Your Government At Work, From My friends at U-cube
I just wanted to share this E-Mail about our governments great idea for the unemployed :
Dear UCubed Leader:
We won. After five years of arguing for an all-of-government response to massive unemployment, we finally got one.
It involved the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Council of Economic Advisors, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Corporation for National and Community Service and even a Special Assistant to the President.
Over 70,000 Americans were touched directly and when "scaled up" - their term, not mine - over 61.4 million Americans were represented. Of those involved, 55 percent were retired; 25 percent lived in rural areas; 16 percent were unemployed; 3 percent were students; 1 percent had never worked; and 1 percent were laid off but expected to return to their old job.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but this all-of-government response was a survey. A frigging poll. And it found that if the unemployed would only just go out and volunteer, their odds of getting a job would increase by 27 percent. And if Mr. and Mrs. Jobless did not have high school diplomas, volunteering increased their odds of finding a job by 51 percent.
Think about that for a second.
The government's strategy for getting 22.6 million unemployed and underemployed Americans back to full-time work is to ... drumroll please ... urge them to go work for free?
And do all those hours of free mental or muscular work lead to a job? Well, not exactly. It only increases your odds of getting a job.
Maybe. Slightly.
"For the unemployed (those actively seeking work), the increase is 5 percentage points, up from the 45 percent probability of employment for the unemployed non-volunteers," according to the study’s authors and buried on page 17.
Frankly, I cannot discount the fact that volunteering fills the gap in a resume. Or that the unemployed participate in broader social networks when volunteering. And I certainly cannot dismiss the intrinsic value of volunteering in the community because it is the right thing to do.
But let's not kid ourselves. Volunteering is not a panacea for a U-6 that has stalled at 13.2 percent nationwide. Volunteering does not pay the bills nor put food on the table. And a study on volunteering is not the all-of-government response the unemployed and underemployed hoped to see.
Unfortunately, one poll is all this government can produce.
And that's beyond shameful.
In Unity -- Strength,
Rick
Rick Sloan
UCubed President
Union of Unemployed
