Every fall, families throughout Rhode Island struggle to pull together enough money to get their utilities turned on before the cold months. Each winter, we hear about another fire caused by a family keeping warm with their oven after losing their heat. More and more we hear about children struggling at school because they can’t sleep in their frigid apartments. Emergency rooms deal with the consequences of a system that allows children to go months without heat and electricity.

In the last year, over 30,000 homes – a record high – had either gas or electricity shut off. While many shutoffs are in the cities, the affluent communities are also affected: in Westerly 612 homes were shut off. East Greenwich had 270, Barrington 118, Newport 811, even Little Compton had 30. This problem isn’t happening somewhere else; it’s in your community.

Currently, all winter long, even if they can make payments, few families can keep up with their current bills and even fewer can make headway into eliminating the old debt. The result is that most end the winter in even greater debt and have their utilities shut off again when the moratorium ends.

A side effect of this cycle is that most available heating assistance is aimed at paying just enough to get utilities restored before winter. There is simply not enough money to help customers become current. Each year rising energy costs and the growth of that debt mean it costs more for the customer to reach the point where power is restored. This hopeless cycle leaves more than 30,000 Rhode Island households exposed to the risk of a cold, powerless winter every year and exhausts public assistance funds.

Read the full article here or after the jump.

The only way to stop the cycle is to address the underlying debt. My Home Energy Rate Affordability Act (2009-H 6079, 2009-S 0490 (Josh Miller)) is aimed at doing exactly that through discounts, subsidies and debt forgiveness in exchange for customers’ sustained effort to pay what they can afford.

The program works this way: Qualified customers – the elderly, the disabled and those with income at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level ($31,800 for a household of four) – would pay 6 to 8 percent of their income, slightly more than the amount that goes toward utilities in a median-income household. They would pay that amount throughout the year, even in summer, to reduce their debt. They would be allowed that rate only for a basic level of heat and energy, so they must conserve. They must make these payments fully for 36 months for their remaining debt to be forgiven.

This program would be funded partially through existing programs and through a modest surcharge pf $1.40 a month per meter for all residential and small business customers – amounting to $16.80 annually per meter.

Some would argue against adding anything to the rising cost of utility bills. However, in addition to helping the poorest, this program would actually help stabilize utility rates for everyone because it would result in fewer customers failing to pay at all. Currently, those who cannot afford to pay enough to get their service restored are unlikely to pay anything. Their debt is then absorbed by all other ratepayers. Under this plan, those customers would be less likely to get shut off again, and more likely to pay every month, even in the summer months when they might otherwise have less incentive.

There are few families in Rhode Island for whom $16.80 a year is going to make the difference between eating or not, which college their child attends, or whether they make their mortgage payment. However, there are many families for whom this program would absolutely make the difference between freezing all winter or not. For them, it could also mean the difference between health and sickliness. It can enable their children to sleep comfortably and go to school prepared. It can mean they stay in their homes instead of shelters or packing in with friends. It can mean that adults can concentrate on work instead of seeking warm shelter.

Allowing the less fortunate to pay a reasonable percentage of their income for utilities frees up some of their income for other necessities like food and rent. That spending would have a positive effect on the local economy.

This proposal doesn’t cost ratepayers much and has no effect on the state budget. But its impact on poor families will be overwhelming. I sincerely urge my fellow lawmakers to adopt this plan in the upcoming return to session.

The districts approved to issue interest-free bonds allocation are:
Central Falls, $7.8 million
Chariho, $4.8 million
Compass Charter School, (South Kingstown) $1.6 million
South Kingstown, $78,000
Warwick, $3.9 million
and Westerly, $3.9 million

Providence was not forgotten as it received a “separate interest-free award of $22.3 million, an award based on its size and poverty level.”

Le plein article

CLEVELAND — The first night after she surrendered her house to foreclosure, Sheri West endured the darkness in her Hyundai sedan. She parked in her old driveway, with her flower-print dresses and hats piled in boxes on the back seat, and three cherished houseplants on the floor. She used her backyard as a restroom.

The second night, she stayed with a friend, and so it continued for more than a year: Ms. West — mother of three grown children, grandmother to six and great-grandmother to one — passed months on the couches of friends and relatives, and in the front seat of her car.

But this fall, she exhausted all options. She had once owned and overseen a group home for homeless people. Now, she succumbed to that status herself, checking in to a shelter.

“No one could have told me that in a million years: I’d wake up in a homeless shelter,” she said. “I had a house for homeless people. Now, I’m homeless.”

Growing numbers of Americans who have lost houses to foreclosure are landing in homeless shelters, according to social service groups and a recent report by a coalition of housing advocates.

