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CALIFORNIA UNEMPLOYMENT OFFICES - In the decades following World War II, the state of California operated a network of over one hundred employment offices scattered through the small towns, urban centers, and rural enclaves. Unemployed workers came to these offices to apply for Unemployment Insurance (UI) payments, and/or to land a job. The offices had the formal title of Employment Development Department (EDD) offices, but everyone referred to them as the Unemployment Offices.
In any of the state’s smaller cities you would find an EDD office usually prominently placed in the city center—in the Central Valley cities of Merced and Madera, Redding and Shasta in North California, Calexico and El Centro in the southern Imperial County. In each of the larger cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, several EDD offices set among the different neighborhoods.
These offices were decidedly low tech operations, and their job search techniques were primitive by today’s standards (help wanted ads in newspapers, responding to orders from employers). The job search process itself could be time-consuming and frustrating: job seekers might travel hours by bus to and from the office, and additionally travel to drop off applications at employer sites. Clients came with behavioral and psychological problems, scary at times to the counselors, that undermined job placement.
Despite the messiness of the in-person, one-to-one, low tech services, the EDD Job Service counselors and staff of the time often talk with fondness about the culture that grew out of these local services. They recall the strong sense of mission, the expectation that counselors would go beyond nine-to-five to assist their job seekers, the connection to local businesses and business groups like the Rotary and Optimist clubs.
There is no need to romanticize the earlier era of the Unemployment Office. But this culture associated with the in-person, local offices, is worth recalling.
This month Congress continues to debate the reauthorization of the main workforce bill, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), and the structure of the nation’s workforce system going forward. Along with the technical guidelines under consideration, how to promote this one-on-one, community-based culture in the internet-driven, virtual-service environment should be on the agenda.
The Job Service as Calling
In June 1970, I drove to one of a local EDD office on Santa Monica near La Brea in Los Angeles. I had just graduated from Fairfax High and was seeking a summer job. I took down information from one of the individual job postings on a 5 X 8 index card on the wall. I called the employer, a small collection agency in West Hollywood, from a pay phone in the hallway, and then hand delivered a resume, and was hired that afternoon. You could do that in 1970, before all of the hiring protocols and regulations that we have today.
It would be a decade, after college and graduate school, that I would return to an EDD office. During the 1980s, I was part of a community job training group in San Francisco’s Mission District, and we referred job seekers to and received referrals seekers from the EDD office on Mission Street. EDD staff were part of the Mission business associations and neighborhood improvement associations, and had longstanding contacts with the city’s major employers downtown: hotels, restaurants, construction firms and banks. Additionally, EDD staff were active in the emerging welfare reform that would change the culture of the local welfare offices from lifeless dispensers of benefits to agents of job placement. The ethos was one that nothing was more important than a job, a role in the work world, especially for the welfare recipients, ex-offenders, out of school youth and ex-addicts who came to the EDD office.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s I served as the director statewide of EDD, and visited EDD offices throughout the state. It was not uncommon to find staff who had been with the department for twenty years, thirty years, or even longer—the longest tenure I can recall was 41 years. Being a job counselor, helping the unemployed find work, was a profession, even a calling.
In Los Angeles, Al Dave, the district manager over the EDD local offices in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, was a mainstay on the city’s boards and commissions related to employment and with the employer groups (he was known as “Mr. EDD”). He had come up through the ranks, and regarded the job counselor position as a trust to help the unemployed. He had little use for any job counselor who only worked nine to five. His successors, Michael Dolphin and Geneva Robinson, carried on this sense of mission.
Veronica Champayne, recently retired after more than 35 years with EDD, recalls the commitment expected of job counselors to their job seekers, as well as the behaviors that counselors expected of clients. “Last month I ran into a former welfare recipient from more than twenty years ago. She stated she has been employed since, hugged me and said ‘I’m so glad that you pushed me so hard.’”
The Fading of the Job Service Role and Culture
The world of the local EDD offices shifted in the late 1990s due to two dynamics. The first was the decision by the Clinton Administration to dismantle these offices and move EDD local staff into a new national system with the generic title of “One-Stop Career Centers.” These One-Stop Centers brought EDD staff into buildings that also housed staff from the state departments of vocational rehabilitation, veterans services, and social services. The Centers were undertaken under the rubric of “coordination", and administered by new entities outside of EDD.
At the same time, the job search and placement process began migrating rapidly in the late 1990s and early 2000s to the internet. With job seekers able to search for jobs and submit applications online, the role of the job counselor seemed less important. Added to this was the rise of the universal basic income and government benefit ideologies that downplayed the role of the jobs in the advancing technology economy.
The result within a few years would be a diminishment of the role of the low tech one-to-one job counseling, as well as the mission and culture of the former Unemployment Offices. The job seekers who came to the One Stop Centers were generally directed to a row of computers and given limited instruction. The traditional one-to-one assistance with a job counselor was limited mainly to groups of unemployed designated as having greatest barriers. Even for these workers, the one-to-one assistance was uneven and often rushed.
Reclaiming the Job Counselor
The current Congressional debates on how workforce programs should be structured have focused on increasing funds for training and in so doing reducing investment in job counseling. However, as the job market becomes increasingly complex and competitive, what most unemployed workers need is the encouragement, direction, and advocacy to employers that Job Service counselors provided.
It is not possible to go back to the previous structure of the Job Service, and the standalone offices that served as community centers. The One-Stop Centers have been unable to assume this role, and no mandate in national legislation is likely to enable the Centers to do so.
Yet in reclaiming values of the Job Service offices, the role of the one-to-one counselor should be increased, not diminished. At the least, states should have wide spending flexibility to invest in job search and retention assistance. A part of this flexibility might be undertaken in concert with the new Medicaid work mandates. These mandates hold promise, but only as they are accompanied by a job specialist helping Medicaid recipients make sense of the job process.
The state Job Service programs already have spending flexibility under other Wagner-Peyser and Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment (RESEA) funding, and some are beginning to use it on job counselors. At EDD, the workforce branch division chief, Javier Romero, has long championed high-touch job assistance for workers on the margins. Under RESEA, the re-employment initiative for UI recipients, staff are being reassigned to provide direct services as job counselors. They are given the charge to engage unemployed workers as soon as they sign up for unemployment insurance, push discouraged workers to move forward, navigate the many disappointments that come with almost every job search today.
In restoring the role of the job counselor, John Colborn, head of Apprenticeships for America, observes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents not a threat to the job counselor but a tool to enhance the role. Effective use of AI enables the job counselor to design individual employment plans with far greater detail and accuracy than in the past. It enables the job counselor to reach far more job seekers far more rapidly.
Job counselor as a trust to assist the unemployed, as EDD’s Al Dave used to say.
(Michael Bernick is the former Director of California’s Employment Development Department and previously served eight years on the BART Board. He is currently employment counsel at Duane Morris LLP, a Milken Institute Fellow, and a Fellow at the Burning Glass Institute. A leading voice on workforce issues, Bernick focuses on employment strategies for neurodiverse populations. His latest book is The Autism Full Employment Act. He is a regular contributor to CityWatchLA.com.)
