The jobs in Atlanta that were lost in the recession, which amount to hundreds of thousands of laid off workers, were discussed at the Georgia Jobs Summit hosted by Georgia’s Labor Department in January.

According to AJC.com, the all-day summit at Georgia Tech drew about 100 people, including economists, business, labor and community leaders, academics, everyday workers and the unemployed for strategy brainstorming, roundtable discussions and economic presentations. Among those taking part was Georgia State University economist Rajeev Dhawan, who gave his forecast for the jobs market.

The job cuts will continue through much of this year, warned Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Georgia State Economic Forecasting Center, in a talk to the conference.

Consumers don’t want to spend and even healthy businesses can’t get the capital they need to grow, he said. “You can give all the tax cuts you want and it won’t make any difference until you clean up the banking system.”

The “Shaping Georgia’s Economic Destiny” summit focused on five areas:

• Georgia’s discouraged, unemployed and underemployed workers.

• How existing federal, state, local and nonprofit resources can be strategically matched to specific demographic groups to stimulate private sector job creation and hiring.

• How the shifting demographics of Georgia’s discouraged, unemployed and underemployed are affecting state policy and the delivery of employment, training and educational opportunities.

• Enhancing existing training and educational opportunities to help Georgians become more competitive in the job market.

• How federal income support programs such as unemployment insurance, Work Opportunity Tax Credits, food stamps, and earned income tax credits can be redeployed to help workers as they gain new skills and jobs.

Georgia Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond said the summit was crucial to determine where Georgia must focus their resources. “Most of the safety net programs were primarily designed to support and assist women and children. Now you have an unemployed population that’s predominately male, and somehow the system is not working as effectively.”

Here are some proposals that conference participants devised:

- a statewide business “accelerator,” like the effort organized by Savannah State University now involving 45 companies in that area. The newly created project provides administrative services for start-ups.

- a law that would give newly formed companies a two-year tax holiday.

- a program to develop “green” jobs.

- expansion of mass transit.

- a commitment of state agencies and companies to use small businesses as contractors.

- start of an economic development bank combined with lobbying on big companies to bring jobs home from overseas.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 8:38 pm and is filed under jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.