Response team to the rescue
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With New York state in December seeing its steepest month-to-month job loss since the 2001 terrorist attacks, public and business officials in Westchester County have joined in initiatives to create jobs and curb private-sector layoffs and unemployment in the worsening economy.
“This is all about jobs. That”™s the issue here,” said County Executive Andrew J. Spano at a recent press conference at the Westchester One-Stop Employment Center in White Plains, where he announced the formation of a county Economic Response Committee headed by Marsha Gordon, president and CEO of The Business Council of Westchester. The center on Bloomingdale Road has been a resource increasingly used by job-seekers as the county”™s unemployment rate rose to 5.7 percent at the end of last year, up 2 points from December 2007.
The state”™s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate jumped 1 percent from November to December 2008, when the 7 percent rate statewide was the highest level since June 1994 and 2.4 percent higher than December 2007, according to state Labor Department officials. In the fourth quarter of 2008, New York lost nearly 103,000 private-sector jobs, including 49,300 in December. That is the steepest one-month drop since October 2001 in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks.
 The number of unemployed workers in the state in December, 671,500, was the highest since October 1993. The one-month increases in the statewide unemployment rate and in the number of unemployed, up 89,800 in December, were the highest since the Labor Department began keeping records in 1976. A Labor Department official in Albany said the number of unemployed New Yorkers has increased by more than 50 percent since the beginning of the national recession in December 2007.
In Westchester, 28,100 workers were unemployed in December, an increase of 2,700 or about 11 percent since November, the state Labor Department reported. There were 9,900 more workers unemployed in the county this past December than in December 2007.
John Nelson, a state Labor Department analyst in White Plains, said unemployment claims in the Westchester-Putnam-Rockland labor market were up 70 percent year-to-year in December. “We are navigating really dangerous waters,” he said.
To help struggling companies navigate those waters at full staff, state officials are promoting the Labor Department”™s 2-year-old Shared Work Program. Bruce G. Herman, the department”™s deputy commissioner for work force development, said an employer planning job layoffs can opt instead to reduce work hours proportionately for all employees. Those employees will be paid partial unemployment benefits by the state to help offset lost wages.
Herman said the program allows employers, including nonprofits, to quickly gear up when business conditions improve and spares them the expense of recruiting, hiring and training new employees. Employees continue to receive health insurance and other benefits.
Herman said 22 companies in the Hudson Valley region with 330 employees used the program in 2007 and 49 companies in the region with 528 employees participated in 2008. “It is an alternative to layoffs and we”™d like to use it as much as possible,” he said.
Donnovan Beckford, director of the Westchester-Putnam Workforce Investment Board, said the county”™s Economic Response Committee”™s six-point plan to confront the unemployment crisis includes training for newly created “green jobs” and promoting the use of one-stop employment centers in Mount Vernon, White Plains, Peekskill and Carmel for both businesses and job-seekers.  Â
One company creating green jobs, Robison Oil Corp. in Elmsford, already has made use of the One-Stop Employment Center.
Robison Oil President Daniel Singer said the company, which has operated in Westchester since 1921, six months ago saw a growing demand for additional energy efficiency and air quality auditing services from its residential customers. Robison started a new division to meet that need but obtaining financing was difficult, he said. The single biggest cost was recruiting and training employees in the new field and compensating them during training.
Singer said the company has recruited seven workers through the One-Stop center, four of whom have completed a 36-hour auditor”™s course at Westchester Community College that is certified by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. The One-Stop Employment Center subsidized their wages during training with grant money. The center as part of the Westchester-Putnam Workforce Investment Board receives funding from the state Labor Department for training and employment programs.
“It”™s a part of our business that we really wouldn”™t have been able to get off the ground without a program such as this,” Singer said.
The county”™s Economic Response Committee “is all about keeping our economy healthy and keeping people employed and having the businesses get appropriate employees,” said Gordon at the Business Council. Among its initiatives to develop future and current job opportunities, the committee will look at the federal economic stimulus package “so we can be positioned and our businesses can be ready to take advantage of those dollars that come into our community.”
In Albany last week to meet with Gov. David Paterson and other state officials on the future of the Empire Zone program and other business issues, Gordon said she was told by state Department of Transportation Commissioner Astrid C. Glynn that the Tappan Zee Bridge corridor improvement project probably will not qualify for stimulus aid because it is not a shovel-ready project. But Glynn held out hope that existing funding for programs that now might receive federal aid could be channeled into the Tappan Zee project, Gordon said.
“These are the baby steps,” Spano said of the Westchester initiatives, “but we”™re committed to making something happen.”