Georgia may have one of the nation's highest jobless rates, but a state program aimed at getting the unemployed back to work is being touted as the basis for a federal jobs program President Barack Obama will unveil next month.
The White House is studying Georgia Works, created in 2003 and hailed since as a promising approach, according to a report this week in The Wall Street Journal. The White House declined Tuesday to comment what the president will propose.
Georgia Works, which the state expanded last year and then curtailed for budgetary reasons, places unemployed workers in jobs for a six-week trial stint. Employers pay nothing and workers continue to receive unemployment benefits as well as a small state stipend for travel expenses and childcare.
Since its launch, 24.2 percent of the 32,266 unemployed Georgians who participated in the program were retained by the companies they were paired with, according to Sam Hall, a spokesman for the state labor department. More than 16,500 employers have participated.
Critics -- including Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project -- say the program takes advantage of the unemployed and may violate federal labor laws. Participants are considered trainees, not employees, and therefore are not eligible for things such as overtime.
“You can’t try someone out and not pay them," Stettner said in a previous AJC article.
But many others say that because the program is voluntary, it does not violate federal wage and hour laws.
They call the program a win-win for the worker and employer. The worker gets to show what she can do and gains valuable experience, while the employer can test out potential long-term candidates without paying costly training expenses.
So can this work nationally?
Columbus State University economist Tim Mescon said that although it's shown promise in Georgia, the partisan politics of Washington make replicating that success extremely dicey.
The President, he said, would have to get states to buy into the idea and somehow incentivize them. Otherwise, the idea is likely to go nowhere.
“The bureaucratic obstacles alone will be insurmountable,” he said.
Tara Reardon, commissioner of New Hampshire’s Employment Security office, said “Return to Work,” a program her state created in 2010 modeled on Georgia Works, has been extremely successful.
Though the state does not offer stipends, 190 of the 276 people who were trained through the “Return to Work” have been hired.
“We got some good advice from Georgia about this," she added. "They told us to be aware of employers who had multiple agreements and asked for a lot of people, but never hire."
Michael Thurmond, the former Georgia labor commissioner who launched Georgia Works, said one of the biggest obstacles to finding employment is getting a “foot in the door.” Georgia Works eliminates that hurdle.
“The key is employers are reluctant to hire primarily because they are operating in an environment with very thin profit margins,” said Thurmond, who is now an attorney for Butler, Wooten & Fryhofer.
For just that reason, Melanie McGovern, business manager of Promo Entertainment Group in Atlanta, believes Georgia's approach could work nationally for many small businesses.
"We were taking so much time and money to train someone to learn what we do, and then maybe they would leave or not work out," said McGovern, who overcame that problem by hiring trainees through Georgia Works. "Being a small business, every penny counts."
Everett Boyer, director of Georgia State University's Educational Opportunity Center, is another proponent of the program, which helped the school hire at least 30 full-time employees.
"It is a good way to audition individuals for a permanent job," he said. "It gives you a chance to look at them, to get to know them to see if they will be a good fit. That really helped us."
But he said it will work on a national scale only if the government makes sure employers are seriously searching for permanent hires.
"It just depends on how sincere the employers are," he said.
Randall Crenshaw enrolled in Georgia Worksafter his employer of 22 years -- Goody Products -- relocated from Columbus to Union City a few years ago.
Although he liked the program and did get hired, he said it lacks some oversight. Although participants are only to work a maximum of 24 hours a week, his employer kept him several hours beyond that, a price he felt worth paying for the chance at full-time employment.
Sandra Hilton, owner of Sandy's Sandbox daycares in Bonaire and Macon, has had varying successes finding employees through Georgia Works, but overall she's a fan.
"You can see if that particular individual is a good match for your center, parents, your children and other employees," she said. "If it's not a good match, no one loses."
She believes trainees benefit even if the employers they train with don't hire them.
"Regardless of whether you work in the childcare industry or some place like Geico, customer service is customer service," she said. "When you’ve learned that initial skill of being a good communicator, that’s a skill you can take anywhere."
Whatever its value, the program has proved too costly for the state to sustain in the face of Georgia's stubbornly high unemployement. In September, Thurmond opened up the program to anyone who registered with DOL for employment services. Before that, it had been limited to people receiving unemployment compensation.
The department, which had paid $443,000 in stipends in September saw the cost balloon to $2.2 million in December.
New Labor Commissioner Mark Butler, who took office in January, swiftly reinstated the original rules. Since then 1,400 people have received training, 197 of whom were hired.
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