Yes, it's true — a healthy Utah labor shortage
Jay Evensen
He said, "Labor shortage."
That's right. Came right out and said it like he was the governor of Maine or Vermont, some place where the houses aren't bursting with children and people don't graduate from college and catch the first bus out.
And the thing is, nobody in the room gasped.
Utah now has an unemployment rate somewhere around 2.5 percent, which actually could just be a handful of people taking a long lunch break.
There are so few workers available that a Zions Bank report released a few weeks ago said projects such as the redevelopment of downtown by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may take longer than expected. Meanwhile, the governor's proposed budget for the next fiscal year predicts that job growth will continue at a 4.7 percent clip in 2007. In the latest 12-month period on record, it rose 5 percent.
All of this has led to such healthy tax collections that the governor has proposed a budget giving public schools virtually all they want (another thing I thought I'd never hear in Utah), while still leaving $27.8 million unspent — wiggle room, I suppose.
Think of the things we've all been conditioned to expect through the years. Utah's high birth rate (it led the nation at 21.2 per 1,000 population in 2004) has doomed the state to a perpetual labor surplus that would keep salaries low. Because of that high birth rate, our schools would demand so much in taxes that it would be difficult to attract much economic development.
Now we have to think differently, at least for a while. The need for workers will naturally lead to increases in salaries and incentives. With the rest of the nation experiencing somewhat of a slump in job growth, more people are likely to move here, putting greater pressures on communities to deal with growth and all that goes with it. The need to preserve open spaces and build roads and transit will become greater.
On the other end of the scale, the people who have little — the chronically poor, the mentally ill and others who find it hard to cope — will have an even tougher time of it as housing prices rise.
I don't pretend to understand it all. An archive full of headlines from yesteryear doesn't help much. These talk about predictions that the state's growth would decline through the 1990s and beyond, or that the birth rate would lead to a population of 2.3 million by 2010 (we exceeded that awhile ago) despite little in-migration.
I'm not sure Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. has any better explanation. When asked how the state could keep the good times rolling, he said, "Keep me in office." He was joking, I think.
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