Date of Award
Spring 1980
Document Type
Dissertation - Restricted
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Education
First Advisor
Nordberg, Robert B.
Second Advisor
Topetz, Nick J.
Third Advisor
Ivanoff, John
Abstract
The present project began with a problem confronting the researcher. From 1975 to early 1977, I was employed by Wisconsin Job Service as the manpower counselor for a moderately large community. My primary responsibilities were the development of employability in and eventually the job placement of the community's "hard-core" unemployed. As a result of the financial trouble's of its primary employer, this community was experiencing a period of economic decline, a substantial increase in its employment rate, and an equally substantial increase in the difficulties facing its "hard-core" un-unemployed in an already competitive job market. The community's response was to expand the scope of two already operative manpower programs: subsidized vocational training under CETA, and the WIN program. My initial, subjective impressions as I worked with the participants in these two programs were that the programs were proving neither adequate nor appropriate, at least in terms of generating placements. It seemed that an inordinate number of my clients were remaining unemployed long after their completion of the program. Particularly in the case of the CETA training graduates, the longstanding problems seemed to remain unchanged. Potential employers often responded that the training graduates were not sufficiently trained or experienced; were not of a caliber equal to the other job competitors; were too young or too old; had the wrong background or the wrong attitude; were (unexplicitly) too black, too Hispanic or too "hard-core", or simply were not what the employer wanted. I became increasingly suspicious that the community's employers had some unstated but definite expectations of those people whom they would hire, which my clients, despite their training, still were not meeting. The present paper is the direct result of those suspicions. Its purpose is to confirm or deny them by determining which attributes among the community's job applicants differentiated those who were hired from those who were not, and to examine the responses available to the community in coping with the problem of unemployment.