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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.

Louisiana legislators entered the last day of their session Thursday poised to adopt a tax overhaul package many lawmakers consider this year’s top priority.
The House gave final passage Wednesday to four bills, eliminating some tax breaks, making another permanent and lowering income tax rates. Supporters hope the changes will make the state more attractive to businesses and residents while still collecting close to the same amount of money.
Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, has endorsed the Republican-led Legislature’s stated goal of broadening the tax base while lowering rates as long as the changes are “revenue neutral.” He has not taken a public position on the specific bills.
The Senate has given final approval to one of the four bills and likely is to sign off on the other three Thursday. Voters would have to approve changing the Louisiana Constitution to make it all possible.
Senate Bill 161, which has passed both chambers, makes permanent an exemption to the state’s corporate franchise tax on the first $300,000 of taxable capital, which would exempt most businesses. The rate would drop from $3 to $2.75 per $1,000 above that level.
Like with other bills in the package, rates would go down further if state revenue growth hits certain triggers and the rainy day fund is roughly two-thirds full.
Senate Bill 159 calls for the end of the constitutional guarantee that taxpayers can deduct from their state income taxes the cost of paying their federal income taxes. The unusual tax break ties the state’s tax policy to the federal government’s and could cause budget problems for the state if the federal government raises taxes.
While taxpayers would be losing a lucrative exemption, in return, the maximum state income tax rate would be set in the constitution at 4.75%, compared with the current top rate of 6%. The bill also would take references to the other tax brackets out of the constitution, allowing lawmakers to set those rates in statute.
That’s where House Bill 278 would come in. Current personal income tax rates of 2% on the first $12,500, 4% on the next $37,500 and 6% in excess of $50,000 would be reduced to 1.85%, 3.5% and 4.25%, respectively.

When saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths and giant sloths roamed North America during the last Ice Age about 18,000 to 80,000 years ago, the Gulf Coast’s climate was only slightly cooler, more similar to regions to the north like Missouri and North Carolina’s climate today. As sea level dropped and exposed more land on the continental shelf, bald cypress trees became established in swamps in what is now the northern Gulf of Mexico.
An event occurred and suddenly killed and buried the bald cypress forests along the Gulf Coast. The buried swamp trees were preserved by sediment for thousands of years. About 18,000 years ago, sea level rose. As the ocean waters moved inland, the buried trees were preserved in their former swamp sediments. In 2004, Hurricane Ivan cut a path across the region and exposed a preserved ancient bald cypress forest.
“It smells like freshly cut cypress,” said marine geologist and paleoclimatologist Kristine DeLong about the ancient trees that she exhumed from about eight miles offshore in 60 feet of water.
It’s a scent that is familiar to DeLong. Her grandfather logged cypress trees in Florida. Bald cypress lumber was highly prized in the 1800s because it doesn’t easily decompose and is resistant to water rot and insects. Now, it is no longer logged and is protected on public lands.
“We were surprised to find this cypress wood intact, because wood normally decomposes in the ocean from shipworms and bacteria,” she said.
In 2013, DeLong and her research team SCUBA dove the site, recovered 23 specimens of cypress and analyzed the wood in her lab at LSU, where she is an associate professor in the LSU Department of Geography & Anthropology, and at the University of Idaho. She radiocarbon dated the wood samples and found that they were too old to be dated with radiocarbon, so her team used other methods to date the forest. They found the forest was from the early part of the last ice age and between 42,000 to 74,000 years old.
“The region experienced climate change but it was getting colder. It wasn’t a gradual drop in climate— rather these quick pulses with drops in sea level. It was definitely a chaotic time, but the land and the forests were resilient to these changes,” she said.
In 2015 and 2016, DeLong’s team collected 18 sediment cores, which are long tubes of compacted sand and dirt, from around the site of the underwater ancient cypress forest. They found sand and seashells in the top layers of the sediment cores but also dark, organic peat that looks like potting soil with roots and leaves towards the bottom of the cores.
“As a marine geologist, we don’t see this type of sediment,” she said. “What was interesting was finding seeds from St. John’s wort, button bush and rose mallow, which are native plants we can find on land today, but we found them preserved in the ocean.”
She is collaborating with terrestrial tree and plant experts on this project, who are similarly puzzled by these specimens from the ocean.
Swamp waters naturally have low oxygen, which is believed to have preserved these specimens from decomposing. The researchers have a few hypotheses on what may have happened to the cypress forests. One idea is that sea level rose suddenly and the flood plain buried the cypress forest. Another idea is that a melting ice sheet caused a sudden influx of water to flow down the Mississippi River and other nearby rivers pushing sediment that buried the coastal forests.
Regardless of how this occurred, DeLong and colleagues believe that it occurred throughout the region and that there may be other underwater ancient cypress forests along the Gulf Coast. This research was recently published in the journal BOREAS.

Happy 40th wedding anniversary Gregory and Marilyn Chenevert from family and friends.