Workforce Developments

WTF is Meg Whitman doing on my blog?

2009-12-15T06:05:00-08:00

Imagine my surprise when I clicked over to WorkforceDevelopments the other day only to find Meg Whitman's face smiling at me from an ad in the right column.

Meg - since she's advertising on my blog we must be on a first name basis - is running for governor of California. Why anyone would want to play nanny to a notoriously ungovernable state that's running a $21 billion deficit is beyond me, but that's for another day. Meg's biggest claim to fame (and source of money to bankroll a run for gov) is that she used to be CEO of eBay.

Why in the world would someone I'd never vote for buy space on my li'l ol' blog? I was immediately worried that readers might think her appearance here constituted my endorsement.

Then again, maybe Meg's been trolling the web for new job-creation ideas and was impressed my posts calling for a New Deal-type program to put people back to work. Or she's been reading conversations in the comments (and here) between unemployed workers helping each other figure out how to access their benefits and decided this a good site to reach Real Americans.

Which gave me a moment's pause. I shouldn't dismiss her candidacy out of hand. Maybe someone who ran a company that changed the way Americans turn the stuff in their garages into cash has innovative new ideas for these unprecedented economic times. And California's never had a woman governor - why not now? So I clicked the ad to find out what Meg's all about.

Turns out Create Jobs is one of her three main platform issues. Two million of them in five years, to be exact. She'll start by laying off 30-40,000 state employees.

What else will Meg do to create all those jobs? Cut taxes and eliminate regulations while building infrastructure for water, energy and transportation. Yawn. I think we've seen that movie before. And in the midst of one of the biggest federal green jobs investments in history, she seems to think that environmentalists don't like jobs.

I don't think she's been reading my blog.

Now I'm left with this conundrum: Should I throw Meg off? I use a third-party provider to handle those flashy ads so I don't see them before they appear. The ad company takes most of the profits and sends me a few pennies per click. However, I do have the ability to block ads that promote things I don't support.

So I leave the question with you, dear reader. Please vote:

Last minute holiday gifts for your favorite workforce development professional

2009-12-12T09:45:43-08:00

If you still haven't found just the right holiday gift for your favorite workforce development professional, consider something from the Workforce Developments shop. This year I've added a new design emphasizing the vital role of jobs and workforce training in rebuilding the economy.

Also available are the classic Venn diagram t-shirts that help explain workforce development to friends and family.

Five percent of the full retail price for every item sold will be donated to Homeboy Industries, a well-respected program that helps at-risk and formerly gang-involved youth through job placement, training and education. Their slogan: Nothing stops a bullet like a job.

If you don't have money to spare this season but just want to support this blog, click on the ads a few times. Seriously. I get paid a tiny portion of a penny each time someone does that. With enough clicks, it can add up to a dollar or more! Think of it as a virtual tip jar at no cost to you.

You can find the Workforce Developments shop at CafePress.com.

Happy Holidays!

Required reading

2009-12-11T09:57:37-08:00

A couple of reports, articles and blog posts I've been reading lately. Highly recommended!

The President's Job's Initiative Doesn't Measure Up
by Robert Reich
How can we help ex-prisoners re-enter the labor market?
An MDRC Fast Fact
Disrupting Philanthropy: Technology and the Future of the Social Sector
by Lucy Bernholz with Edward Skloot and Barry Varela
Job Training that Works

by Sheila Maguire, Joshua Freely, Carol Clymer and Maureen Conway

Are you working on your furlough days?

2009-12-08T12:03:32-08:00

I was chatting with a colleague who works for city government last week about - what else? - the Great Recession and how it's hitting us all. When I asked about furloughs, she pointed to a coworker typing away at another desk. "She's working her furlough day today."

A friend who's a state employee had to sign a document promising not to work on her furlough days. She's had to work them anyway, sometimes when her boss schedules her for meetings on those days. She tells of coworkers shaming others for not working on their furlough days.

