Hiring Practices and Training:
1. Many census offices would hire as many as three times the number of people needed for the work. There are reports that for jobs with as few as twelve places to visit, there were over thirty people trained. Questions to the local census office led to the statement that the numbers of people had to be high because so many dropped out. Little thought was given to the fact that people dropped out because with that many trainees, the amount of work available for each person was so insignificant that continuing with the process was a bigger waste of time and money than doing nothing. Many people did the training just to get the money for sitting for a week. Census workers were told that working for the census would qualify one for unemployment insurance. Then the supervisors were told to limit the hours each person worked to just under the amount that would qualify for the insurance.
Conclusion: The hiring practices were terrible across the board and it it quite apparent that the numbers were political rather than practical. After all, if the census can report that x number of people were hired and trained, it makes unemployment figures look much better. In addition, the same people were hired several times but the hours they were given were not enough to justify a full time job or even a good temporary job. Still, each time they were rehired, they were trained and treated as a new employee which allowed some to be hired as many as five times and count as five jobs created. Because the hiring practices were based on falsehoods and misrepresentations, getting a solid answer from anyone was/is impossible.
2. Training was often laborious, tedious and misdirected. There are many different tasks associated with the census. They go from examining the population of group homes, halfway houses and communal living to home interviews and follow-up investigations. Trainers, who were in general barely qualified to instruct were spending the majority of training time relating personal stories. Much of the training was so bogged down in minutiae that the goal of the training was lost. Once in a while a trainer would break though and reorganize the training materials but in general the "approved" training was completely misdirected. There were training sessions where people simply read from the book. They would go around the training class and each person would read a paragraph or two. Some of the trainees had language problems and while they could comprehend quite well, reading was laborious. However, the training slogged on.
Redundancy and Obfuscation:
1. For each home address plotted, at least three people were involved and in some cases four: They hired a bunch of people to go out and use GPS to plot houses by address and GPS coordinates. They they hired a separate group to go out and manually track the same houses. Then they put the two lists together and hired a third group to go out and resolve the discrepancies. Then they hired another group to verify that the group checking the first two groups were accurate. During this entire time, the census was mailed out and most people filled out the form and sent it in.
2. The carbon footprint of the census must have been incredible. In one part of the census, time cards had to be submitted daily. These then had to be taken to the regional center to be processed. In addition to the driving time required to plot the houses, the time card situation was incredible. Some of the supervisors were driving as much at 400 miles a day to get time cards processed alone. Meanwhile the people doing the house and address verification were driving to do that and also driving, in some cases, incredible distances just to submit a time card. All this had to be done within a specified 40 hour week because overtime was forbidden. So the way the problem was resolved was to give each person just a few real working hours. That way, the numbers could be inflated and the driving time which was paid for at $.50 (fifty cents) per mile piled up. With the ridiculous situation of the time cards, people were driving, taking hours and mileage for the task of turning in time cards. This had nothing to do with taking any kind of numbers for the census. Many of the early tasks were simply plotting houses to ensure a correct mailing. So people were driving all over to plot houses, then drive further to turn in time cards and all this had to be kept under a certain dollar limit so people would not qualify for unemployment. So. . . hire as many people as you can. The more you hire and the less they do, the better for the numbers and the better it fits into the overall census program.
The Census is supposed to be controlled by the Department of Commerce. However, the 2010 census is being controlled by the White House. This was one of the first things that Obama did after achieving office. This means that the 2010 census will be controlled by Rham Eemanuel a political appointee with no confirmation from congress and certainly not a person voted into office. So how does one spell corruption? Could it be C-E-N-S-U-S?
3. The amount of materials produced for each task was larger than all the works published by the GPO. Each job came with a set of maps of a specific area and surrounding maps. A case for one house had over 200 additional pages of information that had nothing to do with actual tasking. The cost in paper and laser tone alone must have been obscene. Many times the maps were completely useless. On some N was S and/or W/E. In other words some were useless. Each map set contained cover pages and legends and much information on separate pages that could have been condensed on one page.
Promotion of the incompetent:
1. Typical government. Promote those who accuse others and make other people look bad so you can look better. The game within the census is a joke from the top down. This kind of organization cannot develop unless the top people are looking for clones to promote below them thus ensuring their own safety. Because the top echelon is incompetent, the lower echelons echo the top. If anyone does too well, they simply are not hired back because this makes everyone else look bad. A low level person was assigned a task to map houses, most were horrible and not correct but the person was promoted. This person attacked anyone who questioned the bad work and because of the stupid organizational structure, nobody checked to see if the work was good or not. Instead, the people questioning the veracity were themselves accused of violating census guidelines.
Overall Assessment:
This was and still is a botched operation costing far more than it should and there is little assurance that the actual count will be correct. Several cases were homes were second or third vacation homes were treated the same as a primary residence. So a family may be counted more than once. Legal or illegal immigration status was never questioned and while it isn't in the scope of the census to determine residency, in an area like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California, the whole census would be skewed by the inclusion of non-residents. Was this Franklin's goal? I strongly doubt it.
The census makes a big deal out of saying that if one works for the census one can then get unemployment. Well this is fine and dandy and if one was unemployed for a significant amount of time would seem like a good thing. The problem is that for most tasks, census work didn't provide enough hours to qualify for unemployment. Does bait and switch sound familiar?
America has achieved the ultimate when government can run an operation that costs way more than it should and is peopled by those educated in the same system. We have come full circle with incompetence and sloth. The Obama White House may be new and have been elected by a majority but the actions of this group shout corruption? How long will people assume that current census figures are a fiction designed to achieve some kind of political end at odds with the Constitution?
FB
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