The U.S. Census Bureau Tries to Manage an Unprecedented Hiring Blitz

By Matthew Blake

Heading into March, the current unemployment rate hovers near double digits, with almost fifteen million  Americans jobless. These numbers will be a little less grim this spring – temporarily, at least – when the U.S. Census Bureau goes on a six-week hiring blitz.

The Commerce Department, of which the Census Bureau is part, is touting these job creation statistics: because of the Census, Commerce says, 800,000 jobs will be created, the unemployment rate will go down, and the economy will even grow. Here in Chicago, the possibility of earning $18.25 an hour to ask people how old they are has raised the spirits of some of the city’s unemployed and underemployed. “It’s not really taxing, it’s flexible and the pay is decent,” says Noah Lepawsky, 32, of Chicago, a recent applicant for a census-taker position. There are lingering concerns, though, about whether the Obama administration is up to the task of what Census Bureau Director Robert Groves calls “the largest non-military mobilization in the United States.”

The decennial census has far-reaching importance: it affects the composition of congressional districts and influences how up to $400 billion in federal program funding is allocated to state and local governments. These programs include Medicaid, social services block grants, and money to enforce civil rights legislation.

The latest Census has been underway for two years already, and its total cost is estimated at $14.7 billion. It will hire 1.2 million temporary workers, people who gain employment by answering very basic reading and math questions as part of a civil service test. (Sample question: “Ms. Jones can’t remember the year of her birth but she knows that she was born in the month of September. It is now May 2010, and Ms. Jones tells you she is 78; in what year was she born?”) The first round of temporary hiring took place last year when census workers did address canvassing. As one former Chicago census employee put it, this meant, “looking at every building and determining if humans could be living there.”

From there, the regional census centers collected all the addresses they should mail forms to. The forms ask about the age, sex, race, Hispanic origin, and household relationship status of each individual, and the size and homeownership status of each household.

The decennial survey’s role in economic stimulus depends to a surprising extent on the fact that Americans are either unfamiliar with the Census, suspect any impersonal snail mail is junk, or are simply disorganized. Since not all homes have phones or the internet, the most efficient way to run the census is for every household to mail their forms to Census Bureau headquarters. Indeed, the Census Bureau motto is, “We can’t move forward until you mail it back.” Census jobs, however, depend entirely on households not mailing back their forms by the Apri 1 deadline, forcing census workers to go door to door collecting information. The Commerce Department’s goal is to have 65 to 75 percent of households that receive the forms mail them back. To that end, Commerce spends $140 million on advertising. But a higher rate of return means fewer door-to-door jobs.

Despite the uncertainty over how many Americans will “mail it back,” the Commerce Department issued a study last week that specifically predicts the census’s economic impact. Of the 800,000 temporary workers it hires this spring, 635,000 will be door-to-door workers. These workers will be employed nineteen hours a week for six weeks, which will actually cause a monthly dip in the unemployment rate (a few tenths of a percentage point). The department is even predicting a .1% bump in economic growth nationwide. “With the unemployment rate expected to be well above those witnessed during previous Censuses,” the study notes, “the effect of large changes in temporary 2010 Census employment on the unemployment rate may be more noticeable in 2010.”

In testimony Wednesday before the Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee, Census Director Groves claimed that the agency has already recruited two million potential hires. In a different economic climate, the Census Bureau might not trumpet the fact that it is putting so many people on the federal payroll to perform such an elementary task. But with an unemployment rate of 9.7 percent, the Obama administration is not shy about advertising these figures.

The Census job market has already had an impact in the Chicago metropolitan region, The national survey is expected to hire about 25,000 workers in greater Chicago, where 513,000 people – or 10.6 percent of the labor force – are presently unemployed. “Applications are up compared to past censuses,” says Jim Accurso of the Midwest regional Census office. “We have seen applications from a broad range of folks. In 2000, we saw more second-income, stay-at-home folks. But this year it will be a primary job for a lot of folks.”

Because the Census must await initial mail-in results, it is impossible to know how many employees will actually be needed until a few weeks before the April door-to-door blitz. And the Census has seen significant problems with the workers it has hired, raising questions about both costs and effectiveness. A Commerce Department inspector general report found that during address canvassing in 2009, thousands of workers were hired, received paid training time – and then never went canvassing. The report concluded that “[a] wide variance between budgeted and actual costs do not generate confidence in the Census Bureau’s budgeting and cost containment process for large-scale field operations.” In other words, regional offices had little idea about how many people it would take to get the job done.

Census workers I spoke with said that address canvassing was disorganized. “They had overestimated the amount of work there was and our positions abruptly ended,” says Lepawsky, who holds two part-time jobs. “They went by the seat of their pants – but it wasn’t worse than other places I’ve worked for in the private and public sector.”

“Our jobs basically ended,” says Kathryn Grover, 27. “There were just like – okay, you’re done. They hired people to work six to eight weeks and then laid them off after three days.”

Still, these workers were fairly positive. “I was unemployed at the time and it paid pretty well,” Grover says. “I got to walk around my neighborhood –it was a pretty ideal part-time, temporary job.”

A smooth hiring process would be an example of the federal government creating meaningful jobs that also stimulate the economy. Even if it is a political third rail to grow the number of government employees, those applying to conduct the U.S. Census have a different view. Says Lepawsky, “I can think of much worse jobs than being a civil servant.”

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