If the price of oil would be 1 10 of that i would still be a geologist. Designing themselves to be one thing and the economy didnt support this and you went and started your own business. This was in 19 i got laid off in 1986. And we opened in october of 1988. Can that story still happen today in america . Sure. But when i talk about it i make it sound kind of fun and easy. It never is. I was out of work for two years and certainly the first six or eight years i months i was out looking for a job as a geologist. It changes your relationship with your family and friends you see a different person in the mirror and some of your old confidence starts to he ebb away. No one saw a brew pub before. Someone that no ones been doing or a problem that no one identifies, you solve that problem. But if no one identifies it its hard to get investors because they dont believe in it. Like any entrepreneur i. T. Took a, it took along time to raise the money. America has to reinvent itself. The revolution in technology and gps and smartphones, smartphones, it has marginalized a lot. A lot of people have lost their lives and their families. Oxfam predicts that next year the top 1 controls more wealth than 99 of the world. We are doing something bad around the middle class, people like you who are trying to make a go of it either as a Small Business or getting a job. Wages are stuck. Youve got the same problem in colorado, lower unemployment but wages are not working in converse relationship to that, inverse relationship. What do we do . How do we fiction fix this problem . Making sure someone who has laid off and their career has disappeared i think government has an obligation through community colleges, through workforce training program, to a, identify those industries that are growing and b, make sure the disenfranchised workers, in colorado we have 6 600,000 people who have dropped out. Get them a certificate but make sure they have a training that will get them a job in technology or aerospace or the industries that are growing and weve got to accelerate that process. Up next its black History Month. Some people are going to question the value of it. Were going to talk to one African American writer who says its important to look beyond icons like Martin Luther king. Stick around. Black history in america, a growing movement of people question whether celebrating a month of black history does anything to improve the lives of black americans. So is it time to rethink the entire notion of a black History Month . Its Martin Luther king day, 2015. Marching bands perform, men walk on stilts. Peek walk, arm in arm, singing. Rewind just a few months earlier. A very different image. Fires raging in ferguson missouri. Protests over a grand jury decision not to indict darren wilson, a white officer who shot and killed a black teen. Conflictingconflicting images of peace and protest that make up the fabric of what its it means to be black in america. Fires after the assassination of Martin Luther king. Gathered in the capitol to hear dr. Kings iconic speech. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed, we hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal. The long march towards desegregation in america, often one step forward, two steps back. You are not effective for segregation. October ordered immediate desegregation in mississippi. Different than the children today and with it the notion of black History Month has changed as well. People hope to gain by pressing the desegregation movement, what hopes are you hoping to achieve . We hope to achieve equal rights to any human being. How long do you think it will take . I have no idea. A modern debate who should succeed americas first black president . I have no more campaigns to run. My only agenda i know because i won both of them. Rosa parks, barack obama, Martin Luther king, jr, all iconic figures, key to telling the black History Month of america but not making life better for blacks in america. Thats what ted johnson believes. He joins me tonight from boston. Ted thank you for being with us. Tell me why you say black History Month doesnt make black lives better, and do you think its actually detrimental or just neutral . So first of all thanks for having me. A pleasure. So my point is that black History Month is extremely important in that it helps us remember, gives us a time to pause and consider, remember the contributions of those that came before us. But if thats the extent of what the month celebrates, then its falling short of what young people, black people in general, in fact the nation, need today. And that is, to be able to see the value of black lives just as been the source of much of the protests here in the past few months. So its not that black History Month isnt valuable. It is. Its just that its not sufficient to celebrate things that happened 50, 60, 100 years ago and then pat ourselves on the back because we celebrated some very extraordinary individuals. Instead i think it should be a time we appreciate those individuals, black individuals who are here today continuing the work of those that have come before us. Although i just enjoyed selma last week, it reminded me that where we are talking about voter i. D. Laws today, in our current elections it is useful to have the context those are the things that were used to keep blacks who were given the right to vote, that is what was used to keep them away from elections. When you look at voter turnout issues, when you so many of these issues, Martin Luther king in the days before he died in the months before he died had really turned to economics and inequality a matter that continues the prevail today. Show so how do we make those messages from the past just not inspirational but remarkably relevant today . The first thing i think we do is recognize that those things have changed. There are a bunch of things that remain the same. If you look at the black Unemployment Rate in the 60s that spurred the march on washington, the black Unemployment Rate is still twice the rate as the rest of the country, the economy is bad, segregation in the School System and in housing not much has changed since 1960. So when we look at the young folks that are marching today its not that theyve forgetting their black history, in fact they are living it. Black history doesnt mean its historical, theres an appreciation of things that have happened in the past and we should appreciate the inspiration that has gotten us to where we are today. The wung thing i one thing i think we can do is there is a role for black folks in electoral politics that wasnt possible in the 1960s because of the disen disenfranchisement of blacks from voting. Even that has been removed even though there are removal of parsing of the act popping up, blacks today from all backgrounds, socioeconomic situations have the opportunity to run for office and not only make change in the street via protest but also make change in city hall and today in the white house. And yet while African Americans turned out in record numbers in federal elections in those elections that often have much more to do with them state elections and local elections the turnout rate in most cases are lower than whites. Thats true. Though. This is an american problem. Sure it is. Absolutely. Mid term elections as well as main elections, 5 turned out across the city for a Mayoral Election so its an american problem. I do agree with you that particularly communities that have felt disenfranchised, in ferguson and college park that have largely white leadership in the locality, those whites take examples. President obama is a great example but hes really not a tangible one for someone looking to run on the local