Only three years ago, foreclosure was rarely a factor in how people became homeless. But among the homeless people that social service agencies have helped over the last year, an average of 10 percent lost homes to foreclosure, according to “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009,” a survey produced by the National Coalition for the Homeless and six other advocacy groups.

In the Midwest, foreclosure played a role for 15 percent of newly homeless people, according to the survey, reflecting soaring rates of unemployment — Ohio’s reached 10.8 percent in August — and aggressive lending to people with damaged credit.

At a shelter for women and children run by the West Side Catholic Center in Cleveland, where Ms. West now lives, foreclosure accounted for zero arrivals in 2007, the center’s executive director, Gerald Skoch, said. Last year, two cases emerged. This year, the number has already reached four.

Similar increases have been reported at shelters in California, Michigan and Florida, where a combination of joblessness and the real estate bust have generated unusually severe rates of foreclosure.

Most people who become homeless because of foreclosure had been low-income renters whose landlords stopped making their mortgage payments, leaving them scrambling for new housing with little notice and scant savings, according to the survey and interviews with shelters.

But in recent months, there has been a visible increase in the number of former homeowners showing up in shelters. Like Ms. West, most have landed there after months trying to stave off that fate.

“These families never needed help before,” said Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House in Santa Ana, Calif. “They haven’t a clue about where to go, and they have all sorts of humiliation issues. They don’t even know what to say, what to ask for.”

Many start off camping out in cars, particularly in warmer places.

“We’ve seen a rise in people sleeping in their cars,” said Rick Cole, city manager in Ventura, Calif., which recently allowed car-camping in designated areas. “Some are foreclosed former homeowners, and some couldn’t afford their rent. People will give up their house before they give up their car.”

Those with means try to rent homes or apartments, though tainted credit often makes that impossible. Growing numbers are landing in motels that rent by the week, cramming whole families into single rooms and using hot plates as kitchens. But as unemployment expands, many are losing the wherewithal to remain.

Many take refuge with families and friends, occupying extra bedrooms, basements and attics. But such hospitality rarely lasts.

So, as lean times endure and paychecks disappear, homeless shelters are absorbing those who have run out of alternatives.

For Ms. West, whose youthful appearance belies her age, in her mid-50s, the nights spent on couches in other people’s homes were uncomfortably familiar. She grew up an only child in a housing project in Neptune, N.J., where her mother slept in the lone bedroom, and she occupied a pullout sofa in the living room.

“I’ve always had this dream of doing better,” she said. “I always wanted to own my own house.”

She realized that dream shortly after arriving in Cleveland with her husband and two children in the early 1990s. At first, they rented. But one fall afternoon, Ms. West found herself on a block lined with leafy trees in Mount Pleasant, a neighborhood east of the Cuyahoga River that was a magnet for middle-class black families like hers. Red brick homes with wooden porches sat on ample lots. Public schools were a few blocks away.

When she saw an ad in the Sunday paper offering a house on that very block, she bought it for $45,000; for the $9,000 down payment she used the savings her mother had left her when she died. She and her husband assumed the mortgage from the previous owner, with affordable payments of less than $400 a month.

Ms. West then had a job as a maintenance worker at an apartment complex for about $9 an hour. Her husband earned about $10 an hour as a truck driver. As the years passed, they added shrubbery to the front yard and photos of children’s birthday parties to the walls.

“I thought that was going to be my house,” she said.

She tapped her inheritance to buy another house on nearby Union Street, paying $15,000 in cash for a light-blue, vinyl-sided A-frame. She turned the house into a home for five homeless people. She did their laundry, reminded them to take their medications and cooked meals, while collecting payments of up to $750 a person each month from the agencies that placed them.

Over the years, Ms. West and her husband spent more than they earned. They used credit cards to finance restaurant meals. They bought a new S.U.V.

At the group home, Ms. West’s compensation slipped as the state limited benefit payments. Yet every month brought the same thicket of bills — water, electricity, gas, plus food for the people under her charge.

In 2001, Ms. West and her husband took out a $67,000 mortgage on the Union Street house — which had increased considerably in value — to refinance high-interest debts, assuming payments of nearly $700 a month.

Two years later, her husband left her.

“It just took the life out me,” she said. “I was in a very bad state, a very depressed situation. Things just kind of went downhill. I just didn’t care anymore.”

By 2005, she was broke. She sold the brick house to her cousin, disbanded the group home and moved in. She paid what bills she could through temporary jobs as a signature collector for petition drives. But as many months passed without work, the bills piled up past due.

By the next year, terse letters were coming from the mortgage company — notices of delinquency, then threats of foreclosure. Much of the neighborhood was in a similar state. Broken windows sat unrepaired at a two-story apartment block across the street, where tattered curtains flapped in the breeze. The city boarded up abandoned homes to deter vagrants, drug addicts and prostitutes.

