Just a quick last-minute reminder for those of you who need some help in a job search -- maybe you've been laid off, maybe you are a graduate, maybe you just hate where you work and need a change. 

There's a 5 p.m. deadline to sign up for Saturday's "Jump Start Your Job Search" at Rosemont College's McShain Hall in Rosemont. "Jump Star" is an all-day (8:15 a.m. to 4 p.m.) $15 seminar on getting a job. Topics include social media and job search, networking, interviewing, learning how to stand out from the crowd. Also included is a motivational session designed to re-inspire. That can be a must in the often depressing hunt for work and meaning. Click here to sign up.

One of the coordinators is Amy Dinning, a human resources professional, who just recently started a job after a long stint of unemployment. She has organized these sessions as her way of giving back to the large and very supportive community of the unemployed. You can read my profile of Amy by clicking here.  

Being a dean in a liberal arts college, Susan Lawrence worries that graduates don't know how to translate what they've learned into something that is saleable in the job market. "They have to take their everyday experiences [as students] and show how they speak to employers' needs," she said. 

I spoke this morning to Lawrence, who has the ponderous title of dean for educational initiatives and core curriculum for Rutgers University's School of Arts and Sciences in New Brunswick. Lawrence is convinced that a liberal arts degree has value, but the challenge is selling that value to employers who may roll their eyes when they see a liberal arts major such as philosophy on a resume.

Lawrence calls it "cross-walk." There's no point, she said, in graduates telling employers about the many research papers they wrote. Employers may not understand the amount of statistical analysis, number crunching and problem solving involved. Instead, graduates need to reframe their academic work in terms of real-life problems that an employer might encounter.

But that takes practice. This spring, Lawrence co-led a class designed to teach that kind of cross-walk, along with a way of thinking about jobs and careers. You can read more about it here.

When I opened my email this morning, I received a note from a reader who clearly saw some bias in my reporting of April's job numbers from the U.S. Labor Department on Friday.

Here's his email:

So, his email did make me think and I think that I will stop quoting from the White House for the next few months. It's kind of rote to put in something from the White House each month. I've basically been including a comment either from President Obama or one of his economic officials all along. Rote isn't good. There should be a specific reason to include any comment. 

On the other hand, job growth (or the lack of it) is a big political issue, so I'll need to address it in a future report. But I think I'll wait until closer to the election before I grab quotes from the president or his organization, and Mitt Romney, his crew or the GOP. (Now here's hoping I remember this when the report comes around again in June!)

As to the rest of his comment, I'm going to explain why I don't think my reporting is biased and it has to do with the sheer number of statistics in the report, which runs between 30 and 40 pages. There are so many statistics, all ripe for analysis and explanation. This time, I chose to explain the concept of  "seasonally adjusted," because weather seems to have been a factor in the job scenario lately. Many, many times in the past, I've written about the issue my reader mentioned in his email: How unemployment rate is partly a function of whether people are encouraged enough about their prospects to join the labor force.

Anyway, thanks for writing. I appreciate the input.

I'm not going to get into who is right or wrong in this dispute between developers Michael and Matthew Pestronk and the building trades. Certainly there are merits to everyone's point of view. But I did find it interesting to hear Michael Pestronk's take on why he thought he and his brother were getting so much union pressure on their project at the former Goldtex factory at 12th and Wood Streets, just north of Vine Street in Center City.

(You can read my story about the dispute in Friday's Inquirer, plus a little more about it in yesterday's blog post.) The brothers are converting the 13-story building into 163 apartments and two retail spaces, a $38 million project.

Pestronk says that unlike most developers, he and his brother also act as their own general contractors. "Other developers tend to rely on third party general contractors," he said, "and most of their work comes from institutions."

So, if contractor does pick up a job from a private developer for a private project in Center City, the contractor is not likely to use non-union labor. "The unions will start picketing at their other projects, as the institutions and the institutions won't have it. So they don't want to risk their business. But we don't have that, so they [the unions] don't have that leverage," he said.

"We’re also completely privately funded. All of our money comes from private banks or investors. We don’t have any money from the city. We don’t have any public money at all, so they don’t have that leverage as well," he said.

"So because they don’t have those leverage points they have to take a stand," he said.

Whoever is right in the battle between Philadelphia's building trades and developers Michael and Matthew Pestronk, war is not cheap.

Just a brief recap: The Pestronk brothers are turning the 13-floor former Goldtex factory at 12th and Wood streets, into an 163-unit apartment building, a $38 million project. It is a mostly non-union, at the moment, although the brothers said they offered union contractors a chance to match their best alternative bid. The unions say that the Pestronk brothers are out to destroy prevailing wages.

Michael Pestronk says vandalism and harassment had been escalating at the site. At one point, according to testimony in a court hearing in April, four cement trucks were turned away at $3,000 each. The brothers have also had to pay the city's sheriff's department $2,000 a day to enforce a temporary restraining order the developers received. Plus they've had to increase their security at the job site.

You can click here to see the website that the brothers have set up to show their point of view. You can also read my story about it in Friday's Philadelphia Inquirer. It's a wild tale.

There's certainly more to come.

