The headline reads “Northeast Indiana: Hundreds of factory jobs go unfilled.” There’s the counterintuitive top that talks about how even in a recession with high unemployment, manufacturers can’t fill their openings.

Then there’s the head of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce’s workforce development program—these types of sources are almost always in these stories and they’re often the flacks behind them—who talks about all the druggies and welfare bums filling out applications:

That quote gets at a big hole in this story: There’s zero discussion of what kind of wages these supposedly unfillable jobs actually pay. Indiana unemployment benefits top out at $390 a week (pre-tax), and they only last six months. That’s the equivalent of a less-than-$10-an-hour job. In other words, if lots people are sitting home on the dole rather than taking jobs, as the Chamber of Commerce would have us believe, these manufacturing jobs probably aren’t paying that much more.

Full post: http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/cnnmoney_cant_find_the_workers.php?page=all