District Employment Programs

Unemployment in the District is higher than it was five years ago, despite strong job growth and a booming city economy. Part of the problem, according to a two-part series by Washington Post staff writer Neil Irwin, is that the city's job training system frequently fails to prepare jobless District residents for the jobs being created. Part one tells the story of Michael Sims, a man with a troubled past who tried to overcome it in a job training program. Part two examines broad flaws in how job training works in the city. Irwin was online at noon on Monday to discuss the series.

A transcript follows.

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Neil Irwin: Welcome to an online chat about my series of articles, called Help Wanted, about unemployment and job training in the District. I spent about a year on this project, looking at why, in a city with strong job growth, unemployment remains so high. Part of the story is what businesspeople call a "skills gap," with lots of jobs, lots of unemployed, but not a lot of people with the skills needed to hold down a job. Job training might fill that gap, but often fails.

We have plenty of questions, along with comments from people involved with Michael Sims, the man at the center of the first part of the series. And a Department of Employment Services official may be posting his response to the article.

Bring on the questions . . .

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Washington, D.C.: Are the staff of the One Stop Centers retained in view of the unsatisfactory results they've been getting? Does any District dept release incompetent, unproductive workers? And how come Emily DeRocco's just learning about these problems? Wasn't oversight in her job description?

Neil Irwin: District officials say that they have overhauled the staffing in the One-Stop centers in recent years and that customer service is very much improved. I have interviewed Pernell and others who say that there are still significant customer service problems, but DOES says that these are the exception, not the rule, and cite their customer survey that indicates that 70 percent of users of the service are satisfied.

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Washington, D.C.: How many people are enrolled in how many job programs? How many people are waiting to enter job programs? How many jobs are waiting for program graduates?

Neil Irwin: It's an interesting thing. There is no simple answer to this question. I can tell you how many people were enrolled in job training through the One-Stop centers in the year ended 2004 (751). That doesn't include various other forms of training available in the city, for which numbers can be harder to come by. As can the question of how many people are waiting to enter job programs. To my mind, the fact that there are no solid answers to those questions is an indication of some of the poor coordination and information tracking in the system.

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Washington, DC: I was looking for a source on some of the figures in the article. Who compiles the rates of unemployment by Ward in the District? As those figures from BLS?

Also, do the caseworkers who are continually unavailable face any sort of sanction? Is it difficult to fire or punish a nonperforming city employee?

Neil Irwin: Unemployment by Ward is tracked by DOES. The data are available at this Web site:

http://dcanalyzer.dcnetworks.org/analyzer/saintro.asp?cat=LAB&session=labforce&time=&geo=

DOES says that it has overhauled the staff of the One-Stop Centers in the last year, and that the new employees are more skilled at dealing with the public. It is indeed hard to fire D.C. government employees, but they say they've found a way to upgrade the staff there.

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Annandale, VA: Can you tell me that I'm wrong with the following statement: Every DC gov't agency, while they may no longer be corrupt, are dysfunctional because they are wasteful and more or less work-welfare for people. There is no responsible organization that oversees their dysfunctional behavior so agencies are simply are not responsible to anyone. I would almost not see spending money on education in DC, prisons, or other forms of gov't administration, but simply hiring to the lowest bidder (and not just DC private firms, so you can get away from corrupt/ill-working DC contractors). What is it about this City's administration? Thank God for the Post.

Neil Irwin: I think your statement, like most generalizations, has some holes. I've been covering business in this city for five years, and have encountered plenty of District employees in that time who are hard-working, honest, intelligent, and helpful. It is true that many agencies have significant management problems. But I'd stop short of such a blanket statement.

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Washington, DC: I'm curious about the $31,000 figure for spending per disadvantaged participant (and the footnote in the chart that notes it may be inflated). How did you arrive at that figure? I know something about these numbers - and I think your denominator is suspect.

Neil Irwin: DOES would tend to agree with you, as they don't like that number one bit. I'll explain a bit more about what that number is, how I arrived at it, and why I think it's useful.

The District's spending through the federal Workforce Investment Act adult program goes to multiple things. It helps pay for the One-Stop Centers and caseworkers' salaries. It pays for services to help people conduct online searches for jobs or to get help from a caseworker on their resume. And it pays for job training, through what are called individual training accounts. The numerator pays for all those things.

The denominator in the math I did is the number of people who not only entered a training program, but completed it and got a job. So that $31,000 per person number doesn't mean that it cost $31,000 to put each person in a trianing program. Rather it is a measurement of the overall cost-effectiveness of the program in terms of ability to get people through training nad into work. This makes sense to me becaues the major problem is the city is a skills gap and the way to fill a skills gap is with training, so it seems pretty clear that a goal for the city should be to get as many people into training and into a job per dollar spent as possible.

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Daryl Hardy: In response to the questioner, staff at the one stop have been recently upgraded; and the US Department of Labor provides yearly oversight. However, their assessment is different from that of the reporter.

Neil Irwin: This is from Daryl Hardy, the deputy director for training and employment at DOES.

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Washington, DC: I am a Development Director for a small nonprofit in DC which does job training and internship placement for DC public school students. I was appalled a the lack of response for applicants. 81 days until they are enrolled in a program is terrible - our students wait no more than 3 weeks. I was also struck by the complete mismanagement of the money. It costs the government something like $31,000 per trainee? Our program costs $8,000 per trainee and that includes a portion of their salary. Lately, many people have been talking about nonprofit accountability - this is a stark contrast of the need for government accountability.

Neil Irwin: Thank you for your comments. Again, as I note above, the $31,000 number doesn't mean the District actually spends $31,000 on each training program; that number includes other things, including their administrative overhead, costs for services other than job training, and costs for training for people who drop out or fail to get a job. The agency pays service providers an average of about $6,000 per trainee.

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Daryl Hardy: The numbers of persons enrolled in Workforce Investment Act programs is public information and available on the Department of Labor site. Again, however, the program entails more than training. Simply viewing it as a training program ignores the intent of the Law.

Neil Irwin: More from Daryl. . .

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DC: The lady in your sidebar. Did she documented everything? Making copies of every letters mailed will helped a lot.

washingtonpost.com: One Woman's Saga

Neil Irwin: Contina Holmes, who endured a 10 month saga to try to get into job training in 2002, kept detailed handwritten notes of every meeting she had with the agency. She gave me copies of those notes. Also, for part of that time, she was being helped by a staffer of the D.C. Employment Justice Center, which also confirmed her story to me.

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Daryl Hardy: The commenter is correct, the figure is inflated. Federal WIA funding also pays for working with individuals to place them in employment without training...that group of individuals is left out of Mr. Irwin's calculation. When that group is included, the current cost is more like $4,800 a person

Neil Irwin: More from Daryl. He is correct that other services are included in the numerator of that number, but not in the denominator.

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Calverton, MD: In addition to the bureaucratic and administrative nightmare awaiting anyone attempting to hire D.C. residents through the flawed first source program, is the failure on the part of our elected officials to recognize that the business community does want to hire qualified D.C. residents. Until the Mayor and the Council understand that initiatives such as the "Way to Work" legislation, which does nothing to promote training and hiring, but instead, puts more of a financial and administrative burden on businesses, there will be little progress made in the unemployment problem in the District of Columbia.

Neil Irwin: Many people in the business community would tend to agree with you. The commenter is referring to First Source, a program that requires companies that benefit from city financing to make a good faith effort to make District residents comprise 51 percent of new hires.

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Daryl Hardy: Also included in the budget are costs for upgrades to federal reporting systems, physical improvements to the centers; repair of copiers and faxes used by customers, and other costs that states (DC) must bear to operate one stop systems and centers.

Neil Irwin: More from Daryl . . .

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Farragut North, DC: I'm curious as to whether the "work for welfare" programs were included in your stories? Is DOES in charge of getting mothers jobs and off welfare too? If so, how many people have gotten jobs, or have they simply lost their benefits.

Neil Irwin: I did review welfare to work program, and DOES officials believe I should have focused more on those than on their programs in the article. I don't have overall data handy right now, but the results suggest that many things on the human services side of the D.C. government are not having much success helping people get in the workforce, either.

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Washington, DC: To what extent do you think the DC Public School System is a part of the problem? How can the school system become an increased part of the solution?

