Friday Musings on the hourly job front for May 4th, 2007

Local unemployment rate plummets over past year. This is the headline for an article in today’s Pittsburgh Business Times and confirms what we have opined for the past 2 months. Pittsburgh is finally growing jobs again. The unemployment rate in Pittsburgh dropped to 3.6% in March. Harold Miller, CEO of Future Strategies LLC rightfully cautions not to get too overly joyous just yet. Part of the Pittsburgh area tightening can be attributed to a decline in the number of people seeking jobs, normally a sign of a weakening job market causing more jobseekers to get frustrated and stop looking. However, Pittsburgh could well be different in this area. We are losing overall population due to a higher death rate than birth rate. The seven county Pittsburgh metro is the second oldest in the country, due mostly to the outflow caused by the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980’s. What does this mean to the average hourly jobseeker? It means more opportunity. There are not enough new jobseekers coming into the market than are retiring. This is already beginning to cause business owners and recruiters much more of a challenge to attract not only qualified candidates, but ANY candidates for many of their positions. Especially their entry level skilled positions. In a previous writing we noted the local concerns of our young people coming out of high school without enough basic skills to compete for many of these jobs. Perhaps this will be the catalyst for foreign immigrants once again viewing Pittsburgh as a place where opportunity abounds. Hopefully this unnatural tightening will not have a detrimental effect of keeping businesses from opening or expanding in our area.

We had an interesting long conversation with a friend who is a shop steward for the Sheet Metal Workers in Pittsburgh. He has been a sheet metal worker for 17 years and has worked through both good and bad times. The biggest concern for his union right now, with multiple large construction projects on the horizon, isn’t just finding enough qualified workers to fill positions, but finding enough who are dependable and responsible. They have bigger problems than in the past with no-shows, absenteeism and tardiness primarily among their apprentices.

We both felt that this is the type of problem we wish we had to deal with in the past. He agreed the next 3 to 5 years look very good for job creation in southwest Pennsylvania. We will need to see positive job numbers become a trend over time before any celebration.