Thursday, October 6, 2011

Walker Phones It In With "Job Hotline"

When Scott Walker first traded in sacking Milwaukee County in favor of pillaging the State of Wisconsin, he made a grand showboating affair of setting up a "Jobs Hotline" for businesses to call in with suggestions and/or questions.  The premise was that he was going to smooth the way for business to relocate to Wisconsin or for companies already here to grow and bring in his 250,000 jobs he promised.

Many observed at the time that he was treating businesses better than the citizens of this once and future great state.

Well, it turns out that his hot line is a cold fish:
Few leads and apparently no jobs have come from a hotline for businesses looking to expand or relocate to Wisconsin that was set up as part of Gov. Scott Walker's plan last year for creating 250,000 jobs during his first term.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel obtained the hotline's log from its creation on Jan. 28 through Aug. 25 through an open records request. The newspaper reported that no jobs appeared to have been created as a result of the 113 calls logged.
That's about one phone call every other day. And even with that low amount of calls and the fact that he had a full time staff person for the phone, a whopping 39% of the calls to the "hot line" got a call back in less than 24 hours, another thing that Walker had promised.

Boy, doesn't that bring back the memories?!

It seems just like yesterday, when then County Executive had willfully chosen to ignore and neglect the people who were losing their jobs as the recession was start to reach its full impact. Back then, he would only have five to ten people working in the call center even though he had enough money to pay for 30 workers. This led to only a small percentage of calls being answered, much less any of them being returned.

Perhaps the problem with answering the phone for the jobs hotline is not that the person was overwhelmed, but the underwhelmed with the quality of calls:
But not all calls were as promising. One caller in the hotline's records for the first week let Walker's staff know that she "wants to be president of the United States," according to the call logs. Another woman called in to say she had a "turkey recipe" and wanted to start a business, according to the phone log.
Then again, given Walker's arrogance and slow learning curve, it could have been that that poor staff person was too busy to answer the phone because they were busy commenting at JSOnline or working on getting campaign donations for his defense against the recall or in regards to Walkergate.  Or maybe they were afraid to the leave the Koch phone in case the real David Koch were to call.

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