DEL.ICIO.USUpdated: 7:00 p.m. February 11, 2009
Federal job fair gets huge turnout
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Darlene Ellis waited in line for two hours Wednesday morning to get information about a job.
What kind?
Rich Addicks/raddicks@ajc.com
No hiring was done at the job fair at the Sam Nunn Federal Building in Atlanta.
“One that pays the bills,” said Ellis, of Acworth.
She stood among more than 1,000 people in a queue that crawled around the Sam Nunn Federal Center in downtown Atlanta, Georgians joined in the quest for a federal paycheck.
They waited to enter a job fair at which about two dozen agencies offered information and fliers. No hiring or interviewing was done, and officials could not say how many jobs are actually available.
The long lines were testament to the steady weakening of the state’s job market during the past year — and the broadening of layoffs to include many professionals and office workers.
Georgia has shed roughly 150,000 jobs since the end of 2007, when the U.S. economy slipped into recession, according to the state Department of Labor.
The initial impact was felt by construction and manufacturing. The first, a victim of the bursting bubble in housing, and the second, sandbagged by the sagging demand for exports. But starting in late summer, job cuts spread into other areas, as many companies started slashing staff and cutting outside contract work.
In December, the most recent figures released, the official jobless rate for Georgia was 8.1 percent — up 80 percent in the previous year.
That figure does not include discouraged workers or those working even a few hours during the month. Meanwhile, the flow of laid-off Georgians into the pool of job-seekers has continued.
Nearly 129,000 Georgians filed first-time claims in December, up 174 percent from the number filed during the same month a year earlier.
Nearly 43,000 of those claims came from metro Atlanta, where 208,919 people were officially jobless as of December, according to the state Labor Department.
Some of them were in line Wednesday.
“It’s sad that all these people, many of them out of work, are in this line,” said Russell Lohr, 37. “It’s definitely a sign of bad times. It shouldn’t be happening like this — all these people wrapped around a building trying to find their future.”
Thursday the state is to release a report on how many Georgians filed for initial jobless claims in January.
They said the fair was publicized primarily at local colleges for soon-to-be graduates, but word spread quickly and middle-aged faces dominated the crowd.
A job fair in LaGrange earlier this week drew a similar surge of job-seekers for $10-an-hour manufacturing jobs. In contrast, recruiters on Wednesday in Atlanta included NASA and the FBI.
Melody Martin, 23, of Lithonia, spent about 45 minutes inside the job fair. She said she “got some good leads and good information” about how to apply for federal jobs.
Martin, who lost her marketing administration job last year, remained optimistic.
“I’ve got a really good idea of what’s out there and what direction I’m headed to,” she said.
Federal jobs seem especially attractive with prospects for the overall job market dismal — at least for awhile. Economists have been steadily raising their estimates for how high jobless rates will rise this year. A state unemployment rate of 9 percent or more is now commonly predicted, with Atlanta’s jobless rate not far below.
In previous recessions, unemployment has typically kept climbing at least until the end of the downturn and virtually no expert is projecting a rapid end to the recession.
By noon, Gwendolyn Campbell, executive director of the Atlanta Federal Executive Board, an agency organizing Wednesday’s job fair, was strolling along the long line to tell job hopefuls that the fair would close by 2 p.m. and they might not get in.
She handed out information and said that, in light of the turnout, the agency will likely hold another fair.
Organizers had simply not expected so many people to attend the event.
“We should have, but we didn’t,” Campbell said, struggling to be heard over the buzz of news helicopters documenting the sight from above downtown Atlanta.
The turnout “shows that government jobs are desired,” Campbell said, pausing. “I guess at this point any job is desired.”
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