Interviewed today after an event being held for senior citizens in Hempfield, Lancaster County, Republican candidate for Governor Tom Corbett, answered questions regarding comments he made on Friday July 9th as he went to door-to-door in Elizabethtown also in Lancaster County. Scott Detrow of Pennsylvania Public Radio, which includes local affiliate WITF, recorded Corbett making several comments including the following: “The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there … I’ve literally had construction companies tell me, I can’t get people to come back to work until…they say, ‘I’ll come back to work when unemployment runs out.’”
“At the time I was responding to a specific question, I had been asked” Corbett said. ”I didn’t communicate clearly enough that my answer was related to that specific question. I never meant to appear insensitive to our state’s unemployed workers.”
Pointing out that Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate (as of May) was 9.1%, it’s highest since 1980 Corbett said ”That kind of number doesn’t occur unless there is a serious problem. We definitely need to develop better ways of connecting potential employers and employees.” Corbett went on to repeat his own plan to alleviate unemployment in the state which is detailed on his campaign website: TomCorbettforgovernor.com.
Dan Onorato, Corbett’s Democratic opponent, has used the comments to paint Tom Corbett who is currently the state’s Attorney General, as “out-of-touch” and someone who apparently has “…never met someone who is unemployed”. At a press conference held this morning on the steps of the State Capitol, Onorato vigorously defended the state’s unemployed saying: “People are struggling to find work. No one can convince me that people don’t have an incentive. The problem is that the jobs went away. We have to get the jobs back.”