A little googling shows this isn't at all uncommon. The NYT wrote about the phenomenon of employees working their furlough days back in June. Bloggers who also happen to be furloughed professors have written about what it means if faculty take the burden of less pay without passing on the pain to students and staff.

One California employee of the Department of Motor Vehicles put it this way:

It's not doing what it was designed to do. We were imagining three-day weekends. There was some optimism. It was a trade-off for sure, but people were O.K. The mood now, I would say, is down. People are working in fear because they don't know what's going to happen next.

Which makes this eHow article about how to use your furlough days wisely seem even more absurd. Maybe you really could take a part-time job or grow veggies to replace lost income if you didn't actually have to work on your furlough days.

What does it mean that we're asking workers to take pay cuts but refusing to call them exactly what they are? For one thing, it prevents us from addressing the very real economic problems we're facing.

If there is too much work to be done to let people actually take their furlough days, what does it tell us about the amount of work being done by American workers these days? Have we pushed productivity to the breaking point?

Are you working on your furlough days? Why or why not? What does this mean for you?

Photo source: Sacramento Bee

Warning: good jobs ahead

2009-12-04T06:05:00-08:00

Yesterday, the big-wigs got together in Washington, DC, for a summit to talk about national policies to create jobs. Perhaps it's fitting that Ben Bernanke sat on the hot seat in another part of the city on the same day and asked to keep his.

Today, folks who are doing the work on the ground to help people find and keep good jobs are getting together in the other Washington to talk about jobs too. Their focus is on what it takes to help workers get the skills they need for the jobs that do exist and will come in the future. The forum is called Warning: Good Jobs Ahead, and it's hosted by SkillUp Washington and Seattle's Port Jobs. Here's how they describe it:

Today's workers will make up more than half of the 2017 workforce -- yet America has fallen behind in literacy and other critical skills.

How can we ensure that all of Washington's workers have the skills to compete?

Join us on December 4th for a provocative policy forum, as we hear from national and local experts about how we can improve opportunities for working adults and strengthen our state's businesses.

Speakers include Irwin Kirsch, author of America's Perfect Storm, Julie Strawn of the Center for Law and Social Policy, and Betsy McKay who directs McDonalds' English Under the Arches program. Yes, that McDonalds.

If you can't be in Seattle, don't worry. The entire forum will be streamed live, beginning at 8:30 a.m. To watch, just click this link and turn up the volume.

If you have comments, add them below or Tweet them and include the hashtag #skillup.

National Reentry Resource Center: new online resource

2009-12-02T08:55:10-08:00

As part of the Second Chance Act funding awards that were made in September 2009, the US Department of Justice awarded $2.2 million toward the establishment of a National Reentry Resource Center.

Launched in October 2009, the National Reentry Resource Center is administered by the Bureau of Justice Assistance at the Department of Justice, and provides education, training, and technical assistance to states, tribes, territories, local governments, service providers, non-profit organizations, and corrections institutions working on prisoner reentry. The mission is to "to advance the reentry field through knowledge transfer and dissemination and to promote evidence-based best practices."

The NRRC is a project of the Council of State Governments Justice Center with project partners the Urban Institute, Association of State Correctional Administrators, and the American Probation and Parole Association. Support is also provided by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, The Joyce Foundation, The Public Welfare Foundation and the Open Society Institute.

The website is organized around Popular Topics such as Employment, as well as target audiences of States/Locals, Community and Faith-Based Organizations, and People Returning Home, with each page providing key resources, as well as program s that are examples of best practices. While this website looks like it still has room to grow, it promises to be a useful resource for those working in reentry. I suggest you take a look!

Racy Ming is manager of the Marin Employment Connection, the one-stop in Marin County, CA. She is also chair of the board for the California Re-Entry Program at San Quentin.

Your help needed: rate the best online job search tools

2009-11-30T17:36:22-08:00

With every crisis comes the con artists, and in the 21st century, they proliferate the web. Think about all those "Obama wants moms to return to school!" ads you've seen online.

