2001: Trouble and triumph
Connecting unemployed to jobs
| • | Motorola leads way in job cuts |
| • | Job-hunting resources proliferating on Web |
By Brian Tumulty
Gannett News Service
WASHINGTON — Gregory Floyd, who was laid off in November as a cook at a downtown Philadelphia restaurant, says he's been searching for a new job by looking at the bulletin board at the local unemployment office.
Gannett News Service
"It usually has jobs like truck drivers going cross country," Floyd said. "Nothing in my field."
Steve Deitz is the program manager for Datatrac Information Services. At the call center in Chantilly, Va., representatives provide callers with the location of the nearest one-stop employment center or related service to match job seekers with employment openings.
Like many of the 8.16 million Americans who now are unemployed and searching for jobs, the 40-year-old North Philadelphia resident hasn't tapped into the new technology the federal government and private industry developed to provide job referrals through toll-free telephone numbers and over the Internet.
Floyd spoke during a recent demonstration on the grounds of the Capitol.
At that event, a group of Philadelphia-area unemployed workers joined laid-off steelworkers from Ohio and Indiana to call upon Congress to provide extended unemployment benefits beyond the 26 weeks states pay from their unemployment trust funds.
The number of Americans out of work for more than 26 weeks has nearly doubled since January to 1.2 million in November. And the national unemployment rate has jumped dramatically since September to 5.7 percent.
But unlike the last recession in 1990-91, information about job vacancies is more readily available.
And the use of these services is on the rise.
The toll-free telephone number (877) US2-JOBS, sponsored by the Labor Department, fielded 11,373 calls in November, more than a sevenfold jump from 1,649 in January. Its telephone representatives can direct a job seeker to the nearest local one-stop career center where help is available with writing a resume, signing up for training or gaining access to Internet-based job banks.
The call center is open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays in the Eastern time zone.
Internet users can do the same thing any hour or day of the week by using America's Service Locator.
"Most of our one-stop career centers are resource centers that are largely computer rooms where individuals looking for jobs or new job opportunities can go in and can actually access job banks," said Emily DeRocco, assistant labor secretary for the Employment and Training Administration.
The granddaddy of the Internet job banks, even though it ranks only 10th in usage, is America's Job Bank, which lists roughly 1 million job vacancies on any given day.
America's Job Bank traces its origin to the 1980s when the state of New York operated a nonautomated interstate job bank in cooperation with other states. In the early 1990s, the states moved it onto the Internet, and in the mid-1990s it became America's Job Bank
More than 400,000 households a month use AJB at home and at work, according to surveys from Nielsen/NetRatings, a partnership between the Nielsen ratings service and NetRatings Inc. of Milpitas, Calif.
Other Internet job banks are getting even heavier usage. An estimated 6.6 million people used the Hotjobs.com Web site in November, while 5.9 million used Monster.com.
America's Job Bank also is available over the telephone through a toll-free service originally conceived as a nonvisual alternative for the blind to make their job search easier. The service, Jobline at (800) 414-5748, is a totally automated system in which callers can create their own career profile and search for particular occupations within a given radius of their home.
