Together, it is time to reap our work REWARD

Benjamin Franklin once said, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

That Ben, what a thinker.

Though this quote was in reference to the Continental Congress being unanimous in their decision-making, the idea of coming together versus working independently is a pretty universal concept. It sort of goes along with that idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

And that brings us to the employment situation in Clarendon County. It is a broken record sing-along, an all too common plaint about the lack of jobs in our county and the bleakness it holds for our future. And like a broken record, I am here to tell you it is not about the lack of jobs, it is about the lack of a qualified, able and willing workforce. It is about a culture rife with lack of initiative, zero work ethic and unrealistic expectations.

I had the privilege of attending a meeting out at F.E. DuBose last week and all the particulars are on the front page. The meeting was about different agencies in our county coming together to form a coalition to try and reverse the tide that will eventually wash our economic prosperity out to sea if we don’t stem it soon. I was impressed with the folks that showed up … Department of Social Services folks, Workforce Investment Board members, school superintendents, and human resource managers from across the county … all of whom struggle in their daily grinds to get folks to work and into productive, prosperous lifestyles.

In Marlboro County, such a coalition has already been formed and is having success – like a five percent reduction in unemployment, and that is significant! It was born from the good news that Mohawk Carpet wanted to build a plant there, bringing lots of jobs with it. An open call for interested individuals was held and more than 3,500 showed up. When 3,393 of those individuals were invited to come take the first of several assessments, more than half failed to even show up.

And the story is no different here. John Truluck, our own economic development director, constantly swims upstream to market our community and truthfully promise an available workforce for potential new industries.

It’s a vicious cycle, this poverty/unemployment/education/tax base thing and throwing our hands in the air, blaming one sector or another for the situation does absolutely nothing to change it.

But this new plan for a concerted, coalesced effort does. They call it REWARD – Rural Economic Workforce Alliance for Resource Development and I think it is a brilliant plan. It makes partners out of all the players … education, social services, workforce and job finding folks, governments leaders, business leaders and you and me. It provides for a systematic approach to preparing men and women for the workforce and it addresses the barriers to employment all the way from literacy to drug use and criminal records. And from where I sat, it accepted no lost causes.

Sure, I am not so Pollyanna to believe that we can eliminate unemployment with the wave of a magic wand, but we can start here and move forward to a day when it is easier to enter the workforce than it is to sit home and do nothing.

A hundred years ago, I was a church secretary in Summerton. The minister I worked for at the time was very big into being in the schools and readily accepted an invitation to a career day at St. Paul Primary School.

When he returned from his presentation, he was all but ashen. This is the story he told me.

“I explained to the children what I did and what my days were like,” he said. “I told them about my education and what I had to do to become a minister. When I was done, I asked several of the children what they were going to do when they grew up. One little girl very innocently answered, ‘Get a check.’ Get a check? I asked her to explain how she would do that. ‘Well, that’s what my mama and grandmama do.’”

That story has stuck with me for the past 12 years. There are children growing up now who are third and fourth generation welfare recipients and have not grown up in homes where someone gets up and goes to work everyday. How can you learn things like work ethic if you have never seen it before? Jim Darby, of Santee-Lynches Regional Council of Governments termed it as “chronic generational poverty” and said it was a mindset problem more than anything else. To that, I say “BINGO.”

Although academics play a large role in this chronic problem, there is a whole rash of “soft skill” issues, like how to dress for an interview, workplace behavior and work ethics that heretofore have mostly been about blaming the worker – or non-worker, as the case may be.

This REWARD program has a lot of potential but it will require everyone to get on board. It will require employers to recognize that when someone has been through the REWARD program, he or she is a viable candidate for a good job. It will require the community to believe that this approach can be a success and be positive promoters of the concept. And believe it or not, what it won’t require is a lot of money from taxpayers. The resources to make this happen are in place for the most part. Isn’t that good news?

Most importantly, it is time to shed our negative, “never gonna happen” attitudes and believe that we can all be agents for change in something that is so very important to our way of life.

That hanging together thing has a lot to offer, doesn’t it?