In today's work force environment, we are told there is a severely limited supply of labor. Yet it is not uncommon for companies to find themselves in a position where availability is not the issue -- cost and adequately trained personnel are the real problems.
The decision to expand or relocate must include a serious look at both the labor supply and potential employees' level of trainability.
Many communities may be sitting on an untapped, valuable resource of unemployed people who have not yet been discovered.
This begins the age-old dilemma of how to get these assets into the hands of interested companies, and much more importantly, how to identify any negative presuppositions regarding hiring labor from the stigmatized welfare rolls.
Let's be brutally honest for a moment. There are several areas of job needs, including certain manufacturing, distribution, and processing-type jobs, where the only way to train an individual is on-the-job. Furthermore, the best trainer, in a lot of cases, is the line supervisor or in-house trainer for the company -- not a government contracted training service.
Whether or not the applicant is from the employment agency or from the Department of Health and Human Services office is irrelevant. Basic skill sets being equal, the stigma is not germane to the ability of the individual to accept training and become productive.
In the past 20 years of economic development practice, there have always been those companies that utilized the Job Training Partnership Act and other state-sponsored job training/subsidy incentives. Yet these programs have always been cumbersome and onerous for the employer. Reports, validation, and little or no choice for the employer made it difficult for these incentives to work.
With states now having more control of how these federal dollars are being spent, and with the savings developed from federally-mandated streamlining going into effect, there is now money available for welfare-to-work initiatives.
| It is expected that this type of funding, where the company knows it needs new employees and there is an availability of
welfare-to-work dollars, will result in significant savings for businesses. |
This is the new paradigm being witnessed in cutting-edge states across the country: taking welfare-to-work dollars looking for a project and marrying them to job-related retention or creation projects. The key is that the dollars must find a home assisting companies in hiring, training, and maintaining employment for post-welfare recipients.
One such program that works extremely well is found in a high unemployment center -- the Central Valley in California. There, economic development professionals at the county level are using the welfare-to-work funds dedicated to job creation and are marrying them to the 65-year-old foreign-trade zone program.
A foreign trade zone project is, in essence, a federally-approved, locally-controlled, federal tax management project. It is available to existing companies and to companies relocating inside the region.
In California, zone applications and activation expenses have been paid for by state welfare funds that are channeled through economic development agencies to qualified companies. The expenditure of these funds guarantees the hiring of previous welfare recipients at reasonable wages and benefits. The results have been outstanding.
It is expected that this type of funding, where the company knows it needs new employees and there is an availability of welfare-to-work dollars, will result in significant savings for businesses.
Moreover, work force agencies in several states are crying out for good projects because of the federal mandate to use the excess funds for job-creation.
Curtis D. Spencer is president of IMS Worldwide, Inc., a Houston, Texas,-based firm specializing in economic development, strategic planning, foreign trade zone development and industrial park marketing. You can reach him at (281) 286-0008.
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