Description of the Hiring Hall Association Project

Every human alive today is descended from about 3000 humans who lived about 50000 years ago on the east coast of Africa. In a book called "The Seven Daughters of Eve", the author looks at mitochondrial DNA. You probably never heard of that. It seems that cells in our bodies have a set of DNA that is passed from mother to child unaltered, kind of. Mitochondrial DNA mutates at a standard rate of time, so it is possible to figure out when two people had a common ancestor. It turns out that there are only 22 females who have descendants still alive today. From this guy's research, he also determined that the Neanderthals in Europe had no descendants. I know, I know, you think your father-in-law looks like a Neanderthal so obviously they had some descendants, but that does not look to be the case.

Now, another guy did a book where he studies the X-chromosome from males and discovered that he could go back 70000 years. The first woman with descendants did not live at the same time as the first guy with descendants. His conclusion was that there are some guys who have LOTS of kids and some who have none. The majority of us are descended from a small number of guys who figured out how to corner the market in females.

A bit a humor there.

What that means to me is that we are all related to each other somewhere in time. To say otherwise is silly to me. There are no other branches of the human species that have survived to the present day.

We should, if we are honorable, be willing to help each other to have what it takes to have a good life. The leadership of the Left wishes to use the coercive forces of the government to help. What that entails is that taxes are taken from everyone and redistributed to the poor. In addition, we have charity which helps the poor. And on and on. Yet, the economic failure rate of our country is about 20%. Percentages mean nothing. People are in trouble and someone needs to do something about the social ills in this country. The problem arises as to the question of "How do you do that?"

The leadership of the Right has failed to answer that question effectively, because they believe that people can take care of themselves if the government simply gets out of the way. It appears obvious to the Right that charities would take up the slack, if government got out of the social welfare business. Too many people outside the leadership on the Left AND the Right cannot believe that. It defies logic.

How do you prove the premise that the government is NOT the best tool to use for effective social change? The answer is that you cannot, because you cannot logically prove a negative.

For some reason we seem destined to try to convince each other that there is only One True Path. Lately I have come to the conclusion that the debate is incorrectly stated. I do not believe that social problems are caused by society. That statement seems on its face to be silly, but I believe that individuals are the problem, not the society we live in. If that IS the case, then the one-size-fits-all model is a stupid idea. Here is the kicker, the government cannot provide anything BUT one-size-fits-all programs. If the government was going to cure some of the social ills, I would have expected to see some type of improvement in poverty and other social ills in this country over the last seventy years.

I don't.

The income redistribution model has failed. The government sponsored job training programs have failed. The leadership of the Left says that if we just have a bigger government that taxes more and gives more to the poor, then all the social ills of the world will be handled. If the government has failed in the efforts it has undertaken so far, why reward it with more money? Why does that make sense? Nowhere in the world where there are large central governments have the people of that country prospered at the level we have. You can learn from your own mistakes or other people's mistakes. It's stupid to learn from neither and that is what is happening right now. We continue to support government social programs, because it looks like there is no alternative. I say there is.

We as a people have become very wealthy. At no time in history has there been a nation like the United States. We as citizens can no longer be conscripted to do much of anything. Only the government can do that by taxing us. We are being forced to do charity without any results to show for it.

Individuals have to fix their own problems. The government cannot do it, because the government has to follow a one-size-fits-all model. What is needed is a program where each individual who has a problem is tested and an inventory is done on their skill base and their other resources. Each individual would then have to decide what they wanted to accomplish. They would have to set goals for themselves.

Then they have to be convinced that they CAN better themselves. If you can do that, then you've won half the battle. Too many poor people have given up and just want to get by. They have such a poor self image that they cannot conceive of things getting better.

For an individual to succeed, they have to set some goals for themselves and their families. Each individual would have to come up with a set of goals they want to achieve.

