Lisa Simpson
Feb 25,2010
In: Foreclosure

Job Opportunities in Mississippi after Foreclosure

Job opportunities in mississippi after foreclosure.

Foreclosures have devastated the daily lives of the ordinary people of America. Scott Phillips had to close his small plumbing company. Roshonda Bolton was unemployed after the garment and uniform factory where she had worked for 16 years shut down last August.

Due to unemployment, eight million jobs were dropped. But the situation changed when they were hired by a paper-napkin factory in Mississippi last month. In Mississippi, a number of states are hiring people. The salaries will initially be paid by the State of Mississippi.

Now they are being trained on the machines in Mississippi at the Hattiesburg Paper Company. The general manager, Steve Swiggum, said the state’s stepping forward to subsidize the salaries helped a lot to push the company to heighten its hiring. “We kind of held back a little bit in the mid-part of the fall,” he said, “just to wait to really see what the economy was going to do.”

With the unemployment rate hovering near 10 percent, a few liberal economists have urged the Obama administration to take some more direct steps. The government would spend money directly to create new jobs, much as it did during the New Deal. 21 states of Washington are using a sliver of the $5 billion in welfare money in last year’s stimulus act that can be used to pay governments and private employers to hire people. It’s nonetheless, a very good approach. Florida, Los Angeles, Perry County are taking steps for creating new jobs.

The Steps program of Mississippi focuses on private-sector jobs. The program is built to decrease the subsidy for each new worker over time. The program is basically open to almost all for-profit businesses and nonprofit groups, as well as public hospitals that are in good standing with the state. To increase small-business participation, officials said they were giving priority to employers with 25 employees or fewer and barring companies where there is strike or lock out. No more than half of a business’s work force can participate.

Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, one of the nation’s most prominent Republicans, said he saw the state’s program as part of the welfare program. “It’s welfare to work,” he said. The state can spend up to $43 million on the program, which officials estimate could create as many as 3,500 jobs — the equivalent of several factory openings, but only a small dent in the problem for a state that had 133,000 unemployed residents in December.