- Georgia Work$ expands, By Christine Vestal, September 20, 2010, Stateline.org: “When Augusta Roosa lost her accounting job at a restaurant on Jekyll Island, Georgia, she figured it would be just a matter of time before she landed another job in her line of work. But after six months of looking, she decided to go for a long shot. ‘I knew the back of the restaurant so I figured ‘why not learn the front?” says 29-year-old Roosa. The trick was getting a local restaurant owner to give her a chance to prove she could learn everything she needed to know on the job. That’s where a nationally recognized program called Georgia Work$ came in. Started in 2003, it allows jobless workers to become trainees for selected businesses at no cost to the employers. Starting today (Sept. 20), Georgia is more than doubling the number of people who can benefit from the program by opening it up to anyone without a job, not just those collecting unemployment checks, as originally designed…”
- Utah incentive helps put people ‘Back to Work’, By Mike Gorrell, September 20, 2010, Salt Lake Tribune: “Javier Mendez married Marquita Luker on Aug. 18, so it was not a good time for him to be out of work. But he was, laid off a couple of months earlier from a gritty job removing asbestos from older buildings. So the 32-year-old Taylorsville man was eager to take advantage of a new Utah Department of Workforce Services program that offers companies an incentive – worth up to $2,000 – to hire people receiving unemployment insurance benefits. ‘That’s like a gimme,’ Mendez said last week while working among a crisscrossing grid of pipes running in and out of a chiller unit at the $20.5 million JL Sorenson Recreation Center being built in Herriman by Layton Construction. His new company, Thermal West, is one of the first to participate in the state agency’s ‘Back to Work’ program, which began in July. The department has received enough federal funding through the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program to find work for up to 2,500 recipients of unemployment insurance benefits and 700 out-of-work youth. How? By offering companies the $2,000 subsidy if they hire someone off the active unemployment rolls and put them to work for three months, at a guaranteed minimum wage of $9 an hour…”
Day: September 20, 2010
Long-Term Unemployment of Workers Over 50
For the unemployed over 50, fears of never working again, By Motoko Rich, September 19, 2010, New York Times: “Patricia Reid is not in her 70s, an age when many Americans continue to work. She is not even in her 60s. She is just 57. But four years after losing her job she cannot, in her darkest moments, escape a nagging thought: she may never work again. College educated, with a degree in business administration, she is experienced, having worked for two decades as an internal auditor and analyst at Boeing before losing that job. But that does not seem to matter, not for her and not for a growing number of people in their 50s and 60s who desperately want or need to work to pay for retirement and who are starting to worry that they may be discarded from the work force – forever. Since the economic collapse, there are not enough jobs being created for the population as a whole, much less for those in the twilight of their careers. Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older. Nearly half of them have been unemployed six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate in the group – 7.3 percent – is at a record, more than double what it was at the beginning of the latest recession…”
Political Reaction to Poverty Rate
Poverty numbers get muted reaction on Hill, By Michael A. Fletcher, September 18, 2010, Washington Post: “Deborah Weinstein, a longtime advocate for the poor, calls the news that one in seven Americans is living in poverty ‘a national emergency.’ But for much of Washington’s political class, the shocking new poverty numbers provoked not alarm about the poor but further debate over tax cuts for the middle class. ‘We know that a strong middle class leads a strong economy,’ President Obama told reporters in the Rose Garden on Friday, as he used the new census report, which also showed that middle-class income has dipped slightly over the past decade, to continue making his case for limiting the cuts to family incomes under $250,000. Meanwhile, Republican leaders in the House and Senate had no reaction to the poverty report. But earlier in the week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took the Senate floor to argue for extending the tax breaks to everyone, saying, ‘We can’t let the people who have been hit hardest by this recession and who we need to create jobs to get us out of it’ be subject to a tax increase. McConnell’s spokesman later clarified the statement, saying that McConnell indeed believes the economic downturn has hit the poor harder than it has high-income business owners, who also have suffered. The reluctance of political leaders on both sides of the aisle to directly confront the fact that growing numbers of Americans are slipping into poverty reflects a stubborn reality about the poor: They are not much of a political constituency…”