Posted on September - 06 - 2010
Labor Department launches new jobs website; critics say it was overdue
WASHINGTON – As part of the Obama administration’s attempt to prevent a double-dip recession going into the November mid-term elections, the U.S. Labor Department today unveiled a new website to match job skills with employment opportunities.
It follows President Barack Obama’s Labor Day pledge to create infrastructure jobs in highway, rail and airport runway construction, and get modern satellite navigation work under way. The Next Gen navigation program languishes in a Federal Aviation Administration bill in a dispute over a labor provision to which FedEx objects.
With unemployment hovering near 10 percent, the mySkills-myFuture website attempts to use a worker’s previous experience to match him or her with an available job or the additional skills training to get one.
A video on the site says that it can “help you identify career options based on your experience through a unique skills-matching process.”
W. Martin Wiseman, director of the John C. Stennis Institute of Government at Mississippi State University, said the Labor Department effort is “certainly an effort to bring a little more visibility to the fact that President Obama’s administration does recognize that unemployment is a huge problem.”
Wiseman noted that it’s something the Democratic Party has been asking him to do for some time, and he suggested “one of the ways to look at it is, ‘it’s about time.’”
“This was a ‘Recovery Summer’ as I guess the Obama spinmeisters advertised it, and we didn’t recover in the summer,” he added. “This allows somebody to put their hands on the keyboard and feel like they’re making progress toward, if not getting a job, letting someone in a position to give them one know what their plight is.”
It may not have an impact before the Nov. 2 elections, however, “whereas it might have if it was done in May,” he said.
U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said the federal government should be doing all in its power to help people find jobs and commended the Labor Department initiative.
But Claude H. Chafin, a spokesman for Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said that while she hopes the website will be helpful to job seekers, she also found it “frustrating that it took 19 months to put something simple like this together.”
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