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Article of Interest

New Employment Law Program at Legal Aid of NorthWest Texas Attempts to Address the Employment Related Legal Problems of Poor Texans
By:  John W. Shaw, Supervising Attorney, Project HIRED

While the Texas unemployment rate is lower than the national average, some Texans are unable to find work no matter how hard they try. For them, it’s not matter of trying or even job availability. Instead, incomplete or inaccurate information on their criminal records keeps them from being gainfully employed.

Founded on the principal that being employed is the primary vehicle through which individuals and families can escape or avoid poverty, Project HIRED is an innovative program started by Legal Aid of NorthWest Texas (LANWT) in 2010. The mission of Project HIRED, an acronym for Helping Individuals Remove Employment Disadvantages, is to help job seekers remove legal obstacles to their employment. Interestingly, Project HIRED has discovered that poverty results in additional impediments to employability that most job seekers may be unaware of, including, but not limited to, the inability to obtain a valid driver’s license to get to and from work and difficulty navigating the complex arena of unemployment compensation benefits that oftentimes serves as the lifeline between loss of a job and homelessness.

Removing or navigating these obstacles is often an impossible task for someone without a working knowledge of the law or the means to hire an attorney to assist in the process. This is why LANWT, a non-profit law firm that represents individuals who are at or below the 125th percentile of the federal poverty level, began the pilot program that became Project HIRED.

According to the 2011 Federal Poverty Guidelines, a family of four is poor if its total annual household income is at or below $22,350 per year¹.  The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 Current Population Survey showed that the poverty rate in Texas of 17.3% in 2009 grew to 18.4% in 2010².  This equates to roughly 4.6 million Texans living at or below the federal poverty guidelines³.  Not surprisingly, the unemployment rate in Texas has also risen with the poverty level. The unemployment rate as of July 2011 in Texas was 8.4 percent⁴.

Oftentimes, the use of the legal system is the only way that some impediments to employability can be removed or at least lessened.  Although we live in difficult economic times, the added burden of impediments to employability based solely upon being a poor Texan is unacceptable, and if left unaddressed will further burden present economic conditions.

<sub>¹Federal Register, Vol. 76, No. 13, January 20, 2011, pp. 3637-3638, at http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/11poverty.shtml
 
²Francis Deviney, Ph.D. and Leslie Helmcamp, THE TEXAS ECONOMIC MODEL: More Low-Paying Jobs + Higher Unemployment = Increased Poverty, Center for Public Policy Priorities (September 13, 2011) at http://www.cppp.org/files/091311_PovertyDay_PolicyPage.pdf

³Id. at 2.

⁴Id.</sub>