Around my part of the country I've found there are a few jobs available.
The problem with most of them is for the majority of people who live here the jobs are 20 to 30 miles away (most of the companies seem to like to hire people from out of town rather than hire the people who live close by), only part time at minimum wage or barely above, and for some reason a lot of managers seem to love scheduling people's part time hours to make life as difficult for them as possible. For example, you drive 25 miles one way to work a shift from lets say 8am to 11am, then you are off until 3pm or 4pm when you are scheduled to work another maybe 2 hours. What are you supposed to do for all those hours in between? Sit in your car in the parking lot? Make another 50 mile round trip drive to go home and back again? Then they change your schedule all the time so it's impossible to get a second part time job to fill in the gaps in your hours. Now you have spent maybe 10 or 11 hours of your day (including driving time) that you couldn't use to get other things done around home that you need to do, to only get paid minimum wage for maybe 5 hours or so. When you add up the real cost of driving (usually gasoline even at today's prices is only a little more than half of the true cost of driving!), the taxes you will have to pay on your wages, the cost of child care while you are gone (a high cost for most of the people where I live that go to work since most don't have a network of family or friends to help each other out for free with child care), and all the other little costs associated with going to work that add up in the end, well, a lot of these jobs actually end up costing the employee almost as much as they get in their paychecks if not more!
Oh, and lets not forget that taking on one of these jobs for many people means losing a big part or all of the government assistance they probably were getting while not working. Whether or not a person agrees with government assistance, that in itself can make taking many of these jobs a financially poor decision!
