Nola Sizemore
Staff Writer
With approximately 400 displaced coal miners in the county looking for work and facing the end of unemployment benefits in just days, a program created by the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program called H.O.M.E. — Hiring Our Miners Everyday — is now available to help qualified laid-off miners and their spouses receive the support and training they need to get back into the workforce.
Speaking at a meeting of the Harlan Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, Workforce Investment Act Director Celia Joyce said this two-year National Emergency Grant from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration is open to residents and employers who meet the grant specifications. She said the program offers on-the-job training, class room training, skilled apprenticeships and other services.
“We’re having an open enrollment for the H.O.M.E. program on Wednesday, Dec. 19, from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. at the Harlan County Extension Depot in Harlan,” said Joyce. “Please bring your Social Security card and your valid Kentucky driver’s license to enroll for assistance for new skilled jobs opportunities and training. If you know any miners please tell them about this event so that they may plan to attend.”
Joyce said through this program they are hoping to help more than 100 unemployed people with things such as free short-term training, which will hopefully enable them to find work in Harlan County and other surrounding areas.
“Another way we are trying to help, we are currently at the Harlan Office of Employment two days a week to help those who are unemployed — being more accessible,” said Joyce. “We are currently accepting applications for Tractor Supply and screening those applications for them.”
Joyce said if any employer is interested in having their applicants screened, her agency is more than qualified to do this. It is a free service.
“If employers are interested in on-the-job training, you can take a person in, give them a job and we’ll pay half the salary and you’ll pay half the salary,” said Joyce. “We also offer many other services. We have job clubs with qualified people who meet weekly to help those people looking for employment. They meet each Wednesday at 1 p.m. with new members beginning with orientation at 12:30 p.m. at the Harlan County Depot in Harlan. Anyone who is unemployed — looking for help, may contact us at (606) 589-3243 or email at cjoyce0003@kctcs.edu for more information. We are here to help in any way we can.”
Reach Nola Sizemore at 606-573-4510 or at nsizemore@heartlandpublications.com
At least have the decency to give credit where it's due.
It's not the gov's money, the U.S. Department of Labor’s money, the Employment and Training Administration's money or your money.
This money came from hard working men and women who pay their taxes.
NONE of these gov programs/employees have money of their own and are paid exclusively with taxpayer's dollars.
Gee think of the money we would have if our paychecks weren't shorted over a third of their total, to pay these people and millions more like them?
We wouldn't need these programs if we/business's got to keep more of our earnings!
It's a catch twenty two.
BTW have you seen the benefits gov employees enjoy at our expense??? Way better than most folks can hope for. Oh and forget about one of them losing their jobs, no matter bad a worker they are. They are sealed in concrete.
Yep and we pay for it all.
It's not love to take from man what is his, what he has earned by the sweat of his brow, and take by force to give to another. Charity must come from the heart and not forced out by tyranny. Only each man knows when the act of giving his livelihood has become too much a burden to bare, NOT the begger with his hand out or the authority with one hand open and a whip in the other.
“…[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”
-James Madison
“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
-Benjamin Franklin
“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816
“A wise and frugal government … shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”
-Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801
“Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”
-Thomas Jefferson
“When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”
-Thomas Jefferson to Charles Hammond, 1821. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, (Memorial Edition) Lipscomb and Bergh, editors, ME 15:332
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to E. Carrington, May 27, 1788
“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.”
-John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 1787
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, elaborated upon this limitation in a letter to James Robertson:
“With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”
In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who fled from insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James Madison stood on the floor of the House to object saying, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
-James Madison, 4 Annals of congress 179 (1794)