Giving Clients the Resources to Find Work

Melissa Glasgow, 28, was waiting in the cavernous welfare office lobby here to see her caseworker when she noticed a poster above the door of a tiny side room. “Got a Minute? Get a Job!” it proclaimed.

She strode in and asked whether the two women there really could help. They told her they could and inquired about her work history.

“I used to be a pharmacy slave,” Glasgow said of her previous minimum-wage job, which she lost Feb. 5.

“Well, we don’t have any pharmacy slave opportunities listed right now. Is there anything else you’d be interested in?” Janie Gonzales joked.

Ten minutes later, Glasgow emerged from the 2-week-old resource room clutching a sheaf of several dozen job openings. Many were too far from her home and her 14-month-old son, but others were real, albeit low-paying, possibilities, such as cashier and clerk jobs.

“I think it’s great. It’s really convenient that it’s right here,” she said. “I don’t want to be on welfare; it hurts me. I’d much rather have a job.”

There are resource rooms at two of the county’s welfare offices, here and in Santa Ana, and two more are on the way in Garden Grove and Laguna Hills. Staffed with county Social Services Agency workers, the rooms are not fancy--a pair of computers, clipboards of job listings, and inexpensive framed photos and posters with inspirational slogans such as “Tomorrow’s Success Begins Today.” The room here is so small that when four people are in it, they bump into each other constantly.

But the services offered are impressive--and free: Internet searches through job databases, resume writing and printing, and even limited phone calls to apply for jobs.

Word is catching on. At lunchtime one day last week, the room filled steadily. An elderly Vietnamese woman crowded into the room with her daughter and son-in-law. “Assembly, assembly,” she said, reciting one of the few English words in her vocabulary.

“She wants assembly work,” her daughter explained.

The clipboard with listings for factory assembly jobs was empty, although electronics, file clerk, hotel, maintenance, dental, painting, printing and miscellaneous listings showed possibilities.

After confirming the woman is a citizen, which is required under the new welfare laws, Cecilia Rondini logged on to the state Economic Development Department job bank and scanned through hundreds of openings. “How about this? Warehouse, $10 an hour.”

“$10? Yes, yes!” the woman said.