Ms. West wrote to her mortgage company, seeking lower payments. But with tainted credit and no full-time job, she was not a candidate for a deal. Fliers beckoned with relief as companies offered to negotiate with her lender for lower payments. But when she called, the companies demanded upfront payments as high as $500.

“I told them, ‘if I had that money, I wouldn’t be going into foreclosure,’ ” she said.

In the spring of 2008, Ms. West accepted an offer from the mortgage company: move out, hand over the keys and collect $2,500. She sold what furniture she could and put the rest on the street — tables, beds, a couch.

Her uncle had said she could stay with him for a while. But when she called him to say she was on the way, he told her that his girlfriend was uncomfortable with the arrangement. Ms. West’s daughter was in a cramped rented house with her boyfriend and her two children. Her son was in a rooming house.

So Ms. West, a stylish woman with a penchant for shiny lipstick and glittering jewelry, wound up camping in her car. She listened to the radio to drown out the voices of prostitutes trawling the street. She meditated. (“Just blank out everything in your mind,” she said. “Just go to a place that’s peaceful, like a beach.”) She prayed.

“It was scary,” she said. “Here I am, alone, and I don’t have nowhere to go.”

The next day, she moved in with a friend, remaining there for about three months. For several more months, she stayed with the cousin who had bought her old brick house and was living there with her husband and seven children. Toys lay scattered across the floor. The walls vibrated with music, television and the sounds of children. She lay awake on the couch, a vagabond in the one place that had once felt so solid.

“I was losing my mind,” she said.

She was grateful to be inside — particularly during the Cleveland winter — yet never comfortable or stable enough to plan beyond the next day.

“You know in the back of your mind that people don’t really want you there,” she said.

Sometimes, she lived out of her car, spending days at the public library, where she washed up in the restroom and used a computer to scan meager job listings.

Finally, a woman she met on the street took her in and helped her formulate a recovery plan. She signed up for food stamps. She enrolled at a community college in a three-month, state-financed training program that would give her a certificate for an entry-level job in biotechnology, putting her in position to earn as much as $16 an hour.

In September, she got a bed at the homeless shelter, reluctantly accepting that she needed her own space to re-establish her life.

“I never wanted to go to the shelter because of the stigma,” she said. “I’m a very independent person. I felt like I got myself into this situation, and I’ve got to get myself out. But I knew I couldn’t just keep going back and forth and staying with these people and not moving forward with my life.”

She sleeps in a twin bed with a flower-print duvet, in a small room painted lavender. Her plants line the windowsill. She keeps to herself, reading motivational books, as she prepares to start classes next month.

She is working again, taking care of senior citizens in their homes part time, and saving money.

By December, she will exhaust the shelter’s 90-day limit, so she is hurrying to line up a house to rent while arranging a subsidy through the West Side Catholic Center.

She is still shaken by the past and anxious about the future, but she is again looking ahead.

“I do want to eventually own a house again,” she said. “That’s the American dream. That’s what everybody wants.”

The U.S. Census Bureau released data today showing that 118,556 Rhode Islanders were living in poverty in 2008.  The data is based on a 3 million person sampling in the United States called the American Community Survey, and shows that Rhode Island’s poverty rate in 2008 stood at 11.7%.  This is lower than (although statistically insignificant to) last year’s rate of 12%.  Rhode Island ranked 31st highest in the nation, below the national average.  When compared to the other New England states, however, Rhode Island had the second highest level of poverty, after Maine.

The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans — those making more than $138,000 each year — earned 11.4 times the roughly $12,000 made by those living near or below the poverty line in 2008, according to newly released census figures. That ratio was an increase from 11.2 in 2007 and the previous high of 11.22 in 2003.

Nationally, the poverty rate for 2008 stood at 13.2%, an 11-year high.  This represents a total of 39.8 million people (14 million of which are children) living in poverty.  There have not been this many people living in poverty since 1960.

Moreover, there is a wide disparity of poverty rates among different racial groups.  28 percent of Hispanics and Latinos live in poverty, while 20.8% of Blacks/African Americans, and 8.4% of White/Caucasians.  This is likely due to the recession’s devastating effect on the job market for low and middle-income earners.  Luckily, Rhode Island has a strong system for unemployment benefits, a system strengthened by the Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2009 (passed the House on Sept. 22).  This system has kept many individuals and families from falling into poverty.

“For those laid off workers who are actually eligible for unemployment insurance, the benefits have helped protect them from plummeting into poverty in this harsh economy,” said Rachel Flum, Policy Analyst at The Poverty Institute.

