Yesterday at the Sioux Falls City council informational meeting, Darrin Smith did a presentation on the $500K the city will be granting to businesses to recruit workers. Some interesting points he made;
1) He said employers are telling him they are having trouble recruiting workers in the $20 an hour an lower range.
2) He said recently in Sioux Falls there was 2,300 available openings and in the same period 3,800 people applied for unemployment.
Am I the only one that sees the correlation here? I think some people would just rather draw unemployment then work for a low wage.
I think to put some teeth in this grant process the city should require anyone seeking the recruitment money that they pay market scale-living wages. In other words $16 an hour or higher.
I also think for every dollar a business gets in grant money they should roll over as a bonus to employees that get recruited and stay with the company over one year. In other words, if Company A receives $5000 from the city in grant money, and they hire 5 people that stay with the company for over a year, each employee would receive a $1000 bonus.
We can recruit low wage employees until the cows come home, but it doesn’t have much of an affect on our local economy and is really just a waste of tax dollars.
maybe if we gave employers a tif….
Money is the least effective work force motivator there is.
You make some interesting points. Most businesses are less than 15 employees and the owner uses them as tools to make himself rich. Hence, most jobs hardly pay the bills and nobody stays. Anything to get wages higher and jobs more like a productive career is worth a try.
I went to the grocery store this week and spent $150 for just myself. I didn’t buy meat. Seriously, I don’t see how most make it if they work for less than $15 per hour after taxes.