If county’s workforce grows, prepare for an economic spurt

Will workers flock to the job market as the Omicron wave ebbs? That’s not an academic question. It’s a key to filling huge labor gaps that have eaten holes in our economy.

Large numbers of South Florida employers complain they can’t find enough workers to fill orders and serve customers, or that they’re holding on only by overtaxing depleted staff and paying so much more than budgeted that their economics are upside down, unsustainable in the long run.

Close-to-home examples that surfaced Friday illustrate the impact of staff shortages in areas requiring specific training, one for a small employer, the other for employers of regional impact.

The company that prints Miami Today alerted us that because of lack of professionals to run printing presses, its normal three shifts totaling 12 people are now down to eight workers. Slots for four workers apiece now have three pressmen on two shifts and two on the third.

As a result, multiple orders are late. The manager we deal with is doing double duty in presswork herself. And the company is advertising for help out of the area, targeting locales where printers have gone out of businesses in hopes of luring press workers to move in.

Hours before learning that, a hospital industry leader lamented that a well-known nursing shortage has been exacerbated by temporary staffing agencies that lure away a shrinking number of nurses by paying them more than their hospital jobs do, then make them available as temps to hospitals at triple their former rate – unsustainable for any length of time.

Nurses had already been quitting in rising numbers as they faced the intense physical and psychological pressures of extra work and a daily dose of deaths. Hospitals, which had been unprepared for a nursing outflow, are collaborating with colleges and universities to ramp up far more nursing education and offer more scholarships.

It’s logical that as the Omicron tsunami rushes away after its lightning swell, more press workers and nurses and other specialized professionals across the spectrum will be healthy, leave quarantine, and be willing to return to the labor force as covid’s threat to them and their families lessens.

But beyond a growing likelihood that one covid variant or another will linger not just for months but as an ongoing cyclical risk much like flu, other factors contribute to scarcities in pockets of the workforce.

One is retirement of professionals and specialists too fast for recent graduates or newly trained technicians to fill employer needs. More talent is flowing out of the proverbial bathtub than in.

Another factor is a weaker flow into the job market. The Wall Street Journal noted Friday that the share of US residents working or looking for work has dropped 0.7 percentage points while the share has been rising in Canada, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. US infection and death rates from covid about triple Canada’s, which surely lowers numbers of people in the US willing to work.

In Miami-Dade, year-end data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics highlight the issue: the county had its lowest unemployment rate ever, just 1.4% of all workers. Economists once believed 2% was the minimum simply because people always leave jobs and it takes time to get to a new one. They called that 2% labor stickiness. Well, we’re far below 2% here, which is excellent.

But that 1.4% milestone has a flip side. The county had only 17,800 unemployed jobseekers at year’s end, but at the same time the county’s labor force fell 32,600 from November – the county lost 3,200 people at work and 29,500 from unemployment rolls who had been seeking work, leaving a very small pool of potential workers who can’t find jobs.

Nationwide in January, the Labor Department said, covid prevented nearly 2 million persons from seeking a job. As we reported last week, South Florida led the nation in wage level rise at 6%. It’s unclear whether, as the impact of covid declines, those higher wages will bring workers back into a Miami-Dade workforce that is now 66,000 persons smaller than before covid hit though the population has grown. 

Logic indicates our total workforce should increase as record high pay levels and a declining covid impact help fill many jobs that now go begging. If that is indeed true, prepare for our economy to spurt as covid retreats.