Over that past two days Big Government, the site that brought us the ACORN killing videos last year has taken aim at the US Census Bureau with allegations of rampant fraud and implied allegations of misconduct in hiring and screening practices. That hasn’t been my experience.

I have mentioned before that I am working as an enumerator this census season. It was a temporary job that could fit around a school schedule so I took it, and while it isn’t my dream job, myself and the people on my crew that I have contact with have tried to conduct ourselves professionally.

Most of the issues that Big Government seems to be trying to expose deal with training and pay during training. The training that O’Keefe, and Adeleye received is at odds with that I received.

1. We only received pay for the time we worked plus the travel time to and from training.

2. Our training days went the full 8 hours.

3. As near as I can tell our time sheets are audited. I have had two returned because of questions.

4. All of us were screened before beginning field work. Our first day of training was on a Tuesday, we were fingerprinted, sworn in, and went through all the regular employment rigamarole in the morning and did our first 4 hours of actual training in the afternoon. We were then sent home until the following Monday, at the time we were told it was to allow time to process our fingerprints.

5. The office I work out of is apparently very budget conscious. Half the enumerators in my crew were laid off after about 3 weeks because we were ahead of schedule. They were going to lay us all off but at the last minute decided to keep some of us on in case follow-up interviews were required.

6. This hasn’t come out in videos yet but I’m sure that they are looking for someway to prove that we are careless with personal information. The number one issue in training was protection of, in government speak, PII. Most of a day was devoted to it. We had to sign statements acknowledging that we could be fined our imprisoned if we reveal personal information to unauthorized individuals, and we are required to give a sheet to very respondent that informs them of this.

In short my experiences have been diametrically opposed to those of the Big Government crew. While the census has problems, it’s computer system being one, and is somewhat inefficient it runs much better than I would expect a system utilizing 650,000 temporary part-time employees to run. That is especially true when you consider the complexities of some of the situations. I can’t go into detail but an example would be non-English speakers, there is a system to insure that we can identify and get an appropriate interpreter if we can’t find one in the household. As near as I can tell it works pretty well. The entire system is like that, a little elaborate at time but it works.

Update - I just went back to work for the census.  Well actually I was one of the retained enumerators, but they didn't have any work for us until today. We were meeting in the same place as another crew from the census office that I am working for.  They are also ahead of schedule and have shed about half their people.  So this office at least is serious about staying on schedule and under budget. 

Posted by: chad98036 at 10:23 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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