Thursday September 26, 2019

An obviously frustrated Wadena, Minnesota, business owner on U.S. Highway 10, posted this sign in its window 

in September 2019.

    I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to a lot of things, I admit. There are more learned people than me who do surveys, rates and polls; many of them being governmental officials who, I’d guess, conjure up imaginary numbers to fill in the blanks or color the charts. An instance being, “The Unemployment Rate”.
 
     Now, according to Google, Minnesota’s July 2019, unemployment rate was 3.4%. This link: https://mn.gov/deed/data/current-econ-highlights/state-national-employment.jsp will provide you additional information that I won’t have to paraphrase or necessarily understand to get my ignorance across. After all this is just an almanac entry by a guy who ‘has some college education’ and nothing official in the way of a degree or anything.
 
    But someone, someday--there’s no hurry-- should explain to me how these numbers are concocted, because for all the fooferah over how great they all are, I’d think businesses should be booming and the people in the unemployment office bored to tears. Where are all these employed people working? And for how long on average?  

    If a person starts a job and quits before the end of shift; then starts a new job a week later, works a day or two and doesn’t show back up for work; then starts a new job--does his or her three new starts go on the employment rate numbers pile? Or what? I'm daft.
 
    I retired, after 33 years, from a toy factory, where one year, in recent times, the attrition rate was up to 40%. It wasn't about rate of pay, for starting wages, and benefits after 90-days, were the highest in area and competitive with comparable businesses.Yet new hires walked off the job in droves; one day four people, all in the same area, quit before the end of shift, leaving management to scramble to find people from within the plant to fill-in, including utilizing engineering and managerial staff. The tide was turned somewhat, that year, by hiring a professional staffing service and bringing in out-of-state temp workers who worked for higher wages--but received no benefits other than yet another job and maybe some subsidized housing of some sort, (but I can only speculate).
 
    I doubt there’s a city, town or community across Minnesota that isn’t experiencing a real ‘unemployed’ problem in as much as they can’t find people to work for them anywhere. There are signs on buildings and along streets, on vehicles, in storefronts, whole newspaper pages, everywhere stating, “NOW HIRING!” 

   I never thought I'd witness such a dire thing in my lifetime. I knew that there were lazy people; there always has been, but not finding enough people to work, state wide, is an epidemic--isn't it? Who have heard of such a thing, when historically lack of work has been the boogieman?

    The libraries, museums and on-line sources are full of historical images of people begging for work; long queues of people in bread lines and in soup kitchens the world over; people carrying signs reading, "Will work for food/ for room and board."

    The complaint that "I can't find a job," is bullshit. There may be extenuating circumstances limiting someone's ability to get to a job, or as with individuals in work-release programs not being allowed out of state employment or having limited work day hours, and there may be other legitimate reasons, but there's something terribly wrong in all this, people. WTH?

    The only thing I see, is that Minnesota's unemployment rate is bogus and quite the opposite is true.