From the PITTSBURGH PATRIOT-NEWS:
… last week Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Corbett said he has heard from business owners statewide that they can’t find workers to fill open positions. “People don’t want to come back to work while they still have unemployment,” he said in Elizabethtown on Friday. “The jobs are there, but if we keep extending unemployment, the people are going to sit there.”
His spokesman later backpedaled, saying Corbett understands most who are unemployed are looking for work.
But when there are five unemployed people for every job opening — according to national and state statistics — this is no time to blame unemployment on the unemployed. Nearly a half-million people are still out of work in Pennsylvania, according to state Labor and Industry Secretary Sandi Vito. We saw the clamor for work ourselves here at the newspaper. A recent part-time opening at The Patriot-News drew more than 80 resumes.
To focus on this aspect of unemployment also takes away from the bigger issues at hand…
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When Tom Corbett said that employers have told him again and again that they cannot get their people back to work until their unemployment runs out was greatly misinformed and, as a state official, most familiar with our laws, he should have known better. I have been an employer in PA for many years and if one of my laid off employees refused to come back to work until his or her unemployment benefits ran out, one call or note from me to the State would end those benefits instantly. The former employee would then be “invited” for an appeal conference which he or she would lose if the circumstances were as Corbett described.
I suppose many of us get tired and angry at these partisan facts and partisan stories that inflame peoples sense of justice and which turn out to be simply untrue, or exaggerated, or embellished and are cynically used to manipulate popular prejudice and ignorance for the political advantage of a candidate. We do the same in business which has made both our political and business ethics a kind of inside joke.