- Big companies join Obama in initiative to help long-term unemployed, By Peter Baker, January 31, 2014, New York Times: “President Obama has persuaded some of the nation’s largest companies, including Walmart, Apple, General Motors and Ford, to revamp their hiring practices to avoid discriminating against applicants who have been out of work for a long stretch of time. Mr. Obama hosted a group of corporate chief executives at the White House on Friday to highlight those efforts and the use of presidential persuasion to help the jobless find work. In all, White House officials said, about 300 businesses have agreed to new hiring policies, including 21 of the nation’s 50 largest companies and 47 of the top 200…”
- Obama wants job training revamped, By Jeff Mason, January 31, 2014, Columbus Dispatch: “President Barack Obama promised to overhaul federal job-training programs yesterday on the second leg of a tour intended to highlight his proposals to improve the fortunes of low- and middle-income Americans. Obama traveled to Wisconsin to discuss the efforts to ensure that training programs match up with the demand for jobs. It was part of a trip that will include a stop in Tennessee to discuss education. The trip is a follow-up to Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday, in which he called for greater economic fairness in a nation that is still recovering from the deep 2007-09 recession…”
- Going back to college at 50, and why it’s a dream come true, By Luisa Deprez and Sandy Butler, January 24, 2014, Bangor Daily News: “When she graduated from Mount Desert Island High School in 1981, Kaloe ‘Kay’ Haslam was the first in her family to earn a high school degree. She took ‘business’ and ‘general’ classes rather than ‘college-bound’ courses. She had no aspirations to go to college, nor was she encouraged. ‘I never thought I could afford it,’ she said. ‘I was one of three in a single-parent family. It was like, ‘This isn’t anything I can afford to do.’ I basically just went to work.’ Her dream at the time was to work in an office. ‘I didn’t even care what I was doing in an office,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to work in an office.’ But living in a high-tourism area, office jobs were not widely available…”
- Unemployment benefits dominate the agenda, By Ed O’Keefe, January 31, 2014, Washington Post: “Stephanie Ransom is 30, single and the mother of a 3-year-old girl. She has thousands of dollars in credit-card debt and suffers from a rare thoracic disorder that causes severe pain in her neck and shoulders. Last July, Ransom lost the job she’d had for nine years at a parts manufacturer in Walworth, Wis., and has not been able to find another one. That prolonged joblessness has become the defining feature of her life…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty