On Nov. 6, Congress passed legislation extending unemployment benefits for 14 weeks. Those people living in states with unemployment higher than 8.5 percent (California’s rate as of September was 12.2 percent) will get an additional six weeks of benefits beyond that.
Adriana Barbara, customer manager and the sole local face for the Employment Development Department in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, said such benefit extensions bring audible sighs of relief from the unemployed.
“There’s a lot of people out there worried about where their next check is going to come from,” she explained. “They need to meet their immediate financial needs first before they can start to look for work.”
For Barbara and her staff, helping people turn that next check into a paycheck is mission one. Though her department doesn’t deal with unemployment insurance claims, the group, located in Santa Maria’s Workforce Resource Center, focuses on employment assistance.
Barbara says she’s seen a wider diversity of people impacted by this economy than she has in the past.
“People that had been employed for many years and are now unemployed are finding that things have changed,” she said. “A lot more of job seeking is done online now, versus 20 years ago [when] most job-seeking contacts were made in person.”
While Barbara and her staff are trying to help people find jobs right this moment, others are looking ahead.
Part of Ray McDonald’s job as director of the Santa Barbara Workforce Investment Board is determining growth industries and helping people get the training they need to participate.
“Clean and green industries are seeing lots of stimulus—with a small ‘s,’ that is,” he said.
The small “s,” as he puts it, is because the industries aren’t necessarily being driven by federal stimulus dollars but by local
investments and trickle-down from research programs at UCSB.
Areas with the potential to drive business growth include “energy conservation, new ways of handling resources, clean building construction, energy audits, and getting commercial and residential buildings to be more efficient.”
The other growth area, McDonald noted, is health care.
“Baby Boomers are going to need health care,” he summed up. “While most of the positions require an educational background beyond high school, a lot of that can be done at the community college or vocational school level without the need for an advanced degree.”
While resources exist to help people find jobs, the fact remains that not everyone is able to land one. Some people may have exhausted their unemployment benefits or were never able to qualify for them in the first place.
Theresa Bartlet is a social worker for the Salvation Army. For 22 years, she’s helped people hardest hit by economic uncertainty. But in the last year—just like the Employment Development Department’s Barbara—she’s seen more people hit hard by the economy.
“For the first time, we’re seeing business owners who’ve lost their business because of the economy come in,” she said. “My heart goes out to them—these are people who’ve always been on the giving end [becoming] a receiver.”
While helping people get back into the workplace is the end goal for groups like the Workforce Resource Center and Workforce Investment Board, the reality is—as Bartlet with the Salvation Army can attest—that not everyone is having luck finding a job.
For people in that demographic, this latest extension of unemployment benefits comes at an opportune time. As Barbara noted: “Feeding our families is a priority for all of us.”
Contact Staff Writer Nicholas Walter at nwalter@santamariasun.com..
This article appears in Nov 12-19, 2009.