Neil Irwin: Absolutely. Virtually everyone who deals with the unemployed in Washington, whether business, government, nonprofit, whatever, says the same thing. Many jobless residents have poor reading and math skills, and will not be able to hold a steady job (that pays a decent wage) until that changes. And for the next generation, fixing that education gap is up to the D.C. public schools. How the school system can do that is a really, really hard question that I don't pretend to know the answer to.

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Daryl Hardy: Regarding the two and one half month time frame--much of this time is spent working with the customer, they have to find training programs that will accept them (Ms. Holmes for example found a program that later rejected her); it is not spend pushing paper through the agency. Finally, the agency has gone through exhaustive reviews by the DOL on these matters. The cost of services is not what it has been portrayed to be...if you calculate costs by the federal model.

Neil Irwin: More from DOES . . .

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Washington, DC: What role, if any, could or should the business community play in improving the workforce in DC? Obviously, the WIC isn't making much progress.

Neil Irwin: I think businesspeople realize this is a huge problem that hurts them. They need qualified employees, and they need more customers. If more unemployed D.C. residents were working, they would have more of both.

Barbara Lang, the D.C. Chamber of Commerce president who just became chair of the Workforce Investment Council, says she plans to work harder to make businesspeople come to WIC meetings and get more senior executives, with decision-making power in their organizations, are on the board. Too early to know what will come of this effort.

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15th and Rhode Island: You cite the Post's own research to come up with 11-month average it takes to get a D.C. job-seeker into training -- and officials here deny that, right? ... but you seem to take the word of officials in Baltimore that it only takes them a month to get someone into a training program. Should we believe them?

Neil Irwin: I vetted that by calling a couple of nonprofit advocates for the poor in Baltimore to see if it sounded right, and none of them said otherwise. In contrast, similar organizations in D.C. (Wider Opportunities for Women and the D.C. Employment Justice Center) have been sharply critical of DOES and the One-Stops.

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Washington, DC: The graphic in today's article provides a powerful visual of disparities in unemployment rates across the District. Have you done any analysis of unemployment rates by gender using 2005 data? Would you consider including some gender analysis in forthcoming articles?

According to the Washington Area Women's Foundation report A Portrait of Women and Girls in the Washington Metropolitan Area: In 2000, women's regional unemployment rate was 4.9 %. Compared with women in neighboring counties, women in the District of Columbia were unemployed at a substantially higher rate (11%), which was almost double the national rate for all women (6%)in 2000. Young women, aged 16-21, had an unemployment rate of 19%, the highest of all age groups in the region. In the District of Columbia, women in this age group faced a disheartening 38% unemployment rate, while young women in Prince George's County followed with a rate of 19%. For more information, visit the following link: http://www.wawf.org/PortraitFinal.pdf

Nisha Patel

Program Officer

Washington Area Women's Foundation

npatel-wawf.org

washingtonpost.com: A graphic showing jobless rates in the District during the past five years can be seen at the bottom of today's story .

Neil Irwin: I haven't done much analysis of the gender breakdown of the city's employment situation. Thanks for the data and thoughts.

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Washington, DC: Your article focused on adult job seekers. Did you look at how young people (say, ages anywhere between 14 and 24) affect the question you probed: a rise in unemployment in DC despite a booming economy? How is the incoming workforce effecting affecting DC's economy?

Neil Irwin: This ties in with Daryl's point. Many of DOES's results for dealing with young people are strong. And, as he noted, the $17 million in WIA spending number in the box along the top of the page includes that spending.

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Daryl Hardy: Regarding Welfare to Work intiatives--Human Services training programs were not mentioned in the article--and like DOES they fund trainig programs...

The article states that DOES had $17 million WIA budget in 2003...that include youth programs that are not a part of this discussion. In 2003, approximately $6 milllion was spent on Adult and Dislocated Worker programs.

Neil Irwin: Oops, here was Daryl's comment regarding human services

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Daryl Hardy: Regarding 15th and Rhode Island, that is not the only point where the District (DOES) had a higher burden of proof than others cited. I wonder if all of the soup kitchen's costs are figured in to the cost for training quoted in the article.

Neil Irwin: To answer Daryl's question, for the math involving D.C. Central Kitchen, I calculated total spending on job training, then calculated a pro rata share of the organization's managment and general expenses and development expenses. I took that total number and divided it by the number of trainees who got a job (not total trainees).