Unfortunately, the Census Bureau’s figures aren’t truly accurate because the federal measure of poverty is woefully outdated.  The Health and Human Services poverty guideline for 2009 show that an individual must make $10,830 or less to be considered “living in poverty.”  For a family of four, the number is $22,050.  That’s not a lot of money and inaccurately represents just how expensive living in the United States (and Rhode Island) is.

Data by the Poverty Institute tell a different story.  In their 2008 Standard of Need, they determine that it costs $52,188 for a family of four to meet basic needs in Rhode Island (housing, food, transportation, child care, medical, etc.).  A single adult would need to earn $20,280 to meet basic needs.  These numbers better reflect what’s necessary to “live” in Rhode Island, and are 200-250% higher than the federal poverty level.

As if the poverty numbers weren’t bad enough, there’s more bad news.  The recession has also widened the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest Americans.

The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans — those making more than $138,000 each year — earned 11.4 times the roughly $12,000 made by those living near or below the poverty line in 2008, according to newly released census figures. That ratio was an increase from 11.2 in 2007 and the previous high of 11.22 in 2003.

The rise in unemployment continues to prolong the hardship for millions of Americans, according to the latest update of the Huffington Post’s Real Misery Index.

The index rose to 32.2 in August 2009, after peaking at 29.2 in July, largely due to the increase in the U6 unemployment rate, which tracks part-time workers looking for full-time employment and those who’ve given up looking for work. The index would be even higher if it weren’t for a slight rebound in housing prices.

Rising unemployment — and the accompanying increase in the number of Americans who have been out of work for more than 6 months (5.4 million as of September) — threatens to diminish the chances of a speedy recovery.

“We’re not at the beginning, and we’re not at the end,” American Bankers Association chief economist James Chessen told the Huffington Post’s Shahien Nasiripour. “We’re stuck in the middle of this cycle, and it’s painful. I think it’s a matter of working through the problems. The loans that were made that are problems today are loans that were made years ago. So it really is a matter of working through a difficult environment.

“The biggest issue affecting lenders today is the unemployment rate. Because not only does that affect consumer lending directly, but it impacts business lending as those consumers just don’t have the income to buy the goods they did before.”

Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan told ABC News last weekend that prolonged unemployment translates into lost skills for the economy as a whole. “And people who are out of work for very protracted periods of time lose their skills eventually.”

To formulate our index, which provides a better snapshot of the economy than the often-criticized misery index (inflation added to unemployment), we used a more accurate unemployment statistic (the U6 formulation), with the inflation rate for three essentials (food and beverages, gas, medical costs), and year-over-year percent changes in credit card delinquencies, housing prices, food stamp participation, and home equity loan deficiencies. We gave equal weight to the broad unemployment numbers and the combination of the other seven metrics (with housing prices having an inverse relationship to the index).

PROVIDENCE, R.I., Oct. 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — In what will play a major role in Rhode Island’s economic recovery, 42 percent of all job openings projected for the state by 2016 are “middle-skill” – jobs that require more than a high school diploma, but less than a four-year degree — concludes a new study released today by The Workforce Alliance and the Skills2Compete-Rhode Island campaign, an affiliate of the national Skills2Compete campaign. But to unleash the full economic benefits of these openings, Rhode Island will need to invest in proper training and education for its embattled workforce.

While the recession is stifling current employment growth, more than 68,000 “middle-skill” job openings (including new jobs and replacement) would account for 42 percent of all Rhode Island job openings between 2006 and 2016. Low- and high- skill jobs will account for 26 percent and 32 percent respectively.

The report, which for the first time tracks Rhode Island’s jobs at the middle-skill level, notes that federal funds from the recovery bill are also expected to create thousands of new jobs — particularly in industries dominated by middle-skill occupations, like environment/energy, construction, healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation.

Rhode Island’s investments in postsecondary education and workforce training have not kept up with employer demand for middle-skill workers. Prior to the recession Rhode Island was already experiencing shortages of middle skill workers in crucial industries. At that point about 48 percent of all jobs were classified as middle-skill but only 37 percent of Rhode Island workers had the credentials to fill them. That gap will return and widen as the economy rebounds, jobs are created and more workers retire. The effect will be multiplied if Rhode Island’s middle-skill educational attainment rate continues to decline.

With record unemployment in the state, the report notes the recession is precisely the right time to develop a strong middle-skill workforce.

“Economic downtime in Rhode Island should be used to invest in training,” urges Linda Katz, Policy Director of the Poverty Institute and facilitator of the RI Workforce Alliance, the lead partner in the Skills2Compete-Rhode Island campaign. “If Rhode Island seeks real economic recovery and long-term prosperity, we must ensure our workforce has the necessary education and training to meet the labor demands of the future.”

