Unemployment: Numbers and Solutions

The State of Michigan’s unemployment rate is now at 7.6%. That was the lead sentence, more or less, in several recent news stories. But, the last line in one of the stories was most startling:

“The state’s labor force declined by 40,000 in 2007.”

Think of it this way, it’s like the entire city of Lincoln Park being out of a job.

Painful? Yes. Devastating? It doesn’t have to be.

There are actually thousands of job openings across the region and across the state. We just have to train the thousands of motivated people who want those jobs so they are qualified to fill them. That’s where Goodwill comes in.

We are focusing new efforts to train the future health care, customer service, restaurant and retail workers who will be qualified to fill the current and future job openings. We won’t be satisfied until everybody who wants a job gets a job. Until then, we are doing our part to bring down that unemployment number.