« GEORGE ALLEN WRITES ABOUT PARENT INVOLVEMENT IN SCHOOLS | GED Programs | WILL NEWT GINGRICH SAVE AMERICA? »
June 22, 2010
AOL REPORTS THAT EL CENTRO, CALIFORNIA HAS THE MOST UNEMPLOYMENT
By Profesor Martin Danenberg "El Quijote del GED"
There is hope for people in El Centro and I mean now. New business means new income. Ask and you shall find out more.
If the Great Recession, as some have called it, has a capital city, it is El Centro, Calif., due east of San Diego, in the desert of California’s Inland Valley. El Centro has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, a depressionlike 22.6 percent. This was earlier reported in the New York Times.
The Southern California town of El Centro suffers the worst unemployment rate in the nation, with nearly 28 percent of its work force without a job, the Labor Department announced today. It was the low point of a report that showed jobless rates are up across the U.S.
Los Angeles had my Dodgers back in 1959 as I was growing up, but El Centro had my father's cousin. I used to hear stories about the Danenberg, but we never met even once. My heart goes out to El Centro and perhaps people there will be able to join in my movement to help people with the GED and other forms of education. I feel we can and we can do it today. GED is a business where people make money. It may not be the lettuce that my father handled in a supermarket or the lettuce that was planted in California, but lettuce's green color has another well known connotation and the people of El Centro can earn money in the GED business. Sí se puede!
It was just reported on AOL that El Centro California is a city that needs help.
In the best of times, Imperial County suffers from an unemployment rate often triple the national average, a result of seasonal fluctuations in the need for laborers to work the fields, Imperial County's third-largest employment sector after government, and transportation and utilities, writes Scott Martelle.
Below you can see that people are losing jobs, struggling even more, and going back to education.
That job died in December, and in February Medina moved to El Centro to help his mother recover from an illness. Unable to find a job, he's using the time to get his high school equivalency diploma but would put that on hold if a job came up. So far, earning his degree is winning. At this rate, he jokes, "I might be able to get a bachelor's degree."
As of late last week, Medina had applied for 15 jobs, and he drops in at some of the bigger local employers regularly "so they can see I want to work." Sitting at the job-bank computer, he had compiled a list of 17 more jobs for which he planned to apply. The job on his screen was for retail sales. "The thing I like about it is it says no experience required," Medina said. "These others, they all specify a bachelor's degree."
Lack of work could well force Angela Ferguson, a divorced mother of two and U.S. Navy veteran, to leave her hometown. Ferguson, 30, had been working a dead-end clerical job at a shipping firm and quit "one year, six months and three days ago" to finish her associate degree in art using veterans' benefits. With one class to go, she no longer qualifies for the benefits (she has to be a full-time student), and so in January she started looking for a job.
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
GEDHOTLINE@AOL.COM
New:
www.mygedhotline.com
www.geocities.com/gedhotline
www.ahorre.com/ged
www.ahorre.com
www.aspira.org
Profesor Martin Danenberg June 22, 2010 08:23 AM