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Washington, DC: Good afternoon,

You should have had a representative from DOES as well.

Anyway, when I was seeking training as a Dislocated Worker, it took several weeks to see a case worker.

During that time, I was reviewing the list of training providers, and there were very little providers that provided training that paid "living wages", (example: CDL training, beauty and barber training, etc.)

At the Franklin Street Station, most of the time, there was either no paper to print and fax resumes, more than one computer was down, the copier did not work, and in some instances, the fax machine did not work.

The DC civil servants at DOES forget who their stakeholders are. Most of them are just there to collect a paycheck. Also Mr. Gregg Irish and all who are involved in workforce development, have the system set up for failure for many of the jobless individuals in the District of Columbia.

Neil Irwin: Another comment . . .

I'm now going to move to comments about the other part of the series, which ran Sunday, the story of Michael Sims.

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Ward 2: Michael Sims's story was really gripping. Did you decide to write about him because he succeeded with job training? Or would you have written about him regardless of whether he succeeded or failed?

Neil Irwin: I started out following several people in that class of trainees. I thought the article would be a bunch of them, not just Michael. After visiting him in jail, I concluded his story was the most compelling and decided to focus solely on him. It's hard to say, but I think that if things had gone differently, and he had gone off the wagon after getting out of jail, I would have tried to write about that.

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Daryl Hardy: Wider Opportunities for Women and the Employment Justice Center are two organizations that have been critical of the Department's job training efforts for several years.

However, federal reviews do not sustain their notions.

Neil Irwin: More thoughts from DOES . . .

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Alexandria: About Michael Sims arrest on a bench warrant -- did I miss something in the article, or shouldn't he have gotten out overnight? What about the lawyer?

Wonderful job with rich material, and good luck to Sims.

Neil Irwin: The Virginia courts were focused on the fact that he had violated his probation, which was, of course, true. They were reluctant to release him to go back to the District, and wanted extensive evidence that he was staying sober and was in a bona fide drug treatment program.

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Petworth, DC: Neil:

Thanks for an informative article about an area our local and federal governments often neglect. The job training program sounded very promising until I read that some of the graduates landed jobs selling hot dogs and peanuts at Nationals' games. It doesn't seem like these jobs would require a rigorous training course in food preparation. What percentage of jobs landed by graduates pay well enough for the graduates to support themselves without public assistance?

Neil Irwin: You are right that those jobs are not lucrative, long-term answers. Most of the people who ended up doing that work did so to make some cash while they sought better, full-time, permanent positions. At D.C. Central Kitchen, the average starting salary is $10 and hour, and many graduates advance to $12-$15 an hour within a few months, particularly if they prove to be reliable to their employers.

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Daryl Hardy: My apologies to the person visiting the Franklin Street center. Clearly, there are not enough staff in local one stops. Mr. Irwin incorrectly stated the number of case workers in the one stop centers--there are 12 in total; approximately 6 at each center. On average 500-600 come through the centers weekly seeking services. While it it not meant to be an excuse, sometimes it does take time to provide individual service.

Neil Irwin: For the record, I wrote that "each one employs about a dozen people, including caseworkers". A half-dozen are caseworkers and the others are various administrative staff, if I understand what Daryl and Gregg Irish told me on Friday correctly.

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Washington, D.C.: Not a question, Neil ... but a note of appreciation for your telling of Michael's story, and the kitchen's participation in and touch on his life and goals. Because we deal with so many individuals, as training classes come and go, the deep personal involvement of staff members with each student often is diminished with graduation. Your story brought back to me the depth of Michael's desire to overcome dependencies and failures, and to become the productive and successful human being all his life experiences had told him he could never be. DC Central Kitchen is blessed to be a part of his story. Thank you!

Ron Swanson, DC Central Kitchen

washingtonpost.com: Photo Gallery

Neil Irwin: A comment from Ron Swanson, who was a major character in Michael's saga.

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Washington, DC: From the article, it sounds like Mr. Sims was sent back to jail because of paperwork that was not filed in Virginia. This sounds like a tremendous breach of his civil rights, to put someone back in jail for four months because an agency did not receive paperwork? Why did it take four months to straighten out the mix-up?

