BP oil spill has oozed out some real slime

When the Portland labor market is at its peak during the summer, you can have a hard time finding anyone that can show up for work. Years back, when looking for summer help, I asked my boss what he was looking for in the way of qualifications for help: “If they can fog up a spoon, they’re hired.”
Pretty blunt, but that was the peak of the labor market shortage. Now we are deep in the depths of the valley of that same cycle. Folks are looking around and taking just about anything that they can find, just to keep above water. It’s month’s away, but I’m even considering one more shot at my clown gig at the Halloween store this year, just to put a few extra bucks on the table.
As folks get more and more desperate to keep the wolves away from the door, that is an open invitation to the scam artists. Over the weekend, I heard a few friends talking about this great job that they were headed to, cleaning up the beaches of the BP oil spill throughout Louisiana, Florida and Texas.
I sniffed the scam when the first mention of big bucks was mentioned. These dudes were claiming that they were going to get paid $30 an hour, net pay, just for scraping all the oily residue off the sand.
I tried to interject that this was most likely a scam, but was rebuffed by the old “My cousins’ nephew by marriage sister’s husband is doing the work” argument. Everyone knows how reliable that familial connection is, so by all means pack up everything you own and head for that job. Never mind those media reports that they're mostly using locals.
That got me thinking about vulnerability in general and the gullibility of the workforce in specific. These scams pop up every few years, based on the disaster of the moment. Any readers out there that were among the throng of construction workers that went to Florida for “Hurricane Andrew” rebuilding jobs all those years back? Of the few that I remember that went, not one of them found a job, and each and every one came back with empty pockets and a sore ... well, you can see where I was going here.
The scams are a little different this year, being mostly Internet and word of mouth based. People get pushed to one of the online recruiting sites, which were up before the first glimpse of oil could be seen from the shore. Often, these sites use the BP corporate logo,asking users to fill out short applications. Then, the “lucky” job seeker is asked for “training fees.” Some of the more intricate scammers won’t ask for the fee up front, as that is the genuine tip-off to a scam. Instead, they say the company will provide training, but the job service and the state require that you pay the “registration fee and documentation fees,” usually running anywhere from fifty to a hundred bucks.
Some of the more enterprising scammers will even promise transportation to the job site, for an additional nominal fee. One group has even gone so far as to call the jobs a “lottery job system,” where the lucky workers name was placed at the top of the list. Once that application is filled out and the fee paid, say goodbye to the opportunity, and perhaps your identity as well.
Folks looking for work these days are seldom rich, and their identity and rapidly diminishing credit rating are all that they have left. To steal both puts these scammers low on the food chain, so low that they rate below politicians mistresses who tattle, former Nazi Guards, and inaccurate jailhouse snitches.
Perhaps it IS time for that new national jobs program the the President promised us, the one that would rival the size of the military. A jobs program designed to hunt down these flim-flam artists, and charge them with the highest crime that we can manage. Stealing the slightest amount of hope from those who are the most hopeless in this economy is a foul act that makes me reconsider my long-held positions on caning and the use of the lash.

 (Bob Higgins is a regular contributor to The Portland Daily Sun.)