Looking for workers looking for work: Local employers feel labor pinch

Economists are coming forward with many possible causes for the tough time employers are having filling jobs. Most are about COVID-19, including the risk of getting infected and mothers who can’t or are unwilling to find day care while schools are closed during the pandemic.
But locally, the consensus is that workers are staying home to receive enhanced unemployment benefits rather than going back to work.
For St. Mary Parish Economic Development Director Evan Boudreaux, it’s government vs. small businesses, and right now government has the upper hand.
The enhanced benefits are set to expire in September.
“Government has unlimited amount of resources at their disposal where as small businesses, they have finite resources to use and at their disposal,” Boudreaux said. “So small business will never win if they try to compete against the government like what’s happening now.”
A look at the May U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the unemployment rate stands at 5.8%. That’s compared to 13.3% in May 2020. In March 2021, the unemployment mark was 6%, while it was 6.1% in April.
In St. Mary Parish, the latest unemployment data available from the Louisiana Department of Labor is from April. That figure shows that St. Mary’s unemployment rate is at 8.1%, which is down from 8.3% in March and much lower than the 12.4% rate in April 2020.
While Boudreaux said numbers are showing improvement nationally and at the state level, he said that the unemployment data is not nearly where it was when the pandemic first began.
While improving local labor numbers, Boudreaux said, also is the issue of what type of jobs these are and if they are temporary or permanent jobs.
In St. Mary, Boudreaux said the tourism and recreation sectors have been impacted the most by the pandemic.
In Morgan City, The Galley owner Carlos Izaguirre said he has been hiring three cooks each Monday for the last three weeks, and as of Tuesday afternoon he only has retained four out of nine employees. He said he lost one of those employees Tuesday.
“It’s not due to strenuous work,” he said. “It’s just laziness. It’s easier to collect the check.
“It’s a different generation. They’re not used to the heat (of the kitchen). As far as the stimulus, yes, I think that is definitely keeping the good ones at home. We’re going through supply and demand where we are competing for employees.”
Boudreaux said that nationwide in April, 44% of small business owners can’t fill job openings.
“I would say that that’s just the same kind of case that St. Mary Parish has if not a higher percentage of our small businesses having job openings that they can’t fill,” he said.
Izaguirre said his business can’t compete with the resources and wages offered by bigger restaurants or corporations.
“The mom and pop operations are feeling it,” he said.
Izaguirre said his brother, Michael, at Tampico’s is having trouble hiring those who work on the floor in the restaurant serving the public.
“He has the opposite problem,” Carlos said. “He is short-staffed front of house that he can’t even find someone to answer the telephone.”
Not everyone locally has suffered from the workforce shortage, though.
Brandon Harden, manager at GameDay Pizza in Patterson, said his business has been able to retain its workforce.
“Really, COVID hadn’t put a damper on us too much,” Harden said. “Pizza is a good takeout business. Most people do know the pizza industry as being for that.”
As for the enhanced unemployment benefits, Boudreaux said the state should look to rural parishes like St. Mary to see the impact these extended enhanced unemployment benefits are having. He said that small dips or increases in employment can have a big impact on the parish’s economy, unlike urban areas where there are a lot more jobs available and a lot more diversification.
Nationally, there are arguments for and against the workforce data released as of late.
The 559,000 new jobs added nationwide in May were down from the estimated 671,000 predicted by economists, according to the recent CNBC article. However, the article noted that payrolls were twice what they were in April.
As for unemployment benefits, Erica Groshen, a Cornell University labor economist, said in the CNBC article that “that’s far too simplistic” to characterize that unemployment boosts are causing people to stay home.