Think about it. Instead of an individual guessing which government program will help them, they would have a way of measuring their weaknesses and how well they would probably respond to each of the programs available. Each individual would then be given a list of what they need to do to achieve their goals. The individual would have to volunteer to fix their own problems by participating in programs that best fit them. Here's the kicker. Not everybody responds to a given program. What if the test was mistaken? Big deal. Move to the second possibility available. Each individual would then work through an individualized program set up for them until they reached their goal. This program I am talking about would then see what infrastructure needed to be help people get to their goals. Too many single parents need daycare before they even consider bettering themselves. I say, do it. Provide the daycare. Provide the transportation. BUT only on the condition that the people involved commit
themselves to reaching milestones along the path to a better life.

Let me tell you a story. About five years ago, I was involved in a project run by the State of Texas. The Council of Governments was the local agency that was attempting to implement it. The name of the project was One Stop Shopping. The idea was that no matter where the poor person entered the system, the entire system would have their information. Instead of the poor person having to move from one agency to the next and fill out a new set of paperwork at each stop, the paperwork would be done in one fell swoop. The poor person would then show up at the various agencies and get helped. The problem was that at the State level, a turf war broke out. Different agencies did not want to share their clients, nor their clients' information. The project got cancelled.

I want to revive that project, but with a twist. Instead of just using State of Texas resources, I want every single charity, church and nongovernmental organization involved. I want an inventory of all the programs locally that COULD help and what their successful clients look like.

I have had for the past year given the project the working title of The Hiring Hall Association. That does not seem to be appropriate, but it would set the tone for the project by saying to each individual: your goal should be to become a productive member of our society by getting the skills necessary to get a job. If that is NOT the goal of the individual, then you HAVE to find out what their goal IS. For the project to work, each individual would have to volunteer to better themselves. If they were not interested in doing that, then you have to live with that and help them reach a place where they are not in real need.

I also want to involve businesses who hire entry level people. By having businesses involved, the Hiring Hall could tell each of the clients what skill set would lead to a job. The goal would be to find a skill set that the client would be interested in AND where they could get a job. It would be kind of stupid to train someone for a profession where they could not get hired. On the other hand, why not have someone train for a stopgap job, so they have an income? In short, ask them to come back for more training as time permits. Any job is better than no job. Unemployment saps your will to help yourself. A stopgap job is just that... a stopgap.

I also think that psychological testing has to be in there somewhere. Psychological testing has been around for over a century. If you knew the type of person who was helped by each program, then you could tailor the program to the individual instead forcing the individual to accept a program that would not likely help them.

Our Founding Fathers made the point that we cannot expect people to be Good. We have to accept people as they ARE, not how we want them to be. We have to make the alternative to being Good carry a high cost.

On the other hand, what if a person just does not want to better themselves? What if they really do want to live off of society? What do we have to do about that? We can't just abandon them to their own destruction. Doing that sets a bad example in the community.

Let's not talk about the extremes right now. The goal would be to fit the help to the individual, not the individual to the help available. That approach has failed. If you do not understand that approach has failed, then I think you may be crazy.

Here's how I think it needs to start. First you have a set of groups with programs to help the poor who agree to work together. In short, the groups doing particular projects volunteer to work with other groups helping people. All the groups have to agree not to fight over turf. I believe that there has to be some type of mechanism for conflict resolution, but I can't see how to do that right off the bat. Turf wars in the poverty business seem stupid to me, but it does not change the fact that they happen.

The last time I started on a project like this I started with the Chamber of Commerce. I think this time that may be necessary as well. Sooner or later businesses have to hire the clients of the Hiring Hall Association. I'm almost convinced that the Hiring Hall Association would be a selling point for drawing in new businesses, because it would tell prospective employers that the seven county area has a set of people who want to better themselves. You have to think about that for a moment. The big problem employers have is that they are betting new employees are motivated to do the job. What if a business could be assured that the clients from the Hiring Hall Association were committed to doing their best? That would cut down on the risk factor and cut their costs.

There has to be some infrastructure groups in there somewhere. What I am talking about is daycare, transportation, food, clothing and housing. If you do not take care of those, then you might as well forget it. Whether you know it or not there are groups in the seven county area who do things like that. Signing them on would be a first step, because logistics is everything.

Each individual would be tested by one of the groups in the Hiring Hall Association. The psychological testing I think would be crucial because it is not possible to help someone unless you know who you are dealing with. You give the person the option: take the test and get your short term AND long term problems solved OR just take care of what is your problem is right then. You cannot force people to help themselves. They have to volunteer. If you force them, they will just drop out.

This is the problem government projects have had forever. They try to fit a person into a program where they cannot be helped OR they make help conditional on attending a given program. That's a stupid idea. You have to get people to volunteer to better themselves. You cannot force them to fix their own problems. It doesn't work. You can encourage them. You can pump them up. You can be there for them as a resource, but they have to volunteer to help themselves. If someone is in a program to check a box, they will not actually learn anything nor better themselves.

When a group joined the Hiring Hall Association, there would have to be an inventory of what the group did. If the group helped people directly, then it would be best to test the people who had benefitted the most from the group's activities. What I am getting at is that the Hiring Hall Association should refer people to a given group only if the client will benefit by being there. The Hiring Hall Association would not dictate who the given group helped, but they would only refer people who could be reasonably be helped. Are you getting this? I am not saying that a given group would have to change their criteria for accepting clients in their own project. I only say that the Hiring Hall Association should only refer people who will benefit by a member group's activities.

One of the aspects of the Hiring Hall Association I thought up was the idea of having an individual join a support group. What I mean by that is that a set of people start their program to better themselves and work as a group to help each other achieve their goals. What if they swapped off daycare duties? What if each team worked to buck each other up? Some people are not joiners, so that would not work for everyone, but there are some people who need the support of their fellows to get much of anything done. The alienation factor is ever-present. One of the big problems with poverty is the hopelessness that besets people in that situation. If you feel hopeless, you cannot believe that anything CAN get better. Having a set of people in the same situation you are in, cheering you on, would be better than attacking the problem alone.

Why does a person who has no skills have to stay in an entry level job? Why can't they start their own business? What if the Hiring Hall Association offered to back people who wanted to start their own businesses, if they proved that they really were capable of doing that? I believe that has to be an option as well. Too many people are unsuited to being employed by someone else. These clients would have to be encouraged to start their own business. The Hiring Hall Association would have to help them avoid failing in the first three years. You did know that most single proprietorships fail in the first three years? Well, it's true.

If the Hiring Hall Association did back someone in a single proprietorship, how would any profits be channeled back into the nonprofit side of the project? If the Hiring Hall Association provides the seed money for a single proprietorship and then provides the support environment to keep it going, shouldn't money be moved from the small business to the organization that advanced the money? I can't quite see the legal aspects of it.

I do know that single proprietorship have to be part of the mix of helping people, because only when you own your own business can you truly be self-sufficient in our society. Some people want that. It is a worthy goal and the Hiring Hall Association should help their clients achieve that goal if that is what they want... and are willing to train to do it.

It seems unlikely that a person could go from abject poverty to owning their own business, but I know it has been done. This is America. You can fail ten thousand times, BUT if you succeed on the ten thousand and first time, then people respect you for your perseverance.

Another thing I was thinking about was a quarterly meet up. What I mean is that each quarter, the churches, charities, non-profits, the government and various businesses involved in the Hiring Hall Association have a get together where they invite the public to come and get help. Each of the different groups would have a booth. It would be kind of a festive affair.

Can you see it in your mind? A set of colorful booths each housing a group trying to help the poor. Each one with facilities to enter the client's information into a data base shared by all the groups in the Hiring Hall Association.

The idea would be to have the Hiring Hall Association collect and verify an individual's information. Then issue an encrypted magnetic card with all the information for that individual on it. An inventory of the person's skills would be done as well as their psychological profile. The person would then have to state what they wanted to accomplish. Then an individual program would be drawn up to help that person achieve those goals. With a psychological profile, you could form support groups with people with similar temperament, kind of like the dating software that is available right now. Assuming they wanted to be part of a support group.

The person seeking help could then go to the various churches, charities and the government for help with the information available for scanning. Just present the card to the group trying to help and the information flows into their system. I also thought that this card could be used to set up the books for a new employee. I mean, an employer could just add someone without a big hassle with paperwork.

The encryption is kind of important because identity theft is everywhere.

By making it an individualized program with milestones along the way, a person in a rotten situation could see that they were accomplishing something. As each milestone was passed, the client would feel more confident and less hopeless. Because each client would be treated as an individual, they would feel respected and begin to get a feeling of self-worth.

When I came up with idea, I determined that the Hiring Hall Association would not be a separate organization. If you do that, then you are begging for the project to degenerate into a command and control model like the state. That's a bad idea. The management of the project should be a rotated between member groups.

I'm with the Kiwanis Club of College Station. Each year the district level of Kiwanis has a convention. Kiwanis clubs all over the Texas and Oklahoma area volunteer to host the convention. An election is held at our annual convention for the location for the convention for the next year. Local Kiwanis clubs make their case for why it would be a good idea for them to host the convention for the next year. The one with the best presentation wins the honor of hosting the convention.

I think the same procedure should be used for the Hiring Hall Association. All the member groups who want to manage the project, could make a presentation to the other members of the association and be voted on. By doing it this way, you have the advantage of keeping the project fresh. Each new management team would bring a different viewpoint to the project. I'm not sure annual moves are a good idea, but greater than four years seems like a bad idea as well.

I've been looking at this idea for a long time. The final piece of the puzzle for me was the psychological profiling. Without that, I just do not think it can be done, because you would not know who you were dealing with. An individualized program of self-improvement has to be based on how a person is, not how you want them to be.

I'm not sure this project can be done because of Crazy Eddie.

Crazy Eddie was an archetype that Jerry Pornelle came up with in a book called The Moat in God's Eye. In the book, he talks about a character who gets in the way while you're trying to handle a problem. The example he gave was a relief column going to a disaster is stopped by an armed band of men lead by a guy that wants you to pay a toll to him and his group so you can proceed to help people. He doesn't have a solution to the problem. He's just in the way.

Crazy Eddie thinking could crop up anywhere in this project. I mean some idiot might sue because they think that ALL screens for entering the psychological profiles should be set up for disabled people. Or some State of Texas agency would be slighted, so they would sue to stop the project because it hurt their caseload. Or some well meaning person would seek to stop it, because it EXPLOITED the poor by providing them with entry level jobs instead of high paying jobs. Or someone could sue because it was not 100% effective. Or there would be a separation of church and state issue.

There was one other portion of the Hiring Hall Association that I wanted to talk about. It's failure. A master craftsman accepts that failure is always possible, but does not let it get in the way of trying. How can you help someone who will not help themselves? How do you help someone who starts to implement their individualized program of self-improvement and stops making their milestones? What do you do with failure?

The answer is to move the person to maintenance level. Just tell the person that they will get them food, clothing and shelter, but they have to get back on track for the Hiring Hall Association to be of any assistance.

Let me give you example. Suppose someone comes into the project and you get them a job. They get fired for not showing up on time. You work with them to learn how to arrive on time. They refuse. You're stuck. You can't help someone to improve themselves if they won't master the three basic skills of entry level jobs: arrive on time, have a positive attitude, and take direction from a supervisor. YET you can't leave them there to starve. That's stupid. You just say to them, "When you're tired of sitting around, please get with us. We can't help you unless you help yourself." And for some people that's all you can do. Make sure they have a place to live, clothes on their back and food to eat.

Another failure mode for the project is someone who refuses to budge from their entry level job. I mean, you get them the stopgap job and they tell you that they are happy to live at the low level of income generated by that job. What can you do? Simple, you say, "Party on, dude. Catch on the flip side." And get on to people with real needs who want to improve themselves.

