Help wanted

This particular signage seems to be adorning the entrances of several local businesses and the number of them steadily increasing.

As business owners and managers scramble to cover holes in their schedules, the question running through everyone’s minds is: Why don’t they have people to work?

According to the Idaho Department of Labor, the latest unemployment rate for Shoshone County is 5.6%, which is only .3% higher than it was in March of 2020 (a difference of about 17 people).

The state average unemployment rate is 3.2%, which means that while Shoshone’s rate might be higher than the state average, it’s still a far cry from the 7.3% that it had in late 2016.

Sam Wolkenhauer, a labor economist with Idaho Deptartment of Labor, believes the issue lies in “the brute force of mathematics.”

Or more specifically, that the number of open jobs is just far larger than the number of unemployed people.

“Even with unemployment higher than it was pre-COVID, last month we counted more than 10,000 excess online job postings in Idaho (meaning, job postings above and beyond the number of unemployed people),” Wolkenhauer told the News-Press. “There are always issues like lack of training, lack of affordable child care, and difficult matching employers and job seekers, but even if we could overcome all these problems and get all the unemployed matched up with jobs, we would still have thousands of unfilled positions.”

Simply put, there are not enough people to fill these jobs across the state and in some places, the jobs available don’t fit the people who are still looking.

In the last 14 months, a lot of people have also found out that working from home is a viable option where it simply hadn’t been before; either because of the businesses themselves not liking the idea of their employees strictly working from home or because the employees weren’t sure that they could make a home office situation work for them.

Shoshone Glass owner Lori Sawyer is one of many employers in the Silver Valley that has struggled to fill open positions.

For 10 months, Shoshone Glass advertised a front office position that only got filled recently when Sawyer’s cousin moved back to the area from Montana.

“Ten months of me working by myself,” Sawyer said of the short-handed period. “I put in a lot of overtime and took work home. It was extremely stressful.”

While she understands that being short-handed can just be the nature of the business, she also believes that the reason for this employer crisis is individuals being comfortable with not having a job.

“I honestly feel like we make it too easy to be unemployed,” she said.

The government of Idaho would seem to agree, as Gov. Brad Little announced last Tuesday that the state will end its participation in three federal pandemic unemployment compensation programs “to help employers get workers back on the job.”