The Obama Administration’s assertion that the tens of thousands of jobs created by the Census Bureau are a useful bridge over tough times is hogwash, says former census worker Naomi Cohn. “They are, truth be told, very short bridges — and don't nearly span the wide, rough waters people like me are facing,” Cohn says.
“It seems to me that the Census Bureau is hiring way more people than needed — while at the same time doling out only a few half days of work to many employees —perhaps to put a shine on the number of new jobs created,” Cohn recently wrote in the New York Post.
Many of the 66,000 census jobs cannot even be characterized as part-time work, Cohn asserts.
“I should know. I was hired in March as a Census Bureau enumerator in Brooklyn at $18.75 an hour,” Cohn says. However, after three days of paid training, she has been called to work a total of only 10 hours over two days.
“Many in my training class of 80 people are equally under-utilized,” Cohn observes. “In fact, I heard that only 17 were actually needed for most of the project we were hired for.”
“During one night's work, counting visitors to a soup kitchen, there appeared to be more census workers (around 20) than people to count.”
“This type of scheduling may be of some use to some people (but) the work offered cannot reasonably be characterized as a job in the sense that the government is portraying,” Cohn says.
April’s addition of 290,000 jobs to the economy was the largest monthly gain since March 2006 and beat economists’ expectations by a wide margin, mybanktracker.com reports.
However, 100,000 of those jobs will be lost in the second half of the year because the 2010 census will be over.
