It seems Omaha is struggling with the same thing we are in Sioux Falls, low wages and trouble recruiting;
Nebraska business leaders have been sounding the alarm on the state’s shortage of skilled workers, seeking to get politicians to do more to help the state attract the workforce it needs to grow.
But there’s something CEOs themselves can do to pull in more workers: pay higher wages. And it appears that if Omaha’s employers want to be competitive in the job market, they may need to do that.
What often surprises me is the resistance to pay higher wages. I have argued when your employees are making more, they are spending more. That means a better local economy and more tax dollars for a better community. Keeping your workers poor really only makes you richer in the short term but hobbles the economy in the long term. Aren’t you tired of watching the local news telling us every night that shelters, food kitchens and food pantries continue to grow and expand? I am, it is something we shouldn’t be bragging about. Sioux Falls is an attractive city, why not make it more attractive by paying higher wages?
FF 24:20 (This was at the Sioux Falls Rotary)
Neel Kashkari, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, takes audience questions during a meeting of the Rotary Club of Downtown Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on August 7. 2017.
FF 24:20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ5k6yvsWls
Yahoo did a recent study of wage growth across the nation. Sioux Falls was very near the lowest. There’s jobs here because they don’t pay enough. Nobody wants them. The top echelon keeps wages down so they feel like billionaires. Once they travel to larger cities they discover they’re hardly millionaires. It would be a public service to advise those coming here they’re better off where they’re at.
Hey, what’ not to like about six (seven? eight?) month winters, rampant racism, chilling effects on civil rights, an extremist legislature, living in a sacrifice zone, chemical toilet, perpetual welfare state and permanent disaster area?
A third of qualified teaching grads leave South Dakota while the remainder struggle with certification. There are no checks on executive power and the governor’s cronies routinely raid the state’s general fund. The state is second in addiction to gambling and teachers’ salaries surf the bottom of the US. Wage slavery is the state’s biggest claim to fame and South Dakota dairies are wreaking habitat havoc. Infrastructure is crumbling and the state’s bureaucracy is overbearing and unwieldy. Ag groups want federally subsidized crop insurance and the right to pollute. Corruption and graft have become ordinary. Hatred of immigrants threatens the state’s already hurting tourism economy.
Any registered nurse with half a brain will leave for Minnesota, Colorado or the Southwest the instant they graduate so the work force in South Dakota will just get stupider and more Republican.
The greed of upper management is cratering our society with an ever-increasing income disparity that’s an economic holocaust for the average American. A future like “Soylent Green” & “Blade Runner” is very real. Stratospheric executive compensation is at levels beyond what growing ranks of wealthy generations can ever spend in their lifetime. Via lax trust laws like those in “The Caribbean of the Great Plains South Dakota”, all this unspent personal wealth sucked out of the economy is passed untaxed to subsequent generations. Their lives of comfort and security are seeded at birth with the financial means to survive an increasingly bleak future – bought at the expense of the working class masses that preceded them generationally.