Hurricane evacuees seeking permanent jobs

NASHVILLE — Some 2,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees have applied for unemployment benefits through the Tennessee Department of Labor, officials say.

And while many evacuees in Tennessee still aren’t sure if they’ll return to their Gulf Coast homes, there are those who have begun to put down roots. They’re renting homes, enrolling their children in school and looking for permanent jobs at functions like the job fair held Wednesday at the Middle Tennessee Career Center in Nashville.

New Orleans native Harold Santiago, who was once a waiter at the famed piano bar at Pat O’Brien’s in the French Quarter, was one of about 35 evacuees who attended the morning session of the daylong job fair.

Santiago has worked over 20 years in New Orleans’ lucrative service and tourism industry and said he wants to find a job in one of Nashville’s restaurants or entertainment venues.

“There’s nothing to go back to,” said Santiago, whose wife planned to enroll his two children in schools in the Nashville suburb of Lebanon, where the family is renting a house. “I’m not even going to try and go back and salvage it. I think I want to stay here. I feel like there’s lots of opportunity in Nashville.”

Melanie Blevins, with the employment agency Wood Personnel Services, attended Wednesday’s job fair and has been to two other Nashville area shelters helping evacuees look for jobs. Most evacuees have told her they plan to stay in Tennessee permanently because they can’t afford to wait on their homes being rebuilt.

“I think they just want somewhere they can call home and be safe,” Blevins said. “They want security and safety in their lives. And they’re just not finding it there (on the Gulf Coast).”

Mark Chandler, director of Field Operations for the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development, said evacuees who have filed for unemployment benefits likely will not negatively impact Tennessee’s unemployment rate because they’re filing a claim against the state they left.

It’s also difficult to gauge how many evacuees are looking for permanent versus temporary jobs, he said.

“At this point it’s kind of hard to determine because they (evacuees) don’t know,” Chandler said. “We have had some who indicated they do plan to stay here. I think some may take a wait-and-see attitude. For the time being, they need an income.”

The labor department has about 80 career centers throughout Tennessee where evacuees can go to look for jobs, Chandler said. Job fairs are being planned at some evacuee shelters in Tennessee, which currently has more than 20,000 evacuees from hurricane-stricken states.

John Threadgill, chief administrative officer for the Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce, said his group has served as a clearinghouse for job offerings from its membership to evacuees.

He said the chamber had a meeting earlier this week with office developers to discuss ways to assist businesses relocating to the Memphis area — the part of Tennessee that has drawn the most evacuees.

“Anecdotally, you run into situations where they’ve moved up here, they’ve enrolled their kids in schools, the parents are tying to find jobs,” Threadgill said. “I know of cases where people are already trying to get integrated into the society here, into the business world.”

Other professionals getting help from local groups are lawyers. Allan Ramsaur, executive director of Tennessee Bar Association, said it asked the Tennessee Supreme Court Wednesday to give lawyers who are evacuees a 60-day temporary license to practice law.

If approved by the court, the break would help Sharelle Lacey, a lawyer who left New Orleans with her family and is staying with a relative in Murfreesboro. Lacey had to get a temporary job as a paralegal because she didn’t have a license to practice law in Tennessee.

“Everything is up in the air right now,” Lacey said. “The house is still under water. We already know the house is going to have be torn down and rebuilt. At this point, it appears we’re going to be here a while. And we still have to live. We still have to exist.”

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On the Net:

Tennessee Career Centers: http://www.state.tn.us/labor-wfd/cc/