Tom Corbett Goes Job-Hunting

Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Tom Corbett was in Lancaster this afternoon, where he paid a call on the local office of the Team Pennsylvania CareerLink,which is a big chunk of state government devoted to helping the unemployed not be unemployed anymore.

All told, Corbett spent about two hours at the office, where he meant with folks who are using the center to try to find new work. He toured classrooms where people were undergoing job training and polishing up their interviewing skills -- among other things.

Among those he met was a woman named Melissa Weissner of Ronks, Pa., out there in Amish country. During a small group discussion with Corbett,Weissner said she'd had trouble finding the kinds of jobs she wanted in the newspaper. Apparently, she'd come from some sort of middle-management position and those just aren't listed in the pages of your local paper.

That changed, she said, when she came to the CareerLink office.

"I was running up against a wall finding me positions that would pay me what I'm worth," said Weissner, who's been unemployed since last November. "I'm getting close."

Corbett also used his stop at the career center to tout the jobs section of his economic plan. Not coincidentally it calls for "strengthening regional workforce development initiatives," which is exactly what the CareerLinkcenter is.

Out on the stump and on the rubber-chicken circuit, Corbett has spoken frequently about trimming the size of state government and getting rid of wasteful programs.

"Is this an example of a state government program that works?" we asked him.

"I think it is," he said. "When you're running for governor, you need to see what works and what isn't [working]. We need to be as efficient as we possibly can."

When we asked him later if he'd seen anything in the career center that he hadn't expected, Corbett said he saw a "workforce that is older and more educated."

"You have to adapt to the needs of the new century," he continued. "It's a whole different economy that we're in now."

Mixed in with his more anodyne comments, Corbett provocatively suggested that Congress' decision to extend unemployment benefits might be having the opposite of its intended effect and actually be serving as a disincentive to go back to work.

"What I see here are people looking for jobs, but that's only 10 percent [of the unemployed]," he said. "What about the other 80 or 90 percent?"

He also suggested that the economy has mutated in such a way that maybe, just maybe, not everyone needs to go to a four-year college. For some students, it might be better to attend a two- or three-year program so they can receive the training for the sorts of jobs that are out there right now.

"How many teachers are we graduating and how many [teaching] jobs are there?" he for-instanced.