Neil Irwin: It was highly unfortunate and frustrating for him, but the truth is, he had violated his probation by using drugs. It's just that by the time Virginia found out about it, he had already entered a drug treatment program in the District. They found out about the original violation, but not that he was in treatment.

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Centreville, Virginia: Mr. Irwin's Feb 12th introductory on the DC Central Kitchen was a heartwarming, inspiring piece of journalism. Its simple, unadorned message to work hard, obey rules, live a clean life and persevere is compelling. Following that route, overcoming past failures, Mr. Sims becomes an exceptional role model, restoring one's faith in so many ways. Thank you, Mr. Irwin. Well done!

washingtonpost.com: A Hand Up In a D.C. System Full of Letdowns (February 12, 2006)

Neil Irwin: Thank you.

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Washington, DC: One of the problems here is a cultural problem. When I came here in 1968 to pursue a college degree, I noted that many District Residents were still pursuing low level government jobs in high numbers. (i.e. high school graduates going to the Civil Service Commission for a clerical rating) That was very troubling to me because even then it was clear that the workforce was changing. Young people were not encouraged to prepare for (Bottom Line driven) private industry employment. I am from a blue collar type environment and understand the value of vocational/trades training. What happened in DC was a systematic cut back in vocational training in the public schools. That was most unfortunate because well trained plumbers, electricians, culinary arts workers do very well. Further, the increase in emphasis on math and language skills has not kept pace with what is needed in private industry. (or college prep) The education of District residents must be re-tooled immediately. I cannot rely heavily on the graduates of the DC Public school system under the age of 40. The skills just aren't there for the most part.

Neil Irwin: An interesting analysis. Thank you for your thoughts.

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Washington, DC: Statistical question. The article says unemployment has risen in the district over the last five years and wonders if there is some fault in the job placement system. However, the article also shows employment growth higher in the District than the nation as a whole.

While I think you've identified some real problems in the job placement system, can it be blamed for what appears to be macroeconomic trends?

Neil Irwin: The nature of macroeconomic data is that you don't really know what exactly causes it to be the way it is, you only know what it is. We know this. There are more jobs than there were 5 years ago. There are more jobless than there were five years ago. The job training system in the District has serious flaws. Are those three things related? There's a strong possibility, but you're right that there's no way to be certain.

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Washington, D.C.: I can't help but think that these programs, costly and often-ineffective as they are, suffer from an additional deficiency: they target the bottom of the work-force.

Grad schools and law schools are turning out thousands of students per year, in the District and region-wide, roughly half of whom graduate with no jobs and no real prospects. They average $105,000 in student loan debt.

These promising younger people (who face a tougher market than I ever did) deserve public support a lot more than ex-cons who won't be reliable employees.

Neil Irwin: The truth is, the preponderance of unemployed in the District are not people with a master's degree or law degree. Certainly some graduates of such schools have trouble finding a job, but the overwhelming proportion of jobless in the city who have too little education, not too much.

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Daryl Hardy: That cannot happen with a DOES training program since the Workforce Investment Council must approve all of the training courses DOES offers or we can not refer a customer to them.

Neil Irwin: From DOES . . .

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Washington, D.C.: Thanks so much for this series, this work -- and the series on the workers who make $17 an hour -- is exactly the kind of business reporting I love to read -- and wish I were writing.

Could you give us any sense of how you focused the masses of notes/data you had?

--an envious journalist

Neil Irwin: With the help of excellent editors.

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Logan-Dupont: Do you think your involvement, as a reporter, in Michael Sims' life had an impact on his progress with the job-training program? Was he more likely to finish because someone was watching and writing about him?

Neil Irwin: You never know. The Heisenburg principle applies to newspaper reporting--it's nearly to observe something without influencing that which you observe. I think he was on a good path even without me following him around, but it's entirely possible that knowing that I was planning to write about him affected how he approached his recovery.

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Laurel, Md.: The district will have several jobs coming in the next few mths/yrs. How can we work to identify or create better relationships with these employers to assure that more District training proprams are preparing indivuals for the best possible jobs. Giving the employers skilled employee's that they need.

Neil Irwin: There's no simple answer. What there are is a lot of people trying hard to make those connections and help people get the skills they need to fully participate in the surging economy we're experiencing.

That's all for me. Thank you all for joining, and to Daryl Hardy for providing the DOES response to some things in the article and in the chat.

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