I read that Ohio Governor, John Kasich was gloating that the Ohio Jobs website, Ohiomeansjobs.com has over 80,000 jobs listed on it. Of course, he let us know that President Obama had nothing to do with this as it was his Republican policies which accomplished this. I assume he did not mean the policies which were petitioned and overturned by the voters of Ohio. It had been a couple of years since I went to the Ohiomeansjobs web site. I was laid off in October, 2008 and I used to go there fairly frequently, as unemployment required that I register there. Since then, I had abandoned that site for others which seemed better, but since Kasich gave it a thumbs up …
Since the last time I was there, the management of the site had been turned over to an out-of-state company (based in Florida) which makes it a policy to not have Union jobs on their site. I’m not sure any Union companies need that much publicity for openings, but why would Kasich and company want to assure that people who are unemployed not have Union employment as an option? I think just asking that question has its answer.
The site said it had 108,134 total jobs. So, I put in my “keywords” and zip code and how many miles radius I would like searched. The engine produced 183 hits, or so it said as I did not take the time to count them. I clicked a button which filtered out the staffing and temp agencies, which reduced it to 70, which is still 70, I guess, but even on the first page I saw several repeats and part-time only jobs. I picked three to look further into and all three sent me to sites which did not work.
I have still not been hired from my 2008 lay-off. Fortunately, between temporary, seasonal and on-call type employment I have kept fairly busy and paid and had not had to be on unemployment in two and-a-half years. I have it a lot better than most in this downturn (okay, Depression, I mean). For Governor Kasich to gloat about the scraps of hope handed out by the state website which is designed to keep people out of Union employment and to get people to accept anything which may go under the name “job” is ludicrous. To be sure, Part time is more time than no time but can it reasonably be called employment?
Kasich’s real policy has been to give Ohio taxpayer money to corporations and forget the employee. His vaunted web site is a full continuation of that policy.