State labor department spends millions to rent career centers closed to public

The Georgia Department of Labor is paying more than $6.6 million a year for 21 career centers that have been closed to the public since March 2020, according to leases maintained by the State Properties Commission.

In pre-pandemic times, the centers offered services like resume fine-tuning and job hunt help, but the department closed the doors of the brick-and-mortar havens for displaced workers last March as the pandemic began to reach across the state.

More than a year later, as businesses are inviting customers back indoors and expanded federal help for out-of-work Georgians has ended, those in-person career services are still not available, and some are demanding to know why.

“Everything else is opened up, except for the Department of Labor career center offices, as they’re driving people back to work by reinstating work search requirements for the meager unemployment benefits that are still available to workers,” said Ryan Richardson, program coordinator for the Atlanta-North Georgia Labor Council. “People want to be working. That’s not the issue. The issue is that the jobs and the support network is not there. We’re still living in a pandemic moment, and if they were really serious about it, they would be opening up the career centers.”

Read more: https://georgiarecorder.com/2021/07/23/state-labor-department-spends-millions-to-rent-career-centers-closed-to-public/