As the ongoing labor shortage continues stifling America’s economy from fully recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, some states are having to fight harder than others to attract talent.
A new report from WalletHub highlighted the states that are struggling to hire the most. Alaska took the top spot, with a job openings rate of 8.3%, followed by Louisiana at 7.7%. Rounding out the top five were New Mexico and Georgia, tied at 7.6%, and Montana at 7.5%.
“This could be happening for a number of reasons, such as a lack of proper compensation or value recognition,” Jill Gonzalez, analyst at WalletHub, told Yahoo Finance.
The coronavirus pandemic shrunk the labor force by 4 million in 2021, and although job losses have recovered, the labor force participation rate remains depressed. So began the era of the Great Resignation, in which thousands of workers opted for early retirement and kept the labor force participation low even as businesses reopened and resumed hiring, according to Gonzalez.
The states struggling the least with hiring tend to have a larger workforce. The four most populous states in the nation — California, Texas, Florida, and New York — all have job openings rates at 6.3% or below.
New York has the lowest job openings rate in the country at 5.4%. Since early 2022, the state’s labor force participation rate rose to 60% by November.
The ongoing labor shortage has not gone unnoticed by government officials, with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell commenting on the issue during his most recent FOMC speech.
“The labor market continues to be out of balance, with demand substantially exceeding the supply of available workers,” Powell said last week. “Companies want to hold on to the workers they have because it’s been very, very hard to hire.”
Workers are also finding that income is not keeping up with inflation, which reached record levels in 2022. Income and inflation don’t always increase side by side as wage growth typically relies on trends in the labor force participation rate and productivity.
The labor shortage can seriously impact a company’s bottom line as well — apart from “reshuffling” employees and changing business strategies, a decline in profits and supply chain issues can hurt businesses. Long-term economic effects can affect GDP growth and ignite a recession, according to McKinsey & Company.
“The impact on businesses is they need to shift their perspective,” Jeremy Hill, director at Wichita State University Center for Economic Development and Business Research, told Yahoo Finance. “If labor remains critical, they need to increase compensation to attract employees, train lower-skilled staff to allow for upward mobility, or add technology to increase the productivity of the current employees.”
According to Gonzalez, uncertainty surrounding hiring will last “at least until inflation gets under control.”
“For now, we can say that finding and retaining labor will remain difficult going into 2023,” she added.
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Tanya is a data reporter at Yahoo Finance. You can follow her on Twitter @tanyakaushal00.
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Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/labor-shortage-these-are-the-states-with-the-most-job-openings-141405503.html