For the past several months, Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) has been heavily advertising how important it is and how much he has done to secure alternative energy jobs for Nevada. When the Shaw Solar Power Plant goes online tomorrow, now that all the panels are installed, it will need very few employees to actually operate it. I expect hundreds if not thousands of people to lose their jobs. Yet, Harry will count it as jobs created if those people start working at another power plant under construction.
Most of Reid's efforts to create jobs created TEMPORARY jobs. He toots his horn about how he 'saved City Center', which is now filing bankruptcy, when the jobs he saved are gone now that there is no construction and little visitation by would-be patrons at the stores and restaurants. While he may have been instrumental in the Shaw Solar plant, many of those people, including some people I know well, will soon be unemployed, and THEY KNOW IT. With the new infusion of money for AFSCME, the school district intends to hire 50 new people (note that it says people and not teachers per se), but when the one year of funding runs out, they will probably lay most of those off.
While he supposedly does all this great stuff, Nevada still leads the nation in unemployment. If Harry were so effective, wouldn't we start to climb up from the bottom? Yet, he claims that he is not responsible for our economic malaise. Even if that's true, he has not demonstrated clairevoyance sufficient to reverse its course.
Somehow, he found a few people around the state to thank him for saving their jobs. Meanwhile, the people at the college with whom I work are upset that our wages have been cut through furloughs, all COLA and Merit bonuses are suspended until further notice, our medical coverage has declined while the cost increased, and our retirement contribution rose from 10.5% to 12%. I have received dozens of emails from people complaining about this. Reid is not the solution to the problem. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Until our unemployment number drops, I'm not impressed, and neither should you be.
Update 17 September: My friend who worked for them reported that he was laid off last night along with a few hundred other people, and we hadn't collected or stored a single milliwatt of electricity from the plant. What's more, I have heard that NV isn't allowed to use any solar energy it generates. Hmm...
Most of Reid's efforts to create jobs created TEMPORARY jobs. He toots his horn about how he 'saved City Center', which is now filing bankruptcy, when the jobs he saved are gone now that there is no construction and little visitation by would-be patrons at the stores and restaurants. While he may have been instrumental in the Shaw Solar plant, many of those people, including some people I know well, will soon be unemployed, and THEY KNOW IT. With the new infusion of money for AFSCME, the school district intends to hire 50 new people (note that it says people and not teachers per se), but when the one year of funding runs out, they will probably lay most of those off.
While he supposedly does all this great stuff, Nevada still leads the nation in unemployment. If Harry were so effective, wouldn't we start to climb up from the bottom? Yet, he claims that he is not responsible for our economic malaise. Even if that's true, he has not demonstrated clairevoyance sufficient to reverse its course.
Somehow, he found a few people around the state to thank him for saving their jobs. Meanwhile, the people at the college with whom I work are upset that our wages have been cut through furloughs, all COLA and Merit bonuses are suspended until further notice, our medical coverage has declined while the cost increased, and our retirement contribution rose from 10.5% to 12%. I have received dozens of emails from people complaining about this. Reid is not the solution to the problem. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Until our unemployment number drops, I'm not impressed, and neither should you be.
Update 17 September: My friend who worked for them reported that he was laid off last night along with a few hundred other people, and we hadn't collected or stored a single milliwatt of electricity from the plant. What's more, I have heard that NV isn't allowed to use any solar energy it generates. Hmm...
No comments:
Post a Comment