With so many websites and online job boards claiming to help job seekers, how can you separate the good resources from the garbage?

The US Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration has issued a challenge to help job seekers and the workforce development professionals who serve them find the best online tools available for their job search. They're harnessing the power of the internet to find out what works best, and your input is needed.

DOL's Tools for America's Job Seekers Challenge is went live today. Here's how it works:

Step 1 (Nov 30 through Dec 18): Do you know of any good online job seeker tools? The site developers should post them to the challenge site. They might be

General job boards, listing sites and aggregators
Niche job boards
Career tools such as ladders, transition tools, etc.
Web based career exploration sites
Web 2.0 social media sites specializing in job searches or job postings
Other job matching and career advancement tools

Step 2 (Jan 4-15, 2010): Look through the online job seeker tools on the challenge site. Take them for a test drive and see how they work. Then rate them and comment on them - what works, what doesn't?

Step 3 (beginning Jan 18): Find out what job seekers and your workforce development peers rated as best. DOLETA will publish the top tools in each category.

This challenge is based on the concept of crowdsourcing, and the idea that together, we are smarter than we are individually.

It's the same idea that drives much of the social web, from Wikipedia to the comments section on a blog like this - I don't know everything in workforce development. We all gain knowledge when you add your thoughts, ideas and wisdom by commenting below. What's more, if you find a mistake here (and it has been known to happen), you can help by correcting it. James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds explores the concept in much more detail.

The more people engage in nominating online tools and rating them, the better DOL's challenge will work. We'll get more ideas and more input from more people. So get to the challenge website and start adding your favorite job tools today. You can also help by spreading the word to friends and colleagues.

And if you think this all sounds too modern and web-savvy to be the Department of Labor you know and love, read the bureaucrat-ese version of the challenge with all the details in TEN 16-09 below:

Tools for America's Job Seekers Challenge -

How to turn your holiday gift buying into a local stimulus package

2009-11-24T06:05:00-08:00

If you're like most Americans, you're going to spend less this holiday season than you did last year. What's more, you're probably planning to pay cash.

As bad as this sounds, spending less creates an opportunity to rethink what the holidays mean to us, to think carefully about the gifts we give and the workforce that makes and sells them.

You can think of the money you're planning to spend this season as your own personal stimulus package. Just like the Obama administration set priorities on what kinds of work they wanted federal stimulus money to support, you can do the same thing to support workers in your own city.

Is there a small business in your neighborhood you want to make sure stays in business? Like a favorite coffee shop, bike shop or hardware store? Then buy something from that store to give as a gift.

Is there a local nonprofit doing good work that you want to make sure survives the recession? A women's shelter, food bank, arts organization or library? Maybe this is the year to make a donation in Uncle Bob's name rather than giving him another tie he'll never wear.

Buy foodstuffs from a local farmer at the farmer's market, or a book from an independent press at a locally-owned bookstore. Buy a t-shirt advertising your favorite local restaurant, a toy produced from recycled materials at a factory powered by solar energy.

The point is this: decide what's important to you, what you want to make sure stays around, and spend your little holiday stimulus package on it.

And maybe this Friday, rather than joining the mayhem, you'll stay away from the stores and spend your time with family and friends.

Don't get me wrong - the causes of this crisis are truly terrible: layoffs, reduced work hours, hiring freezes, furloughs, pay cuts and economic fear. But the truth is, small businesses and nonprofits are hurting too. At the local level, your choices can make a real difference. Spend your holiday gift budget with them and your gift will go twice as far. Once to the recipient of the gift, and once to the place where you bought it.

You just might be the difference that keeps their doors open and keep someone in a job just a little longer.

Good news on the job hunt

2009-11-22T07:53:40-08:00

In these tough times, I'm always delighted to report some job hunting good news, even if it's just one person.

