Congressional candidate completes 400-mile 9th District bike ride

JASPER - Dr. David Vogel, the Democratic candidate for Georgia's 9th District congressional seat, has completed a 400-mile bicycle tour through the district. <br /> <br /> Vogel began the ride September 2 and was in Gainesville eight days later. (See earlier stories. Links below.) The ride ended Thursday in Jasper. <br /> <br /> When he announced the start of the ride, the 72-year-old Vogel indicated that he might omit part of the ride from Clayton to Hiawassee. However, he completed the 102 miles through the North Georgia Mountains from Clayton to Jasper with no omissions, arriving at his final destination half-an-hour early. <br /> <br /> Aside from stops planned by local organizers, Vogel stopped at businesses all along the route where workers are employed at minimum wage, part-time, with no benefits. <br /> <br /> According to Vogel, "There should be no such thing in America as a class of people called 'the working poor'." He says he finds managers and small business owners sympathetic to the plight of people working two part-time jobs and still finding themselves in poverty. However, Vogel says employers can't stop the spread of these jobs without a policy change. <br /> <br /> "Among those changes", he says, "should be a rule that requires a company that hires more than 10% of its workforce part time to pay part-time benefits. That would remove the incentive to split full-time jobs up into part-time jobs." <br /> <br /> Hearing the suggestion that education is the way out of poverty, Vogel said he agrees "up to a point." However, he noted that among university graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, three years after graduation "somewhere between one-fourth and half of them have not found employment in their chosen fields. If you'd care to make a guess at what that labor surplus has been doing to their wages and benefits, you'd be right."