Rhode Island had the strongest labor force growth in New England in the last five years, and it’s one of just two states where labor force participation increased – both “very positive” developments, an economist told local business leaders last week.
But without immigrants, said Paul E. Harrington, of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, neither of those things would be true. Native-born men, especially younger urban men, are actually leaving the work force, he said.
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And while the ranks of mostly unskilled, unschooled immigrants grow, the supply of highly skilled, college-educated workers that Rhode Island employers need isn’t keeping up with demand, Harrington said at a breakfast sponsored by the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce and the R.I. Economic Development Corporation on April 11.
“We’re oversupplying the bottom of the labor market and undersupplying the top,” he said. As a result, he added, good, well-paid jobs go unfilled while many workers can’t find employment.
In May and June of last year, for example, Harrington said, 2.8 percent of jobs in the state were vacant, even though 5.4 percent of Rhode Island workers were unemployed.
The disconnect is even greater when you analyze it by industry, Harrington said. Take construction, where 15.2 percent of workers were jobless, but only 2.5 percent of positions were open. In health care and social assistance, meanwhile, the unemployment rate was 2.5 percent, while the vacancy rate was 4.4 percent – more than 3,300 unfilled positions.
“Health care wants to grow, but its productive capacity is held back by the lack of workers,” Harrington said. Rhode Island even has a shortage of information technology workers and engineers, he noted – an unusual phenomenon in the aftermath of the tech bubble bursting.
Normally, Harrington said, young people see which areas have job opportunities and get into those fields, but the data for Rhode Island suggest that “for some reason, the signal is not getting transferred to young people.”
To correct the problem, Harrington said, the state has to focus harder on ensuring that all workers have strong literacy and basic math skills, “the sine qua non for success.”
Schools should also teach occupational skills such as accounting, he said, and give young people as many opportunities as possible to get work experience early on.
“This is a high-end economy” where “occupational proficiency and higher ed matter” more and more every day, Harrington said.
Another trend to pay attention to, he said, is women’s growing role in the Rhode Island work force – up 4.5 percent from 2000 to 2005 alone, the biggest increase in New England. Many of these workers are single mothers, he said, “so things like child care and after-school programs are very important. Single moms have a hard time.”
After Harrington’s presentation, Chamber members heard from employers and others directly involved in work force issues.
Eric Gimler, who’s in charge of recruitment at Stanley Bostitch in East Greenwich, said his company has added more than 200 jobs in the last two years, and it’s found that the best way to get skilled workers is to grow its own. Employees like seeing a path for advancement, he said, and filling jobs internally has worked so well that today, Stanley Bostitch has zero openings for hourly jobs, “which is rare.”
Dale J. Venturini, president and CEO of the R.I. Hospitality and Tourism Association, said her industry expects to need 12,000 extra workers in the next decade, and while there are “a lot of opportunities for low-skill workers,” there’s a growing need for college graduates as well, from programs in culinary arts, for example.
Again, creating “career ladders” has become a priority, Venturini said, but it’s not always enough to motivate the youngest generation of workers, “Generation Why,” many of whom are chronically late and have a tendency to skip work when they have cash in their pockets.
“What we need to figure out is how to manage them, and how to get them to give a damn,” she said.
Mike Perruda, director of work force development at Women & Infants Hospital, which employs about 2,800 people, said he had 33 vacancies as of last week, several requiring a master’s degree or even a doctorate. Yet at the same time, the vast majority of people who want to work at Women & Infants don’t stand a chance.
“We receive about 10,000 job applications a year,” he said, “and we can use about 400 of those.”