Anasa Sinegal, who guest blogged about her bifurcated job search during the last week of September, has just landed a real career-track job. It's not quite her dream job yet - it's an adjunct position, teaching only one class at a college that hasn't had a journalism program for several years, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. She's excited about it, and so am I.

Congratulations, Anasa. To everyone else out there who's looking for work, keep the faith.

Forty years of failed employment policy

2009-11-20T06:05:00-08:00

The Great Recession didn't create today's employment crisis. It has only exacerbated and laid bare employment and earnings trends that began in the 1970s. One of those trends is a federal employment policy based on this idea: "Get the economy right; unleash the power of capital markets, and these labor market problems will take care of themselves."

So says Gordon L. Berlin, President of MDRC. He spoke earlier this year at a Recovery and Reemployment Research Conference sponsored by the Employment and Training Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor. MDRC is the outfit that does all those excellent evaluations and research reports on employment programs that you wish you had time to read.

My recommendation: don't skip out on reading Berlin's remarks. They explain how forty years of employment programs and policies have brought us to the state we're in today, where employment policy is viewed as a "backwater." In sum, he says, "the U.S. Department of Labor has not played a central role in the affairs of the nation's workforce for more than 40 years." In that time,

The minimum wage has not kept up with inflation and remains far below its original historical benchmark of 50 percent of the average wage;
The unemployment insurance system has eroded to the point where a majority of laid-off workers do not qualify for benefits; and
Funding for Workforce Investment Act programs fell roughly 25 percent between 2000 and 2008 at a time when the economy twice fell into recession.

Berlin focuses on the role of research in identifying which programs work so that we can replicate them and bring them to scale. This is the first White House administration in a long time, he says, that's actually interested in doing rigorous evaluations and investing in what works. He doesn't shy away from the tough issues either, like the way performance standards can sometimes create incentives to serve those who are most likely to land a job, rather than those who need the most help to get and keep one.

In speaking of dislocated workers, those who have worked and have soft skills but lack specific training for today's jobs, Berlin says this: "The key is to determine the role of public service employment in a period when cyclical unemployment is so severe that it could plausibly create a new generation of long-term structurally unemployed as the duration of unemployment reaches levels not seen since the Great Depression."

By "public service employment" he means New Deal-style job creation programs. If you've been reading this blog for any time at all, you know my position on that.

This is "an extraordinary moment for employment policy," Berlin told his audience in September. That's even more true today. Since then, unemployment nationally has hit double digits, and President Obama has announced plans for a "jobs summit" next month.

It's not just that jobs are the key to our recovery from this recession cycle, but that a fundamental change in workforce and employment policy has to happen. I'd say we need to enact new policies that ensure that

Work pays enough to live on,
We invest adequately in proven education and training programs needed for the jobs that are available, and
When there isn't enough work to go around, a real safety net catches and helps lift up those in need.

Green grants galore

2009-11-19T06:05:00-08:00

More stimulus dollars are on the way. The U.S. Department of Labor has just announced the award of $55 million worth of grants to job training programs for disadvantaged communities and labor market information agencies, to help people land green jobs.

Get more details on all the grants and awardees.

Green job training programs are an obvious investment in these troubled times. But what about labor market info? It's hugely important too. If we don't have the right information about what green jobs are in demand and where, we can waste a lot of time and resources creating the wrong kinds of training programs.

DOL expects to award a total of $500 million for careers in energy efficiency and renewable energy from the Recovery Act. It's just a drop in the bucket compared to federal spending on the bank bailout, which I think reflects some upside-down priorities.

Still, this is only round one on the green jobs stimulus, and President Obama has announced a big jobs summit for some time next month. Maybe what will come out of that meeting is a much bigger investment in job creation in 2010 that will help turn the economy around for the rest of us.

Unemployment duration: how long are people out of work today?

2009-11-12T08:58:53-08:00

Courtesy of the folks at Visualizing Economics, this chart showing how the duration of unemployment has changed over time:

If you're having trouble seeing the chart, click here.

Thanks to the folks at the Planet Money twitter feed for the link!