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October 5, 2008
The day after ACS announced that it would hire 100 people for "pink collar" office work paying more than the minimum wage in Louisville this fall and 100 more in Lexington, the Dallas company was deluged with responses.
On Wednesday, 40 people called ACS. Seven staffing agencies inquired about whether they could help fill spots. Ten job-seekers showed up, newspaper clippings in hand, at one of four ACS offices in Lexington. Among them was a man dressed in a suit and tie, company spokesman Chris Gilligan said.
"The response was far more than we expected," Gilligan said of the jobs that will include the sorting and processing of paperwork. "There is definitely a hunger for jobs in Kentucky."
With an unemployment rate of 6.8 percent in August, the most current monthly data available, Kentucky is among 18 states where the jobless rate exceeds the national unemployment rate of 6.1 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those 18 states include Indiana, where the unemployment rate was 6.4 percent in August.
On Friday, the government announced that the September national jobless rate remained unchanged at 6.1 percent, as the U.S. economy lost 159,000 more jobs.
The national rate is at a five-year high, showing about 9.4 million Americans officially unemployed, an increase from 8.5 million unemployed in June, according to the National Unemployment Law Project, based in New York. Because unemployment rates are reported as a result of Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys, statewide and metropolitan-area figures are considered less reliable than the national figure.
That nationwide snapshot of the unemployed includes people sidelined temporarily by power outages from Hurricanes Ike and Gustav. The roster also includes Mildred Lewis of Louisville, a 50-year-old day-care worker at South Side Christian Church who lost a week of wages last month.
Lewis, who earns $6 an hour and lives in a rented home, said the $153 in weekly unemployment benefits she claimed Thursday at the state unemployment office downtown will help.
"I'll pay some bills and get some groceries," said Lewis, adding that she is a diabetic who does not have health insurance. "This economy is going to get worse, definitely. This is just the beginning."
Jobless data and interviews with those unemployed suggest the economy has worsened considerably since early spring.
Among those growing desperate is Sean Ryan, 29, of Pewee Valley. His nine-year career on the factory floor at Lear Corp. assembling seats for Ford Explorers ended in a mass layoff in early June. With that went a weekly net income of about $800. Subsisting since then on $746 every two weeks in state unemployment benefits, Ryan said is he is three months behind on his $1,100 monthly mortgage and considering filing for bankruptcy and moving in with his father in Louisville.
For now, Ryan has seized state unemployment tuition assistance to attend the University of Louisville full time, working toward a bachelor's degree in finance.
"It is going to be a struggle," Ryan said. "Hopefully, I will come out with a job that is more secure."
Paul Coomes, an economics professor and National City research fellow at U of L, acknowledged that our region's "economy is flat."
In an interview Friday, he added that the region seems to be faring better than gloomy national forecasts predict.
"I don't think the sky is falling," he added. "Everywhere I go, people are stacked up to spend money."
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