[shaddi]

This pretty great, but it's also pretty anecdotal. How were these 13 chosen (probably not randomly)? What is the outcome going to be in 6 months? A year? Five years?

Based on the (admittedly not extensive) work I've done trying to help homeless folks get back on their feet, a lot of people do just need some money to get their life back in order. For instance, it's hard to apply for jobs when you don't have an address or a phone number for people to call you back at. Giving someone the ability to not have to worry about making their rent payment for a couple months can be huge.

But a significant portion of the cases I've seen can't be solved this simply. Despite what this article says substance abuse issues /are/ a big factor for a lot of the homeless people I've worked with. Providing cash money can alleviate some of their problems in the short term, but there are generally more fundamental obstacles that are holding people back. If you don't address these issues people can very easily fall back into the trap.

The best intervention I've ever seen for a homeless person is an employer who is willing to give them a steady job and be understanding about the difficulty of the situation they're going through. Anything that can get a homeless person to this point should be encouraged. Sometimes that can mean covering their expenses for a while to get back on their feet. But often it means providing substance abuse support; often it means teaching job skills; often it means connecting them with the right social service or civil society groups.

[nika]

Or, for those who aren't quite ready to do a steady job, the legalization of interent or part time jobs. Let them work when they are sober and not when they are not.

Unfortunately the burden on businesses for "hiring someone" is so high due to regulations that it only makes sense to make positions that are full time, or part time with dedicated hours.

There are a lot of jobs that could exist where people worked some number of hours when they wanted to work, but where if they didn't show up for several weeks someone else could be doing it while they're gone.

Businesses would be willing to hire people on such terms (especially for some jobs like construction, or cleaning, etc) but they have to create positions that are focused on specific people due to the impact of regulations.

Hell, under Obamacare anyone who hires a kid to mow their lawn and pays them $400 over the course of a year has to file a 1099 on them!

[Klinky]

Your jab at Obamacare is also wrong, it would be $600 and most likely this provision will be removed.

There are such things as day labor positions and in many cases these people are taken advantage of because there are no regulations in place to ensure they are getting at least minimum wage.

Most low end jobs are service sector jobs that require a certain number of staff be on hand at all times to service customers. It's not going to work if you have 10 employees show up one day of which only 3 you can use, while the next day you only have 1 employee show up & you're short staffed.

In a lot of cases many part-time jobs offer rubber banding hours. You may have 25 hours one week and then 10 hours the next week. It's very hard to work around & in many cases it can interfere with your schedule. Your work usually wants you to be there regardless of other obligations or else you're fired. This has to do with workplace policies and not regulations.

As far as the employer side goes, if you are going to invest time and money into a new employee, you want to make sure this employee is going to make a good return on your investment. If the person shows up smelling bad & reeking of alcohol or is high, this person probably has issues that a three-day on the job training course making sandwiches is not going to fix and may end up costing your business a lot more money than they would bring in. Training employees is not cheap. Training 100 people, when only 20 will show up on a regular basis is essentially asking business to throw money out the window.

I laugh at the idea that you would want to hire people who have drug abuse problems to work with dangerous construction equipment or allow them on your premises, possibly unsupervised, to clean.

Usually flex-hours make sense for higher end positions where there are obvious goals set & your product may not be entirely physical in nature. Rarely will you find flex-hours viable in low-end service sector or manufacturing.

Usually the homeless have a multitude of problems. They need drug-detox, healthcare, housing and education. All of which will cost money. Putting this burden on business is not viable, there is no incentive to do it.

[shaddi]

Isn't this already possible? There are plenty of day laborers who wait in the morning at "The Corner", and people with jobs for the day come pick them up. They work when they are able, and when there is a job for them. Regardless of whether or not this is legal, the market for this already exists, and it frankly isn't that great for employees. The benefit of a steady job -- or more accurately, a steady stream of income -- is that you can plan around it.

Also, I fail to see how regulation has prevented this from happening. Do you have any evidence you could point to? Lots of businesses have a big payroll of part-timers who only work a few hours a week. Speaking from personal experience, when I used to work these kinds of jobs many of my coworkers (myself included) had extremely flexible "work when you can" schedules. Lots of transient employees, too. For some industries this works, but for most non-minimum wage jobs frankly I don't see what the incentive for an employer to do this would be.

[angus77]

I've actually tried to convince a couple of employers in the past to give me more flexible hours when it was obvious that the set hours were irrelevant (e.g. I wasn't greeting guests or waiting for phonecalls or anything). They were adamant that that is just not the way things are done.

Same thing as when you try to convince an employer to let you go home early when you work a little harder and manage to get 8 hours of work done in 6 hours. That's just not the way things are done, so slow down already!

[rdouble]

The USA has the most relaxed hiring regulations in the developed world.

[eru]

Or one of the most. I am not too sure about, say, Hong Kong.

[cosmicray]

> Hell, under Obamacare anyone who hires a kid to mow their lawn and pays them $400 over the course of a year has to file a 1099 on them!

Under the new health care legislation ? No. What you are describing has been an IRS requirement for many years. One that was mostly ignored. The congress wants to close the loophole (but the way they wrote it is rather brain damaged).