Brandon Melton, Senior Vice President of Human Resources for Lifespan expressed his concerns, “While the recession has created a temporary hiatus in our immediate demand for nurses, we are very concerned about the even steeper gap that will occur once the recession ends – causing demand to increase and allowing nurses that have been delaying retirement to finally do so. At that point we foresee not just renewed, but heightened demand for nurses and other middle-skill jobs, like radiology technicians, at our hospitals.” Melton continues, “To stay ahead of this curve, our Stepping Up program is currently addressing the impending skills gap in two ways: working with Labor to help our lower-skilled employees move up the job ladder and partnering with community-based organizations to train residents to enter employment at our hospitals.”

Andrew Cortes, Director of Building Futures, states, “We’re working to ensure that the construction industry will have workers to meet current and future labor needs and in doing so are providing low-income Rhode Islanders with pathways to better-paying jobs.” Looking to ramp up their skill training, Building Futures is the key partner in a recently submitted application for a Recovery Act competitive grant and Cortés states, “Basic skills are the foundation on which our training program builds, so Rhode Island’s investment in adult education as part of its workforce development strategy is critical to ensuring that we can build the workforce our industry needs.”

The analysis for the study was performed by TWA using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey. The analysis is based on the methodology developed for the national Skills2Compete report – America’s Forgotten Middle-Skill Jobs – by labor economists Harry Holzer and Robert Lerman.

Rhode Island’s Forgotten Middle-Skills Jobs assesses the current and future middle-skill employment and education patterns in the state:

• Shortages in healthcare are ongoing and will worsen. Prior to the recession, Rhode Island health care employers reported having troubling filling positions from the local labor pool. More than half of all vacancies in this industry were open for more than 60 days. More than half of all openings were for registered nurse and nursing aides or orderlies and attendants,
• Middle-skill jobs expected to grow by 2016 in Rhode Island include carpenters with a median earning of $42,280; radiology technicians with a median earning of $61,000 and licensed practical nurses with a median earning of $48,540. The report includes a list of 30 high-demand middle-skill jobs in Rhode Island.
• Like the nation as a whole, Rhode Island faces substantial challenges when it comes to basic skills. Almost 149,000 Rhode Islanders are in need of adult basic education or English as a second language. Annual waiting list surveys show that 1,700 people are waiting for these services at any point in time with many waiting a year or more.

The report also finds that two-thirds of the people who will be in Rhode Island’s workforce in the year 2020 were already working adults in 2005 — long past the traditional high school to college pipeline.

The Skills2Compete campaign says this finding underscores the crucial importance of investments in training and re-training the current adult workforce to closing the skill gap. And while the nation’s overall K-12 education system also needs significant repair that alone won’t solve this problem.

Echoing a vision put forward by the national Skills2Compete campaign, President Obama first challenged every American to commit to at least one year of postsecondary education or training in February 2009, and has continued to signal that investing in a range of skills for America’s workforce — “be it at a community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship” — will be a priority for his Administration.

“There is a federal call to action that must not be ignored. The President has called on all Americans to obtain some form of postsecondary education or job training and has backed that up with commitments to invest in community colleges and other middle-skill training opportunities” notes Jessie Hogg Leslie, of The Workforce Alliance, the convening organization for the national Skills2Compete campaign, “Even with a heightened focus on these issues at the national level, Rhode Island should not wait for federal policy to play catch-up with state demand, but rather take proactive policy actions to train more state residents for better, more plentiful middle-skill jobs and careers.”

The Skills2Compete-Rhode Island campaign is calling on state leaders to embrace this bold vision to guide its economic and education strategy that would allow residents to meet or exceed the President’s challenge: Every Rhode Islander should have access to at least two years of education or training past high school — leading to a vocational credential, industry certification, or one’s first two years of college — to be pursued at whatever point and pace makes sense for individual workers and industries. An education strategy guided by this vision would give Rhode Island a competitive edge for recovery and long-term growth.

The study notes historical precedents for such an initiative at the federal level including universal high school for U.S. students in the mid-nineteenth century and the GI Bill, which boosted post-war prosperity in the 1940s. The report also looks at state-level precedents such as Michigan’s “No Worker Left Behind” initiative, launched in August 2007, which promises to train up to 100,000 state residents in jobs in high demand occupations and emerging industries.

Members of the Skills2Compete-Rhode Island campaign will meet in Washington, DC November 2nd and 3rd with legislative leaders to review the study’s findings and encourage further federal efforts to ensure all workers can get the skills they need to play a role in economic recovery. Over those two days, the campaign will brief federal policymakers on the report’s findings and begin to explore ways federal and state policy can complement one another to make Rhode Island a leading state in addressing the middle-skills gap.

