LATINO CENSUS NETWORK

NATIONAL IMAGE, INC.

Hispanic-American Leadership in Employment-Education and Civil Rights

Updated November 21, 2008

101 Avenue of the Americas--New York, NY 10013--212-334-5722--917-677-8593 Fax--info@latinopolicy.org

June 20, 2008

Estimado colega,

The challenges facing an accurate Latino count by the 2010 Census in light of the negative environment created by anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiment in this country and other factors will be enormous. It is, therefore, critical that Census Bureau staff who will be doing the outreach have adequate numbers of Latinos in their ranks at all levels. Unfortunately, the Census Bureau has done a poor job of recruiting and hiring Latinos over the years and currently has one of the worst records of Latino hiring in the federal government (see story below). To remedy this problem, a major joint effort by the Census Bureau and our community will be required.

The Census Bureau is now in the process of hiring people in preparation for the 2010 Census to staff their Early Regional Census Centers in management and office positions in Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte (NC), Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Los Angeles, New York City, Philaldephia, Puerto Rico, and Seattle (see second story below with links to each regional office). These offices will oversee 2010 Census field operations for their region, including recruiting, community outreach, administrative, and automation support, and other operations performed by hundreds of Local Census Offices and hundreds of thousands of temporary census employees. It will be important to have good Latino representation on these early appointments.

We must aggressively make our community aware of these employment opportunities to assure that there is adequate Latino representation in management and other positions. This will be important in making sure that the regional and local Census offices and centers have people that intimately know the Latino community and can communicate in Spanish to assure an accurate count.

It would also be helpful if members of the Latino Census Network in different cities would set up meetings with the directors of their regional Census offices to discuss their plans for recruiting and hiring Latinos. In these meetings we should also offer the Census Bureau resources they can draw on to recruit Latinos job applicants and to develop partnerships with our community.

As we approach the 2010 Census, having a diverse workforce at the Census Bureau that reflects the country's population emerges as an important element in assuring an accurate count of all communities. This is a recurring issue in the case of Latinos, who make up over 16 percent of the US population (including Puerto Rico ), 13.3 percent of the civilian labor force, and 7.8 percent of the federal government workforce, but only 5.4 percent of the people working in the Census Bureau. These Census workforce figures were released at last month's meeting of the Census Bureau's Race and Ethnicity Advisory Committees (REAC) meeting and are for March 2008.

The representation of Latinos in the Census Bureau's headquarters, where the major decisions are made, was even poorer. The total of 140 full-time and 4 temporary Latino employees at headquarters represented only 3.6 percent of its workforce. In the entire Census Bureau, there are only 57 Latinos in top level and Senior Executive Service positions, making Latino representation at those grade levels a miniscule 4.1 percent.

At the recent meeting of the Census Advisory Committee on the Hispanic Population, upon hearing these dismal figures from Census staff, the committee members present were shocked at the lack of progress made to date in the hiring of Latinos. They requested that the Bureau develop a more aggressive approach to correct this problem, especially in light of the upcoming 2010 Census. Over the next two years, the Bureau will be staffing 150 new local offices around the country and the territories and hiring over 600,000 temporary employees, a process that the Hispanic Committee expects will be monitored closely to assure that the hiring of Latinos in both management and line positions becomes a much higher priority.

For further information, contact the Census Equal Employment Opportunity Office at 1-800-872-6096.

Un abrazo,

Angelo Falcon
National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP)

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