Millions for summer work

By Jeremy Redmon

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia’s Labor Department says it spent $19.7 million of the federal stimulus funds it has received this year on a program that created 2,601 jobs.

So what are these jobs? It turns out they were part of a summer employment and training program that served about 10,900 low-income young people this year, public records show. By the time the state calculated the jobs with a federal formula and reported them to the U.S. government in October, most were already gone. The rest will be gone by March.

Critics say the money could have been better spent reviving the economy.

“That is more of a jobs-training type thing or whatever the case may be,” Don Sabbarese, director of the Econometric Center at Kennesaw State University, said of the money spent in Georgia. “That really has nothing to do with stimulus. It’s really frustrating.”

Sabbarese said offering incentives — such as tax breaks — for small businesses to hire workers would have a bigger impact on the economy.

Lina Garcia, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Labor Department, defended the stimulus spending on the summer youth jobs.

“Whether purchasing their own school supplies and back-to-school clothes, paying a portion of college tuition, or helping to pay bills, young people put this money directly into the economy,” Garcia wrote in an e-mail.

Other proponents say the stimulus spending has helped keep teenagers out of trouble, train them for careers and support their families amid a crippling recession.

Georgia is not alone in spending stimulus dollars on these types of summer jobs. When Congress passed the $787 billion spending program in February, it stipulated that $1.2 billion would pay for Workforce Investment Act youth activities, including summer jobs. Spending from that pot of money put 314,732 young people to work across the country last summer, Garcia said.

People ages 14 to 24 worked in the state’s Georgia Summer Training and Employment Program, Unlimited Potential. Most spent six to eight weeks in their jobs, earning an average of $1,500 to $2,000 in all for the summer.

Among their employers were Georgia Power, Fort Benning, CVS and school systems across the state. Their hourly pay ranged from the federal minimum wage — now at $7.25 — to $14. The stimulus funds also helped pay for summer school and General Educational Development tests for youths.

“This year, many of our young people who were working actually used the money they earned to supplement the family’s budget — to pay rent, to buy food and gas — because their parents were unemployed,” Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond said.

For weeks, critics have been questioning the numbers and types of jobs federal officials say are tied to stimulus dollars. So far, stimulus spending has created or saved 640,329 jobs nationwide, according to the federal Web site recovery.gov. Of that amount, 24,681 are in Georgia, the Web site says.

But news media outlets across the country have shown in recent weeks that those numbers are wrong.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for example, reported on Nov. 15 that recipients of federal stimulus dollars have overstated the number of jobs created or saved in Georgia by more than 1,500. The AJC showed how recipients counted the same jobs repeatedly, counted raises they gave their workers as jobs or reported projected numbers of jobs when the work had not even begun.

The state Labor Department’s summer job count is also wrong. It’s too low, according to state and local officials. The official who oversees the state’s summer jobs program said the U.S. Labor Department told Georgia to use a certain formula, which understates the number of youth jobs created with stimulus funds in Georgia.

As directed by the federal government, Georgia calculated the jobs held by about 10,900 youths this summer as full-time equivalent positions based on six months of work starting April 1, Assistant Labor Commissioner Linda Johnson said. But people didn’t start working in the summer jobs program until June in Georgia and most finished by September, state and local officials said.

The Georgia Labor Department told the local work force boards that oversee summer jobs programs across the state to divide the number of hours the youths worked by 720, which equals 30 hours of work a week for about six months. Johnson said federal officials told Georgia to follow that formula for consistency with other states, even though most youths worked less than four months in Georgia, meaning it would have been more accurate to divide the number of hours by a smaller number. That would have produced a larger number of jobs.

“This discussion that you and I are having we had with the [U.S.] Department of Labor, to be honest with you,” Johnson told the AJC. “We proposed that June 1 be the date.”

However, Garcia, the federal Labor Department spokeswoman, pointed to guidelines on her department’s Web site that say otherwise. Those guidelines, which are in a Sept. 21 memo addressed to the states, say the jobs should be calculated based on a quarter, or three months of work. Johnson said her office got different guidance from a federal labor official in October. A U.S. Labor Department spokesman said he was looking into Johnson’s assertion.

In Cobb County, CobbWorks put 457 young people to work this summer with federal stimulus funds. To be eligible to work in the Cobb program, they had to come from low-income families and face at least one other challenge, such as having a disability or being pregnant or homeless. The eligibility requirements come from the federal Workforce Investment Act. CobbWorks also trained the youths how to dress and act professionally.

“We did a real intense four- to five-day boot camp ... where they were with us all day and we had different programming,” said John Helton, executive director of CobbWorks, a nonprofit group affiliated with the Cobb Workforce Investment Board.

Critics say the summer jobs can be helpful but much more needs to be done to revive the economy.

“If it turns out that a large portion of the overall jobs nationwide throughout the stimulus program turn out to be these kinds of jobs, then I would say that is a problem,” said Philip Mattera, research director for Washington-based Good Jobs First, which is part of the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery. “But right now there is so much confusion about the counting of the jobs that I don’t think we can reach that conclusion yet.”

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How we got the story

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found much of the information for this story in a report filed by Georgia’s Labor Department on the federal Web site recovery.gov. The AJC obtained additional records from the Labor Department and CobbWorks and interviewed officials from both agencies. The AJC also interviewed officials from the U.S. Labor Department, the Econometric Center at Kennesaw State University and Washington-based Good Jobs First, which is part of the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery.