Posts Tagged ‘jobs’

Restaurants are set to reopen for indoor dining, but owners are divided between health concerns and business interests

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the U.S. unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 5 percent in September. Meanwhile, the most recent data for the Bay Area shows Alameda County’s unemployment rate at 4.6 percent as of August.

Job recruiters say it’s a candidate’s market in Oakland, but applicants still report difficulty finding a match.

On Tuesday Oakland residents celebrated a breakthrough in ongoing efforts to create thousands of jobs for local workers due to construction of the planned shipping, packaging and distribution facilities at the site of the old Oakland Army base.

Though Mary Swift-Swan has traversed the Bay Area’s many estuaries and coastlines since she was 3 years old, she didn’t settle into the nonstop, unpredictable life of a sailor until she was well into her 30s. Now, as a licensed captain and the owner of Afterguard Sailing Academy, located near Oakland’s Brooklyn Basin, she spends almost every day on the water

Oakland Community and Economic Development Agency has partnered with service organizations to create job opportunities for out-of-work youth while mitigating blight in the city’s commercial corridors. The city’s partnership with Men of Valor, a non-profit re-entry program in East Oakland that provides housing, job training and other services to high school drop-outs, recovering addicts and the formerly incarcerated, has proven so successful since it began in June—removing about 114 graffiti markings from 88 businesses along Foothill and International boulevards—that in October CEDA decided to expand the program and take on new partners.

Non-profit organizations were ready to hand out pay-checks to underprivileged youth in Oakland this summer but were unprepared for the reality checks that went with them. President Barack Obama’s stimulus package last February made it possible for Oakland to hire 1,000 youth this summer, but some agencies said the stringent qualifications narrowed the applicant pool…

Across the street from the City Center where professionals work purposefully on laptops and Blackberries, a different scramble unfolds inside the Old Oakland Bank building. There, a portion of Alameda County’s 80,100 who are unemployed—10.3 percent, in April compared to 5 percent at the same time last year—shuffle through literature on how to sharpen resumes and and interviewing skills.

Hey you! Welcome to The Job Blog. My name is Brittney and I am a 23-year-old television student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. As I inch toward graduation, I find myself trying to avoid all of the negative news about the economic crisis, as it will decide whether I live in my own…

by KRISTINE WONG  Sep. 27 — Most Saturdays, Mosswood Park is filled with a lively mixture of families, dog walkers, and weekend soccer warriors. Today, a different group of voices rang out from the park’s center stage – those of environmentalists, builders, and students who rallied for new jobs to improve both the economy and…