Temps only, but
thousands will be hired
for census

BY Meredith Mazzilli
DAILY NEWS WRITER

Monday, February 1st 2010, 9:05 AM


Thousands of temporary workers will
be hired citywide by the U.S. Census Bureau.

With the 2010 census underway, a job helping to
collect personal information from your neighbors
might seem like an easy way to make money.

But while mass hiring for the temporary jobs will
take place citywide, competition is tough and job
availability varies widely by neighborhood.

As many as 100,000 people are likely to be

interviewed for jobs at 32 local offices in the five
boroughs and some surrounding counties, said
Tony Farthing, regional director of recruitment for
the U.S. Census Bureau.

Between 500 and 1,000 people will be hired for
each of the offices. The pay is from $14.50 to $20
an hour, depending on the position. Visit census.
gov and enter your zip code to find the next hiring
event. Info also is available at (866) 861-2010.

"These are temporary positions, one to three weeks
mostly - don't quit your day job," Farthing said.

Preference is given to applicants who live in the
same neighborhood as the census office.
Candidates need to take a written test; applicants
can take it multiple times to try to improve their
score.

"We're testing every day, seven days a week," said
Vanessa Molina, a manager of census recruiting.

Most positions won't be filled until mid-April.
Hiring at census offices will vary based on the rate
of citizen response - the fewer census forms mailed
in, the more workers needed to follow up to ensure
as complete a count as possible. Data from the
census are used to help decide how billions in
government spending are allocated.

The door to door workers who try to make sure
every person in every household is counted, known
as enumerators, make up most of the hires and work
May through June.

"We're looking for enumerators, clerks, recruiting
assistants, crew leaders and crew leader assistants,"
Molina said. "There is one test for all the positions.
We're going to need thousands."

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Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods such
as Park Slope and Cobble Hill have proven among
the most difficult to staff, so job-seeking residents
in those areas may have more luck.

Bilingual candidates also have an edge. The agency
particularly needs workers who can speak Korean,
Portuguese or French.

Farthing noted that applicants who take the test are
scoring better than in past years, perhaps a
reflection of the high unemployment rate, which has
left many skilled workers jobless.

"We used to hire people who were getting scores of
70% to 75%," he said. "If we got someone with a s
core of 80%, we were happy. The way the economy
is, I have more people like you wouldn't believe
getting 100%."

Jason Anno, a 21-year-old student at the Borough
of Manhattan Community College who lives on the
Upper West Side, attended a hiring event on
Thursday.

"I heard about the census hiring from a flyer posted
at school - it seemed like a good way to make
money," he said.

Anno was more interested in administrative work
than canvassing in apartment buildings. "I would
rather not knock on peoples' doors," he said.

Lilia Chelala of Tribeca, who's working as a census
recruiting agent, said, "I'm very happy - I love
giving jobs to people."

http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2010/02/01/2010-02-01_temps_only_but_thousands_will_be_hired_for_consensus_.html.

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-----------------

From: Laura Whitehorn <lwhitehorn@earthlink.net>
Date: Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 12:28 PM

New York City events featuring Safiya Bukhari’s “The War Before”

Monday, February 1st, 7:00 pm —Barnes & Noble, Broadway at 82nd St., Manhattan (1 train to 86th Street; B/C to 86th)
‘Black Women, Black Freedom’ – Celebrating “The War Before” and “Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle,” with a panel including Wonda Jones, Laura Whitehorn, Dayo Gore, and Komozi Woodard. Free.

Wednesday, February 3, 6:00-9:00 pm —Medgar Evers College Center for Women’s Development, 1650 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn, Rm. B-1008 (2/3/4/5 to Franklin Avenue; B/Q to Prospect Park; S to Prospect Park or Botanic Garden)
Launch party for “The War Before” and celebration of Safiya Bukhari—with Wonda Jones, Pam Africa, Safiya Bandele, Cleo Silvers, Robyn Spencer, and Laura Whitehorn. Free.

Friday, February 5, 7:00 pm —Bluestockings Radical Books, 172 Allen St, btwn Stanton and Rivington, Manhattan (F/V to 2nd Avenue; J/M to Bowery)
Reading and discussion with Joan Gibbs, Laura Whitehorn, Bullwhip (Cyril Innis), Paulette D’Auteuil, and others. Free.

Saturday, February 13, 7:00 pm —The Brecht Forum, 451 West Street, between Bethune and Bank Streets, Manhattan (1/2/3 or A/C to 14th Street)
Book party with Wonda Jones, Michael Tarif Warren, Cleo Silvers, Bullwhip, Dequi Kioni-Sadiki, Laura Whitehorn, and others. Sliding scale: $6/$10/$15; free for Brecht subscribers

To buy the book online:feministpress.org

Where the Women Wait, an Unwritten Code Is Revised

Marcin Zurawicz Women, many of them Hispanic or Polish, waiting for work cleaning houses in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

For years, every morning, the sight has been the same at Marcy and Division Avenues in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: a crowd of women gathered on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway overpass amid the din of traffic. They are day laborers looking not for construction work, but for work cleaning houses of Hasidic residents.