Skills2Compete is a non-partisan campaign to ensure the U.S. workforce has the skills needed to meet business demand, foster innovation, and grow broadly shared prosperity. The campaign’s diverse and growing list of endorsers include national and local leaders from business, labor, education and training, community and civil rights groups, and the public sector. The Skills2Compete Vision: Every U.S. worker should have access to the equivalent of at least two years of education or training past high school — leading to a vocational credential, industry certification, or one’s first two years of college — to be pursued at whatever point and pace makes sense for individual workers and industries. Every person must also have the opportunity to obtain the basic skills needed to pursue such education. For more information visit www.Skills2Compete.org and www.Skills2Compete.org/RhodeIsland.

TWA’s mission is to advocate for public policies that invest in the skills of America’s workers, so they can better support their families and help American businesses better compete in today’s economy. The Workforce Alliance is a national coalition of community-based training organizations, community colleges, unions, business leaders, local officials, and leading technical assistance and research organizations. This alliance of stakeholders, who have not previously come together, ensures that our efforts are not in the self interest of a particular group, but are instead in the broader public interest of the nation. For more information, visit www.workforcealliance.org

In a brutal job market, here’s a task that might sound easy: Fill jobs in nursing, engineering and energy research that pay $55,000 to $60,000, plus benefits.

Yet even with 15 million people hunting for work, even with the unemployment rate nearing 10 percent, some employers can’t find enough qualified people for good-paying career jobs.

Ask Steve Jones, a hospital recruiter in Indianapolis who’s struggling to find qualified nurses, pharmacists and MRI technicians. Or Ed Baker, who’s looking to hire at a U.S. Energy Department research lab in Richland, Wash., for $60,000 each.

Economists say the main problem is a mismatch between available work and people qualified to do it. Millions of jobs with attractive pay and benefits that once drew legions of workers to the auto industry, construction, Wall Street and other sectors are gone, probably for good. And those who lost those jobs generally lack the right experience for new positions popping up in health care, energy and engineering.

Many of these specialized jobs were hard to fill even before the recession. But during downturns, recruiters tend to become even choosier, less willing to take financial risks on untested workers.

The mismatch between job opening and job seeker is likely to persist even as the economy strengthens and begins to add jobs. It also will make it harder for the unemployment rate, now at 9.8 percent, to drop down to a healthier level.

“Workers are going to have to find not just a new company, but a new industry,” said Sophia Koropeckyj, managing director of Moody’s Economy.com. “A fifty-year-old guy who has been screwing bolts into the side of a car panel is not going to be able to become a health care administrator overnight.”

It’s become especially hard to find accountants, health care workers, software sales representatives, actuaries, data analysts, physical therapists and electrical engineers, labor analysts say. And employers that demand highly specialized training – like biotech firms that need plant scientists or energy companies that need geotechnical engineers to build offshore platforms – struggle even more to fill jobs.

The trend has been intensified by the speed of the job market decline, Koropeckyj said. The nation has lost a net 7.6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007. Yet it can take a year or more for a laid-off worker to gain the training and education to switch industries. That means health care jobs are going unfilled even as laid-off workers in the auto, construction or financial services industries seek work.

“So we have this army of the unemployed” without the necessary skills, Koropeckyj said.

Sitting in his office overlooking the Clarian Health complex, Jones leafed through some of the applications he’s received. One came from a hotel worker who listed his experience as, “Cleaning rooms; make beds, clean tubes, vacuum.” Another was from a fitness instructor whose past duties included signing up gym members.

Many of the jobless seem to be applying for any opening they see, Jones said.

“You just don’t have the supply to fill those particular positions,” he said of the more than 200 “critical” jobs he needs to fill at Clarian, including nurses, pharmacists, MRI technicians and ultrasound technologists.

Contributing to the problem is that in a tough economy, employers take longer to assess applicants and make a hiring decision. By contrast, “in a healthier economy, you don’t wait around for the perfect person,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of labor economics at Harvard.

To be sure, employers in most sectors of the economy are having no trouble filling jobs – especially those, like receptionists, hotel managers or retail clerks, that don’t require specialized skills.

But as more jobs vanish for good, the gap between the unemployed and the requirements of today’s job openings is widening. Throughout the economy, an average of six people now compete for each job opening – the highest ratio on government records dating to 2000.

Sifting through applications for jobs at the U.S. Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state, Baker said he sees “people that have worked in other areas, and now they’re trying to apply that skill set to the energy arena.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not the skill set we need.”

The jobs opened up after the lab received federal stimulus money to research energy-efficient buildings. Baker needs employees with backgrounds in city management and a grasp of the building codes needed to design energy-efficient buildings. Yet even a salary of $140,000 for senior researchers isn’t drawing enough qualified applicants.

