Dalton to get 45 Labor jobs

DALTON, Ga. — Thirty-five new Georgia Department of Labor jobs announced Tuesday represent a promise fulfilled for department Commissioner Michael Thurmond.

In town Tuesday to announce the new Disability Adjudication Services office, Thurmond said that a year earlier he promised to bring jobs to struggling Whitfield County.

During that fair, which attracted 5,000 unemployed people, one person stood out to Thurmond, he said, a man who had worked in real estate, finance and the textile industry, but had been out of work for a year and a half.

“With tears in his eyes, he talked about some of the challenges he was facing,” said Thurmond, who could not recall the man’s name. “Before he left ... he said, ‘Promise me one thing, when you get back to Atlanta, you will do something to help bring back jobs to Whitfield County.’”

So Thurmond came back Tuesday to announce the new office, which will help disabled workers obtain federal unemployment insurance benefits. There are similar offices in Atlanta, Savannah, Athens and Thomasville, but no office in North Georgia, Thurmond said.

State officials will host a jobs fair Thursday, and the new positions are expected to be filled by Sept. 15. The office will open in October with 35 initial positions, and later 45 employees will work from the facility, officials said.

The state has an estimated $2 million payroll budgeted for the office. Thurmond expects its impact in the region to be about $6 million.

Georgia was granted a green light to hire 100 more adjudication employees by the federal government, and those jobs all had been planned for the Atlanta area. Thurmond said he changed his mind and began looking at Dalton after the job-fair conversation convinced him Whitfield County needed help.

“The decision had been made ... to place those jobs at our Atlanta office,” he said. “But then I remembered my friends in Dalton, so we decided the folk in Atlanta got enough jobs. What we need to do is put jobs where people need jobs.”

Although Thurmond got a welcome reception Tuesday, labor figures suggest Whitfield County needs hundreds, not dozens, of jobs to improve its unemployment rate. The latest available figures show an 11.8 percent unemployment ranking, the highest in Georgia, which had a 9.9 percent unemployment rate statewide, according to July figures.

New labor numbers will be released Thursday.

Dalton and Whitfield officials said the shift to white-collar office positions is representative of the work force diversification Whitfield County needs.

“Professional jobs are one thing we’ve really been about over the last 12 to 18 months because our downtown needs it,” Mayor David Pennington said. “Hopefully it will attract other professionals to our community.”

The Department of Labor will locate the new office in an unoccupied office building at 500 E. Walnut Ave., just on the periphery of downtown, an area city and county leaders have been selling hard to developers.

“This may not be a project that is recruited ... but it certainly fits our strategy,” said Brian Thomas, CEO and president of the Dalton-Whitfield Chamber of Commerce. “We’ve talked a lot in this community ... about bringing in jobs that are not just always manufacturing. If you look at downtown’s ability to thrive, you need people who live, work and play in that area.”

In addition to jobs, the new office will save some significant driving times for local residents.

Larry Minchew, a Dalton resident who attended the announcement, said he’s had to drive relatives to Atlanta and Chattanooga to handle their disability application processes. It’s a time commitment and an expense that’s costly to out-of-work people, he said.

“Filing for disability takes two years,” Minchew said. “It’s hard, and people really have to count on their families and friends to get transportation.”