Census Is Taking Names--for Employment

The U.S. Census Bureau says it will add to Orange County’s happy employment picture (October’s unemployment rate was a mere 2.9%) by hiring 475 temporary census “address listers” in the next few weeks.

The workers won’t be knocking on doors to collect Census data. Instead, “address takers” will get $11.75 an hour (with an extra $1.50 an hour for crew leaders who supervise teams of about 14 “takers”), to canvass the county’s cities block by block to ensure that the government’s residential mailing lists and maps are accurate.

Census questionnaires will be sent to those residential addresses--912,915 of them on file so far--at the end of March 2000.

To apply and get information about the written test that is part of the application process, call the Census Bureau’s toll-free recruiting line at (888) 325-7733. The tests will be given at several locations in Orange County beginning Dec. 7, with actual hiring to begin in January.

Nationally, the Census Bureau will hire more than 400,000 people over the next 16 months to verify addresses, mail out census forms and do other work leading up to presenting the final census count to Congress and the president at the end of 2000.