Joe Baca Quotes

I feel we should be able … to find a way of employing more of these so-called unemployables

We know there are a lot of people in the unemployment pool that do not match up in their skill set for what jobs are going to be created, and that's an area we've got to keep pressing on.

We may not realize it, but a crucial step in building a healthy economy is helping people move from welfare to work.

Unemployment undoubtedly is and always has been a scourge….The real tragedy is not unemployment per se, but unemployment plus the impossibility of providing adequately for the unemployed without impairing the conditions of further economic development.

There are several million job vacancies on the country right now, but they don’t line up with skills [of the unemployed.]

We need to make sure we do more job retraining, and that's why we're working to have a 5-million-apprenticeship dream.

The most powerful recent innovation in government is when states aggressively use community colleges for retraining. In Michigan, where large numbers of workers were displaced from the manufacturing industry, we created a wildly successful program: No Worker Left Behind.

You see, you can't put joblessness in a jail cell.

These works brought all these people here. Something should be done to get them at work again.

You would think that if any group in America had 20% to 25% unemployment, it would generate all kinds of attention. The Labor Department would understandably and necessarily begin to concentrate on what can we do to reduce this level of unemployment. Congress would give great time on the floor for debate on what can be done.

First create jobs, and then provide skills to people.

Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.

My research clearly reveals that if we want to put inner-city workers to work immediately, we just can't rely on the private sector. They don't want to touch them; they don't want to hire them.

Thus every person has a right to work, and this right must be recognized in a practical way by an effective commitment to resolving the tragic problem of unemployment. The fact that unemployment keeps large sectors of the population and notably the young in a situation of marginalization is intolerable

We need to give up the idea that economic growth alone can or will reach down to provide good jobs to the chronically unemployed .... Only a strong program of public employment has ever achieved that in the past ...

When you have 7 percent unemployed, you have 93 percent working.

Society and state need to afford protection against the nightmare of unemployment through economic policies that ensure balanced growth and full employment or through unemployment insurance and retraining programs.

Unemployed people are spoiled

Any system of economics is bankrupt if it sees either value or virtue in unemployment.

We want the States to have a work and training program. We want the States to see to it that those who are drawing an unemployment check … unless there is a good cause for them not to, to be required to take … training and then work …

For instance, twelve men are struggling for employment in a trade where there is only room for eight ; four are driven out of that trade, but they are not trampled out of existence. A good deal of competition merely decides what kind of work a man is to do though of course when a man can only do one kind of work, it may easily become a struggle for bare life.

The unemployed want to work. They are not chiselers.

Let me make it clear that the Youth Employment Opportunities Act of 1961 is not primarily concerned with delinquency prevention. Rather, it is designed to help all types of young men or women who suffer deficiencies of training or opportunity which keep them unemployed.

There's a belief... in the country that we can cure unemployment by creating opportunity. The skills gap proves that opportunity along is not enough to get people employed.

Do you want to use your tax dollars to educate more people who can't get jobs? I want to make sure that we spend our money where people can get jobs when they get out.