LA CROSSE, Wis. (WXOW) – The La Crosse Interfaith Leader’s Coalition held a virtual community conversation with economists to learn why the workforce shortage is still a problem both locally and across the country.
Presenters included UW-La Crosse College of Business Administration Interim Dean Taggert ‘TJ’ Brooks, Kwik Trip, Inc. Recruiting Director Megan Harvey and Workforce Connections Executive Director Teresa Pierce.
The panelists shared that 22 million jobs were lost during the pandemic, 17 million eventually returned but 5.3 million openings are still available.
“A number of people are taking this opportunity as a way to say, ‘I’m not going back to the life I had,”’ Pierce said. “There are a number of people who had two or three low wage jobs and their approach to this is, ‘We’re not doing that again.’ So, having people who have two or three jobs if you pull that person out of the workforce they now have one. So, that leaves two different jobs that are left unfilled.”
Political leaders often argue that federal unemployment wages impact the workforce shortage differently.
“People on the left saying this isn’t causing the problem at all to people on the right saying this is the only problem that we have with the labor market,” Brooks said. “The truth always lies somewhere in the middle.”
Brooks said it will take economists ten years to truly understand the root cause or ripple effect of the pandemic workforce shortage.
“There’s a sort of very slow recovery that happens on the employment side of things,” Brooks said. “This one has been quicker, but it still is going to take some time.”
Big-time La Crosse employer Kwik Trip, Inc. plans to increase retail worker wages and build an early childcare facility at their corporate campus to entice more workers.
“We do feel like it is a barrier to employment for some co-workers and we’d like nothing more than to help our coworkers,” Harcey said. “If we didn’t raise wages as we have been, we would not be competitive. So it’s obviously very costly to an employer and unfortunately, there’s a lot of employers that won’t be able to make the adjustments that we have.”
She acknowledged that Kwik Trip did much better than several small businesses during the pandemic. They added 50 stores in the midwest and added 551 jobs.
The panelists agreed that COVID-19 vaccine mandates will cause the next shortage of workers.
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