Baker said he’s getting resumes from well-educated people, including some from information technology workers who want to enter the green-energy field. But he said it could take a year to get an unqualified employee up to speed on all the building codes they need to know.

“We’re running out of people to train” new employees, he said. “We simply cannot attract enough (qualified) people.”

The lab has hired a recruiter for the first time to fill dozens of positions. Rob Dromgoole, the recruiter, is going so far as to make cold calls to college professors. He’s also visiting academic conferences to pitch jobs.

The trend has left jobseekers like Joe Sladek anxious and frustrated. Sladek’s 23 years in the auto industry haven’t helped his efforts to land a job in alternative energy since he was laid off a year ago.

As a quality control engineer for auto supplier Dura Automotive Systems Inc. in Mancelona, Mich., he made about $75,000. Sladek would review technical reports to make sure the factory’s auto parts matched the specifications of clients like General Motors and Toyota.

He hoped to parlay that experience into a similar job at a factory making windmill blades or solar panels. Several factories were hiring, and Sladek landed a few interviews. But he never heard back.

At PricewaterhouseCoopers in Chicago, there’s a shortage of qualified applicants for management jobs in tax services, auditing and consulting. Rod Adams, the company’s recruiting leader, said huge pay packages on Wall Street siphoned off lots of business school graduates earlier this decade.

“That made our pipeline more scarce,” he said.

Some of the openings at PricewaterhouseCoopers pay around $100,000 and don’t even require graduate degrees – just specialized accounting certifications or other credentials.

Formerly successful bankers or hedge fund managers don’t necessarily qualify.

“We’ve gotten a lot more resumes, but they haven’t been the right people,” Adams said.

If the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s most recent report had been an international comparison of test scores, the media would have gone berserk. Negativity certainly erupts when ODEC releases the results of their Programme for International Student Assessment test, since it generally shows U.S. students performing poorly compared with their peers in other industrialized nations. The PISA tests invariably get lots of press, with experts making dire predictions that our under-skilled kids and lackluster schools are taking us down to economic ruin.

ODEC is a Paris-based organization that collects and monitors statistics on 30 industrialized countries.

But ODEC’s most recent report, “Doing Better for Children,” examines child well-being, not test scores. Education data are included, but the focus is poverty, teen-parenting, environmental quality, and telling measures like whether kids have desks, calculators and other basic tools to do schoolwork at home. (Forty-eight percent of U.S. children do not. The ODEC average is 35.)

In short, by ODEC’s measures, the U.S. does a wretched job of caring for its children. The statistics are appalling. So why wouldn’t the press care?

Perhaps it’s because pundits rarely concern themselves with the dysfunctional families that produce the kids who score badly on tests. By averaging all U.S. children together, ODEC’s statistics mask the evidence that we, the social class, which includes pundits, take superb care of our children. Our kids are the ones who are most likely to be just fine. We don’t really want to think about those other families, because, well, if you don’t have anything nice to say …

Still, here is a sampling of ODEC’s stats:

Only Luxembourg (population 490,000) has families with a higher disposable income than the families in the U.S. On average, we’re rich people.

However, the U.S. has a sky-high rate of childhood poverty, topped only by Poland, Mexico and Turkey. Roughly 21 percent of America’s kids are born and raised under the poverty level set by the federal government, a ridiculously low threshold of $22,000 for a family of four. Do the math. You can’t live on that here. A more realistic measure would greatly raise the percentage of children in poverty. The average childhood-poverty rate among the ODEC countries was 12 percent. Unlikely countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic beat the pants off us.

The U.S. has high infant mortality rates, and high numbers of babies born underweight.

Particularly alarming is our high rate of teen births, the second worst rate after Mexico. Our rate is 50 births per 1,000; the ODEC average is 15.5. Our babies are having babies, forming new families very likely to be incompetent, and very likely to keep the cycle going.

And education? The educational achievement of our 15-year-olds is the seventh worst among the countries studied. But more upsetting is the measure of the gaps between the highest student achievers and the lowest, which for us is sixth worst in the comparison. In other words, if you’re a privileged American kid, and you can keep from wrecking your own self by getting spoiled and disaffected, you’re on track for a promising future.

Since the U.S. is a large country, in absolute numbers lots of American kids are succeeding brilliantly. In the last PISA test (2006), just under 70,000 American kids were deemed top performers. Finland may be the highest performing country overall, but it’s tiny, with roughly 1,000 academic hotshots.

So it’s by no means all of our kids who are going to wrack and ruin. But lots of them are. Many children fend for themselves, with poor family support, on track for truly dismal futures. Our burgeoning prisons are only one image of where that track sometimes leads.

