GOPideas... ideas done right

The state of Georgia has found a way to get unemployed people jobs, provide labor to growing businesses and improve workforce skill sets and their program deserves recognition and replication across the country.

Georgia Works is as effective in practice as it is simple and elegant in design: it pays people to work, instead of paying people to not work. Georgia Works is a completely voluntary program that enables unemployed workers to work for 24 hours a week for eight weeks at a business of their choosing. This allows for potential employers to provide unemployed workers a tryout without committing to them. Georgia works also deserves credit for aligning incentives for all participants. Employers do not have to pay into the state unemployment insurance fund (eliminating a barrier to adoption by companies) or fill out reams of paperwork while participants in the program receive a $300 additional stipend for child care/transportation (so no reason why people can’t foot work-related expenses to participate) and the program is only 24 hours a week, so job seekers still have plenty of time to look for other jobs.

The program has shown results any conservative would love, by saving $6 million in reduced unemployment compensation. Thus, even by providing additional subsidies for child care and transportation, the program’s net savings is $3.7 million. This Stateline story discusses many other advantages of the program, although the true genius of the program is that it aligns the incentives of all parties. As someone who has taken low-paid internships and who lives in the greater Washington area, almost every young professional got their job for working for someone for free/low pay and then was hired full time or made contacts at the organization that were used in a job search. Thus, working at a company in a specific industry is a much more effective strategy to find full-time employment than pounding away at Craigslist. Second, companies have almost no risk in the program other than 8 weeks of a tryout. Although most jobs have a training period and an implicit cost is the training that a company will provide (which is also a implicit benefit for the worker and the state), 8 weeks is enough time to gauge work ethic, punctuality, thought process and ability to solve problems --- all skills needed in any job.

Furthermore, the program implicitly mitigates hiring risk for small companies, which is an unquantified benefit of the program. Proportionally, each employee of a small company is more vital than that at a large one, meaning that a bad hiring decision has a proportionally larger negative effect. Studies have shown that people are fearful of loss to a greater degree than they are hopeful of gain --- which leads to smaller companies practicing more conservative in hiring practices. Georgia Works counters this bias by decreasing the risk of hiring a bad employee --- essentially extending the employers evaluation period from an interview or two to eight weeks of on the job evaluation. Last, job seekers are not full time employees, so they can still spend time looking for other jobs --- and how, exactly, does one spend 40 hour a week looking at want ads, sending resumes and doing cold calls?

Of course, a program that decreases unemployment, creates jobs, help businesses grow and saves taxpayer money must be opposed by somebody; which it is. Andrew Settner of the National Employment Law Center: “I don’t buy the idea that pushing unemployed workers to fill just any opening is better than searching for a suitable job.” This is exactly why Republicans need to disavow the no-government-is-the-best-government strategy. Against that strategy, Mr. Sattner would be able to argue that society should have a safety net for people who fall on hard times --- a position supported by most Americans. However, using a little government money to hand free jobs to the unemployed and free workers to small businesses --- liberals are left to argue that giving jobs to unemployed people is a bad strategy and a better strategy would be to continue to spend tax dollars to allow people to wait for a better job. We know what would happen: unemployed people would sit at home and collect checks. How do we know, quoting from the Stateline story:

Randall Crenshaw was one of those people. At 41, he lost his job of 22 years last January at hair-products company Goody Products, in Columbus, Ga.  After two months of job searching, he said, “I was in shock because I was used to getting up and going to work every morning.” So, when his adviser at the employment center suggested he enter the Georgia Works program, Crenshaw jumped at the opportunity. “There were about 50 of us in the room when he invited us to stay after class if we were interested in hearing more about the program.  Only two or three people took him up on it. So many people got up and walked out. I was just amazed by that,” Crenshaw said.

When discussing how to spend taxpayer dollars, conservatives can argue for providing labor to small businesses while simultaneously providing jobs for the unemployed while liberals argue that a superior alternative would be to provide taxpayer funds for people to do nothing.

Let’s have that debate.