Out of work since October, Dominick Maldo nado sells his blood plasma to buy diapers for his 2-year-old son.
Unable to find a full-time job and reliant on sporadic assignments from a temporary-employment agency, the Lakewood resident said he’s lucky to get 10 hours of work each week.
“I’ll take anything right now,” said Maldonado, 22. “I’m desperate.”
The former warehouse worker is one of Colorado’s “unofficial” unemployed — known as the underemployed — thousands of discouraged workers who gave up looking for full-time jobs and settled for part-time ones or simply stopped trying.
If those people were counted, Colorado’s jobless rate — 7.2 percent, or 195,800 people, in February — would likely balloon to 13.2 percent of the state’s labor force, estimates Alexandra Hall, chief economist with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.
“A lot of industries have opted to cut worker hours rather than eliminate jobs,” Hall said.
Put simply: The number of underemployed is probably even higher.
Though Colorado doesn’t track the statistic, nationally the number of underemployed was 15.6 percent in March, nearly double the 7.9 percent in December 2006, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Conner Bisset is one of them.
He lost a full-time job last fall as a barista — an espresso expert — when Starbucks closed its Highlands Ranch location where he worked. The 18-year-old found a different coffee-shop job three months later, but for only 20 hours a week.
“It’s pretty bad out there,” Bisset said.
On Wednesday, Bisset and Maldonado joined hundreds of others at a job fair in Denver to vie for one of 70 jobs — half of them part time — at Tony’s Market.
The gourmet food store is opening a new location at 10th Avenue and Broadway and was inundated with applications. Doors were closed two hours early and job-hunters directed to a website.
“We are overwhelmed,” said Lynnea Louison, Tony’s human-resources director. “We never expected this kind of response.”
Several applicants were a bit overqualified, Louison said — two of them had Ph.Ds.
Aldo Svaldi: 303-954-1410 or asvaldi@denverpost.com
