For those seeking employment, the Seeds of Hope Neighborhood Center in Biddeford offers essential resources like career guidance, free Internet access and resume assistance.
This employment center helps fill the gap created by the closing of the state’s CareerCenter on Saco Island two years ago. Even in better days, the Saco Island office reported serving 5,000 people per year.
Today, no one would dispute that the need is much greater.
The Seeds of Hope job center, supported by Biddeford’s Community Development Block Grant funding, has substantially increased the services it offers. It is now supported through a partnership with Goodwill Industries of Northern New England, which plans to open similar sites throughout the region.
According to Seeds of Hope website (http://seedsofhope4me.org) the Career Resource Center is open from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. It is in the basement of Christ Episcopal Church on Crescent Street in downtown Biddeford.
Other organizations also offer job-search assistance, and since the closing of the CareerCenter on Saco Island, the Maine Department of Labor has been serving this area through its Springvale CareerCenter. Such help is essential for those determined to regain jobs, because despite slow improvement in earnings, employers remain reluctant to hire.
Nationally, unemployment in July held steady at 9.5 percent. More troubling than the lack of improvement are the statistics showing that the labor force continues to shrink, as those in their prime working years exhaust their unemployment benefits and cease to be tallied.
Although employers have been adding jobs, the rate of growth is too slow to make up for the huge losses over the past 18 months. Until this situation improves, efforts to assist job seekers can’t hope to make progress against the sheer lack of jobs. Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that job openings in June totaled 2.9 million, at a time when the total number of unemployed was 14.6 million. As long as this ratio continues, four out of five applicants won’t find a job.
Despite the gloomy outlook, providing unemployed workers with help and encouragement in seeking jobs will pay off for some, and is vital to the self-esteem of many unemployed workers. The search for work itself is a challenging and potentially productive effort.
Private markets aren’t yet making good use of the U.S. workforce, so government efforts to create jobs must continue. Each month it becomes more clear that the economy will not substantially improve without a recovery in the job market.
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