Mint issues blog with VA
The Mint is in the process of ramping up third shifts at its Philadelphia and Denver production facilities to meet surging demand for circulating coinage. Yesterday the Mint trumpeted the…
The Mint is in the process of ramping up third shifts at its Philadelphia and Denver production facilities to meet surging demand for circulating coinage.
Yesterday the Mint trumpeted the success of its effort to hire new staff with the issuance of a blog written jointly by the Mint’s principal deputy director Rhett Jeppson and the director of the Department of Veterans Affairs Center for Women Veterans, Elisa Basnight.
Once you wade through the gobbledygook, the nub of the matter is that two jobs fairs were held, one at each facility.
The result was 15 people were hired and 11 of them were women veterans.
Philadelphia had its job fair in late May and hired four women and presumably three men.
The Denver fair was in early June. There seven of the eight new hires were women veterans.
This works out to 73 percent of the jobs going to women veterans.
Congratulations were expressed.
The blog also noted that 41 people attended the job fair in Philadelphia and of that number 20 were veterans.
In Denver, 38 of the 42 persons who attended were veterans.
I will put a link at the bottom so you can read the full 1,060-word text of the blog if you like.
But before you go, let me mention that I dug back into my own blog file and found that on May 8 I wrote that the Mint was looking to hire 86 people in total to staff the new third shifts.
That number puts the information in the Mint-VA blog into a different light.
That means of the 86 jobs, roughly 13 percent of them went to women veterans, a far cry from 73 percent.
I expect the blog is an example of government cheerleading. There is nothing wrong with that. Any success should be publicized.
Unlike the Treasury effort to put a woman on the $10 bill, these job fairs went beyond symbolism.
There are 11 women veterans who now will be taking home real paychecks earned at the U.S. Mint.
On another day we will find out how the other 71 job vacancies were filled.
Here is my promised link to the Mint blog that was posted on the www.numismaticnews.net website yesterday:
Buzz blogger Dave Harper is winner of the 2014 Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog and is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."
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