There were originally maybe 40 or 50. And like many traditions that grow up out of necessity around New York City, this cleaning woman shape-up had certain unwritten codes, accepted patterns that all the women acknowledged, and abided by. Read more…

He Looked Something Like This

New York Police Department The gunman, as he appeared.

This is not to diminish the seriousness of the fact that a man was recently murdered in a jewelry store holdup, but the sketch that the police released Wednesday got us wondering: how is this going to help anyone catch the killer?

The drawing, at right, shows a face almost completely obscured by a hat, sunglasses and a scarf pulled all the way up to the bridge of the nose.

Even combined with the surveillance video the police released, which shows, basically, a male adult of average build, dressed in black and carrying a duffel bag, walking down Madison Avenue, the sketch would seem to reduce the pool of possible suspects only to about a quarter of the population.

City Room asked a retired detective to review the evidence. Read more…

Ace Tuskegee Airman Dies At 90

Inmates’ Stock Is Rising in Albany District Fight
By JEREMY W. PETERS

ALBANY — As state lawmakers prepare to redraw the boundaries of Congressional and state legislative districts, one segment of the population is quickly becoming a coveted constituency: prisoners.

They do not carry any endorsement influence, promise big-dollar political contributions or even vote (they are barred by law from doing so). But with the balance of power in the State Senate tipping on a single vote, Republicans and Democrats are already squabbling over the home addresses of New York’s 58,378 inmates as they anticipate how the 2010 census will reshape the electoral map.

With New York expected to lose at least one seat in Congress because of population shifts nationwide, and Republicans facing the prospect of being further relegated to the minority if they do not pick up seats in the Senate, the fight promises to be especially fierce.

On Thursday, Democrats announced plans to seek a change that would help them lay claim to a large slice of the prison population, a move that would help them add to their ranks.

Under their proposal, the state would have to count prisoners as residents of their last known address rather than counting them where they are held, a practice that has increased the population of upstate districts, where Republican voters predominate.

Supporters of the change have framed the issue as a way to prevent the disenfranchisement of poor, mostly minority communities.

“The present rule takes people who come from and return to poor or black and Latino communities and transfers their value for reapportionment purposes to rural upstate districts that really have nothing to do with them,” said Senator Eric T. Schneiderman, a Democrat from the Upper West Side of Manhattan who is leading the effort to change the way prisoners are counted.

But Republicans say that aside from depriving upstate districts of representation in the Legislature, the plan would unfairly change the way one group is counted without changing how other transient groups, like university students and military families, are counted.

“This isn’t purely black and white; you need consistency,” said Senator Joseph A. Griffo, a Republican whose North Country district includes four prisons. “To me, until you change everything, you don’t change one specific component.”

If the proposal becomes law, New York would become the first state where prisoners are not considered residents of the district where they are incarcerated for purposes of determining the size of legislative districts. Similar proposals have been introduced recently in Illinois, Wisconsin and at the federal level, but none have become law.

The average time served for an inmate in New York is about 3.6 years. “That’s less time than most college students spend away from home,” said Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from Brooklyn who is sponsoring the prisoner-counting legislation in the Assembly.

An analysis conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit group that studies incarceration patterns, found that seven upstate Senate districts would not have met the minimum population requirements if prisoners had been excluded when district lines were last redrawn in 2002. All seven of those districts were held by Republicans; five of them still are.

In all, 44,326 New York City residents were counted as residents of other parts of the state when district lines were last redrawn. Subtracting the 586 prisoners in New York City who were not city residents, the city’s net population loss was 43,740.

The result, the study said, has been an overpopulation of Senate districts in New York City and an underpopulation of districts upstate. The population of districts are supposed to be relatively constant, but the law allows for slight variations. As a result, some Senate districts upstate barely meet the population requirement, while some districts downstate nearly exceed the requirement. Currently, a district’s population must be no more than 5 percent higher or lower than 306,072.

The district represented by Senator Elizabeth O’C. Little, a Republican, is the example most often cited by advocates for changing the law. When the boundaries of her district were drawn in 2002, the Senate included nearly 13,000 prisoners as residents, or about 4 percent of its total population.

Department of Correctional Services data from this month showed that Ms. Little’s district had about 11,000 prisoners, reflecting a statewide trend toward a shrinking prison population.

Ms. Little said in an interview that changing the way prisoners were counted would distort census data. “The purpose of the census is to record who is living where at a given period of time,” she said. “So if you’re in a nursing home at a certain time, you’re going to be counted there even if you’re just there for rehab. If you’re living in a college town while you’re away at a university, you’re going to be counted there. And if you’re in prison you’re going to be counted there.”

Ms. Little added that she viewed the prisoners in her district as her constituents, regardless of how temporary their stays might be. And she noted that they behave like other concerned constituents in one major way: they write. “I have gotten letters from inmates.” [NYT]