There is one more possibility that I thought up. What if the skill set for a given individual is bad for the local economy and the individual does not want to change, why not help them move to a portion of the country where their skill set is needed? Kind of a weird idea, but something to consider. Maintaining a person who cannot work and refuses to improve themselves is costly. Wouldn't it be better to pay for them to go to place where they can get a job and make a living wage? Something to think about.

I looked at this project and it seemed to me that it would be a good thing to do, because we have so MANY people moving into and out of this area. I mean, why not become a magnet for unskilled people wanting to better themselves? What is wrong with that? Why NOT be known as a place where you can get a second chance to succeed in America?

Whether you recognize it or not, the seven county area has over 400 service clubs in it. Each club is trying to help. They communicate with each other, but to date they seem to address the emergency needs of people without addressing the long term needs of individuals. This is not a criticism, because it just seems that way to me. For too long we have tried to deal with poverty as if the poor were a class of people who must be helped instead of individuals needing individualized care.

Of course to get the Hiring Hall Association to work, there must be a volunteer willing to coach the client through their individualized self-help program. The job of case worker is the wrong concept for this position, because case worker IS a job. A volunteer to coach people through their program would have to be willing to be a resource without doing all the work for the client. The volunteer would be a cheerleader as well as a source of information. Someone has to constantly meet with the client and say, "You can do it." Too many times the State of Texas makes the mistake of destroying their clients' selfworth by grinding them down with bureaucracy. The client feels that they will never get into a better situation, because the person trying to help them has such a low opinion of them.

I know, that is a harsh criticism of the State of Texas' attempts to help the poor, but it seems to be an unavoidable condition for most case workers. Because of the feed and forget nature of the present programs, I do not see how a client of the welfare system can feel good about themselves. Each of the State's programs seems to be modeled on the one-size-fits-all concept. How could anyone feel good about themselves in that mode?

But what if you had a coach instead? What if the person assigned to a client by the Hiring Hall Association was an unpaid volunteer? With proper training the coach could seek to maintain a positive attitude in their clients. Their goal would be to provide a hand up, not a hand out. Their reason for being with the client would be to help the client achieve their goals. Logistics is everything. A coach's job would be to eliminate any excuse the client would have for failing to improve themselves. Too many people in rotten situations seek to find excuses for why they have failed. The coach's job would be to remind their clients that they volunteered they volunteered to help themselves and make sure that the lacking resource like transportation was provided.

Using retired successful people as coaches seems to me to be a solution. It came to me also that we could use retired military, particularly sergeants. Too many of our retired NCO wind up without productive work after they retire. The present batch of retiring military has seen duty in Iraq. Why not use the skills they learned over there rebuilding a country to rebuild lives? Surely we could advertise in military journals for help. Many retired military are moving to this area anyway. Why not harness that knowledge to a good cause?

Every coach who has ever existed has had to confront the balancing act of how hard to push as opposed to how hard to pull. If a coach pushes too hard, then the client could collapse under the stress. If the coach provides too much encouragement, then the client could have unreasonable expectations and feel cheated at the end of the process.

You're always going to run up against clients who want to game the system. The Hiring Hall Association would have to accept that a certain number of their clients will lie about wanting to improve themselves. The clients will never show up on time. They will become morose when chided. In short, they will be seeking a handout, not a hand up. The Hiring Hall Association would have to accept clients as they are and move them into the maintenance mode. Clients have to volunteer to improve themselves. If they refuse to volunteer, there is a point when you have to accept the judgement of the client and simply provide them with their basic needs. To do otherwise is to be seen as hard hearted.

The Hiring Hall Association has always got to be based on the client volunteering. If we as a society continue to address the issue of poverty using the feed and forget model ONLY, then poverty will never get any better. On the other hand, some people will NOT volunteer, so the feed and forget model has got to be the last resort, not the first resort.