Today the U.S. Dept. of Labor published its monthly accounting of the job situation in metropolitan areas. Once again, I was reminded of how much worse the job situation is in our New Jersey counties. In March, the unemployment rate in the metropolitan division that consists of Camden, Gloucester and Burlington counties was 9.7 percent, compared to 8.1 percent in the Philadelphia area, which includes the city and the four surrounding suburban Pa counties. 

Here's how it works: Philadelphia county has the highest unemployment, but right behind it are the three New Jersey counties. Together, all of them fall above the national unemployment rate. But when the counties are grouped by metropolitan division, Philadelphia's high rate is offset by lower rates in Chester and Montgomery County.

In the morning, Richard Gelles, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy and Practice, spent an hour on WHYY's Radio Times talking about child abuse in Philadelphia. In the afternoon, he talked to me about Chinese philanthropy for a story now planned for Friday's Inquirer. The two topics are connected -- one the story of a long-established institution and the other the possibility of creating a new institution.

His radio interview focused on some of the child welfare system issues raised by the tragic death of Khalil Wimes, 6, reported by my colleague Mike Newall. Click here to read the Inquirer story.

His radio conversation came up during our interview about China. "When you go to China, it's a clean palette," he said. "They have no institutions in place. They don't have child welfare laws. They don't have child reporting laws. They don't have unions." In China, he said, it's almost possible to create a safety net from scratch, without having to work around programs and policies and their legacies."

The same, he said, applies to Chinese philanthropy. China's market economy is relatively new and the possibility of an individual generating enough wealth to donate is also new. So China now has the opportunity to create its own philanthropic structure, perhaps modeled after the United State's structure, which has been successful, and perhaps not.

The question is, whether, if we could start over, we would build the same system. "If we look at the American experiment, would we build it in 2012?" he asked.

The legislation had a catchy name -- Ban the Box. The "box" refers to the box on a job application that candidates must  check it if they've ever been convicted, or in some cases, arrested for a crime. A year ago, Mayor Michael Nutter signed into law a measure forbidding employers to use the box on applications or to even ask potential employees about their criminal histories during their first encounter. The EEOC seems to agree.

In new guidelines released Wednesday, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission described it as a best practice for employers. 

"Some states require employers to wait until late in the selection process to ask about convictions," the EEOC wrote. "The policy rationale is that an employer is more likely to objectively assess the relevance of an applicant's conviction if it becomes known when the employer is already knowledgeable about the applicant's qualifications and experience. As a best practice, and consistent, with applicable laws, the Commission recommends that employers not ask about convictions on job applications and that, if and when they make such inquirers, the inquiries be limited to convictions for which exclusion would be job related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity."  

"Employers are taking it seriously," said William Hart, director of the city's Reintegrated Services for Ex-Offenders, talking about the "ban-the-box" legislation signed into law last year.

Hart said that Philadelphia prisons release 31,170 inmates a year. (That number may be larger than the amount of people, since some are in and out of prison several times in a year.) In addition, the state correctional institutions, which house more serious offenders, send 5,000 newly released inmates to Philadelphia each year.

"Competition for employment is fierce," Hart said.

You can read more about the guidelines, and read yesterday's jobbing blog post on Philadelphia's special connection to them.

In 1960, a 15-year-old Philadelphia teenager got involved in a gangfight that led to someone's death, even though he claimed he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger. The teenager served less than four years for the crime and kept a clean record from then on. But his story made a big impact on the law and on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's new guidelines on how to handle employment of people with criminal records.

Released Wednesday, the guidelines talk about the case of Douglas El, who challenged SEPTA's policy of barring anyone convicted of a violent crime (in his case, second-degree murder) from holding a job as a paratransit driver. El was 55 years old in 2000, when SEPTA hired him as a driver for paratransit passengers who have physical and mental disabilities. A few weeks later, he was fired. 

He sued SEPTA in federal court, lost on the first round and also lost on the appeal, mostly because El never offered an expert witness who could talk about the likelihood of him harming these particularly vulnerable passengers. The EEOC's guidelines mention the case and the 2007 decision by the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The EEOC noted that the court expressed "reservations" about a blanket exclusion policy like SEPTA's. The appellate judges said that the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination, requires employers to justify criminal record exclusions (which are, at heart, about mitigating risk). Employers, the court said, "must accurately distinguish between applicants [who] pose an unacceptable level of risk and those [who] do not."

"El was clearly a motivation for this to happen, because the 3rd Circuit concluded that the EEOC's policy was too sketchy for it to be entitled to any deference by the courts," said Sharon Dietrich, a managing attorney for Philadelphia's Community Legal Services and the author of an amicus brief in the case. Dietrich, who heads the group's employment practice, and her colleagues have become national experts on the issue of employment of people with criminal records.

The office is co-counsel in a case against the U.S. Census Bureau, which declined to hire people with criminal records -- even those who had previously worked for the agency. It's the biggest case on this issue in history. 

"I am proud of CLS's role in the legal developments around Title VII and criminal records," Dietrich said.  "Our clients needed help as their employment opportunities shriveled in the background checking frenzy that started in the late 1990s, and we went into some uncharted waters to help them get some second chances."

Read my story in tomorrow's Philadelphia Inquirer about the new guidelines.