So here’s what that report says to me: Help the families. Many American families are in trouble. Deep trouble. Half the parents divorce, if they marry at all. We are generations away from extended families or high-functioning faith-based or ethnic communities that could provide social safety nets, advice and respite for overwhelmed or clueless parents. In their isolation, many families get most of their parenting tips from TV’s powerful suggestions to spoil the children with shiny junk.

The schools resent the families’ disengagement, and for good reason. The public resents women having babies they can’t support, for good reason. We don’t like those families, and given our resentment, we leave it up to them to fix themselves.

But the time for resentment is past. The ODEC report shows us to be in crisis already.

In general, a kid is only as healthy as his family, only as high-functioning. Even if test scores were the gold standard of childhood health, our obsessive, narrow focus on the functioning of the schools is never going to yield the achievement we want.

The key to deep, lasting improvement of the schools would be to launch a companion effort to shore up the families, with reformed attitudes and policies. How have other countries reduced teen birth rates or, most critically, childhood poverty?

For that we’ll need some clear-sighted thinking about modern families, their needs and isolated circumstances. The other industrialized nations have policy strategies for supporting families, and they do far better than we do, including producing students with better test scores. The ODEC report references a number of documents outlining such national strategies. We should be looking to them.

And wondering why on earth we have so little interest in the people who are the most important in our children’s lives.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@gmail.com, or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.

October 2, 2009 New York Times

The American economy lost 263,000 jobs in September — far more than expected — and the unemployment rate rose 9.8 percent, the government reported on Friday, dimming the prospect of any meaningful job growth by the end of the year.

The Labor Department’s monthly snapshot of unemployment dashed hopes that the pace of job losses would continue to slow as the economy clawed its way back from a deep recession. Economists had been hoping for 175,000 monthly job losses.

In one bright spot, fewer jobs were lost in August than originally reported — with 201,000 positions gone instead of earlier figures of 216,000.

But overall, the report offered little good news for the 15.1 million unemployed people in the United States. The number of hours worked stagnated. Overtime hours slipped in many industries. And temporary help companies — typically, among the first to rebound after a recession — shed 1,700 jobs.

Indeed, while many businesses are making money again and seeing new orders trickle in, most are not ready to hire back the workers they laid off, even part-time.

To economists, that suggests that unemployment could remain at historically high levels through next year, if not longer.

“It’s a little bleak,” said Marissa Di Natale, senior economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “We’re not going to see job growth until the second half of next year. And even when it does start to grow, it’s going to be slow.”

The economy has been bleeding jobs every month, without interruption, for nearly two years. More than 15 million people in the United States are now unemployed, and more are working part-time jobs for less pay, or have given up looking for work altogether.

“This is still severe,” said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project. “It’s not going to be turning around as fast as people want.”

At the same time, other measures of the economy are beginning to waver, signaling that the initial phase of the recovery — a sharp rebound from a deep bottom — may be giving way to a long grind higher, marked by uncertainty and pain for many.

For Democrats, a slow recovery — and an unemployment rate at a 26-year high — could quickly become a liability ,if businesses are not hiring by next year’s mid-term elections.

The Obama administration has said job losses would be even worse without the tax credits and spending projects from the $787 billion stimulus, but Republicans have pilloried the programs as ineffective.

In Elizabeth, N.J., Stephanie Wheeler has been watching her savings and unemployment benefits run out. A year after she lost her job at a data processing company, she has $800 left in her savings account and six more weeks of $379 unemployment checks. After that, she said she does not know what to do.

“It’s terrifying,” Ms. Wheeler, 56, said. “I have an apartment. I’ve been here for eight years. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m petrified of being set out on the street.”

She said she has been applying for work as an administrative assistant, receptionist and in customer service, and resorted to paying an online agency $206 to update her résumé, after she said she was guaranteed a job or her money back. So far, she has gotten neither. She said she has been paring back her expenses as best she can, starting with meals.

“I try to eat less,” she said.

Some 52 percent of unemployed people have exhausted state jobless benefits, and some are reaching the end of the makeshift strands of emergency extensions. The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would provide another 13 weeks of benefits, but a similar bill has stalled in the Senate over questions of whether it should only cover people in the hardest-hit states.

On Thursday, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, nodded at the problems that long-term unemployment creates for workers, saying that they risk losing skills and becoming less employable if they detach from the labor force.

As a construction worker, Richard Hall, 44, of Winter Springs, Fla., spent two decades pouring concrete, framing buildings and helping to erect glittering high-rises, but it has been a year since the company he worked for him shut down. He said he has found no other building jobs in Florida, and his final unemployment check, for $235, arrived on Wednesday. Now, he said, he and a friend drive around in a pickup truck and pick up old washing machines, ovens and loose metal from the street and sell it for scrap.

“They pay you by however many pounds,” he said. “It’s better than sitting around doing nothing. That gets old real quick.”