WASHINGTON is in the midst of spending $11 billion to fulfill the Constitutional obligation to count Americans, a wonderfully quaint process I imagine worked better when this was a young country and people stayed on farms scattered about the countryside.
Today, the census is a mess.
People are harder to find, of course, because they are often at an office somewhere. And when they are located, they don’t necessarily want to cooperate.
Census workers get paid well, and are compensated for training and travel time to and from their homes. So these jobs are sought after, especially in this hard knocks economy.
A few weeks ago, I started looking into the Census’ hiring process: how it hired/fired/rehired people and split jobs into pieces by giving workers fewer hours of work than promised, for instance. And I asked the question: how was this razzmatazz affecting the employment numbers being produced by Washington?
Workers also allege that they are told to check and then check again the same families, extending their hours with busywork. People report being called up to six times, even when they cooperate.
Others said they’ve been told to do no more than one survey an hour, even if they can work a little harder.
Last week the Labor Department said 411,000 of the 431,000 jobs created in this country in May came from the census. Since I started this investigation, I’ve been flooded with tips from Census workers, most of whom were so incensed by what they had to endure that they may have broken their oath to share this information with me.
To be fair, I got about four letters in defense of the Census from workers. And the folks at the Census shot back angry notes about my questions on possible statistics tampering.
In my opinion, the Census bosses didn’t make a convincing argument that they understood what was really going on in the field or that they knew how their employment numbers were being applied to the overall national labor count. (Fox News even got one Census supervisor to admit that jobs were being double counted.)
Well, that’s enough from me. Here are edited snippets of what some disillusioned workers who contacted me had to say. After reading these, do you really think Washington will know the true number of people living in this country?
* “I wish to tell you about my (Census) crew’s biggest problem, the respondents. I have never seen so many rude, intolerable, nasty and threatening people in my life.”
* My training was “conducted in Corona (Queens) by a slick fellow who constantly urges us to pad out time sheets. ‘Get every hour you can, man,’ he would say.”
* “We know how to enumerate safely because we are required to read” the Census handbook. “Number 3, ‘wear comfortable shoes. These shoes may come in handy should there be a need to run . . . (And) as you walk toward your vehicle, scan beneath the vehicle for persons waiting to charge out at your ankles.’ Who knew?”
* “I have been hired and laid off (by Census) five times. Each time I had to refill out paperwork as if a new hire, get fingerprinted, etc. Each training session is four days, at least 35 hours plus (50 cents a mile) mileage. Each assignment only lasts about one-third as long as told when called up.”
* “Working here in Kansas, we Census workers were basically ordered to obtain the info by any means possible, (including) asking neighbors. This strongarm tactic was enough to make several of us quit, as we felt it was a blatant violation of privacy since the Census forms clearly have ‘refusal’ as one of the choices.”
* “I work Manhattan South. I have never seen such waste and inefficiencies in my working life. The Census makes a big deal about you living in the area you work in — however, the guy who runs Manhattan lives in New Jersey.”
* You should see the stack of books, office supplies and forms I have left over, even after voluntarily returning several stacks of books and forms. Do you plan to write an additional story? If you are, I have a great story for you regarding blatant dishonesty and card padding endorsed by management.”
* “Not only did I lose my unemployment benefits for accepting my short-term crew leader job . . . but I was told after . . . working diligently for five weeks ‘there is only work in the mountains and you do not have a four-wheel drive vehicle so you can’t go.’ ”
* “The waste that I have seen on freebies in this area is astronomical. They have given out bulk amounts of free T-shirts to liquor stores and the like.”
* “In a half-hour I have to go into work even though they don’t have any work for me to do. So why must I go in? Because we will all have to hand in our time sheets from two days ago, the last time we got work. So today we are all getting paid for at least an hour, plus travel expenses and time, to hand in our time sheets that only have about one to two hours of work done.”
* “We are not supposed to wear any political signage, or talk politics, but in our training meeting the (unit leader) said, ‘You have to be careful about Tea Party members, they are on purpose not giving out information and they may shoot you. They are nutjobs.’ ”