Census Bureau to Create 2,000 Jobs in Pomona
In a move that will create about 2,000 temporary jobs targeted for people coming off welfare, the Census Bureau said Friday that it will set up a center in Pomona to collect and process questionnaires for the 2000 census.
Hiring will begin this summer as construction crews prepare the new facility, one of three that are being established nationwide by the federal agency. The bulk of the 2,000 jobs will be filled in early spring of 2000 and will last only four months. About 40% of the jobs will be in data entry.
Despite the short-term nature of the work, government officials said the census jobs will provide a much-needed boost to their efforts to help welfare recipients gain employment under the state’s welfare-to-work reform. Many have expressed concerns about the lack of available work for Los Angeles County’s 153,000 adults currently on welfare, who under the new state law have two years to find work.
“It’s very good news,” said Daniel Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research group that earlier this month released a grim report on the regional economy’s ability to absorb welfare recipients. “It’s not a solution to the total problem,” he said of the census jobs. “But it is certainly helpful.”
TRW Inc., which is developing and managing the data-processing centers in Pomona, Phoenix and Baltimore for the Census Bureau, is expected to provide job training and help people find new work after their temporary assignments end. TRW said it will set pay for the census workers based on government figures for each city.
Data-entry operators in the private sector in the Southland earned on average almost $12 an hour in 1997, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the temporary census jobs are likely to pay substantially less. Workers will not get health benefits but will receive an additional $1.23 an hour to help with those costs, said Elaine Cullen, director of business assistance for the San Gabriel Valley Commerce and Cities Consortium, a group that worked to bring the center to Pomona.
Raul Ramirez, an administrator at Greater Avenues for Independence, or GAIN, the county’s welfare-to-work program, said the census center will be a “steppingstone” for people who are hired. He said he expects many of those jobs to be filled by workers in Pomona, a city of about 142,000 people, with 5,400 adults on welfare.
“Even if it’s time-limited, they’re getting the experience of working,” he said. “People we put into those jobs will migrate to other jobs. If you’re employed, you’re more employable.”
For Pomona, the site of the census center could not be more significant.
The Census Bureau will be spending millions of dollars to refurbish and put in desks and computers in a building that was part of General Dynamics, the aerospace firm that once employed thousands in Pomona.
The building is now owned by a furniture manufacturer, from which the Census Bureau will be leasing 257,000 square feet of space.
“It’s a major coup for us,” said Severo Esquivel, city manager of Pomona, which has bounced back from the loss of General Dynamics and other employers but still has an unemployment rate hovering around 8%. “If you think where that plant was and how it went from 12,000 employees to just 50--now they’re going to spend millions on that building. It’s a major development.”
