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.