CareerLink Alle-Kiski: Still an employees’ job market

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CareerLink Alle-Kiski: Still an employees’ job market

Mary Ann Thomas | Friday, April 1, 2022 1:39 p.m.

Courtesy of Phil Grove/CareerLink Alle-Kiski

Matthew Rubio is a kitchen operator at TruFood’s sheeting lines for nutrition bars. TruFood is located in RIDC Park in O’Hara.

The number of job postings for light manufacturing, health care and transportation positions remains high at the state Department of Labor’s CareerLink Alle-Kiski office.

This week, the center had 425 job openings, which is down slightly from last November, according to Phil Grove, an account representative at PA CareerLink Alle-Kiski.

The Alle-Kiski job center covers 28 ZIP codes in Westmoreland and Allegheny counties.

“Employers are still doing things to attract workers such as offering higher pay,” Grove said. “Employers are desperately in need of new blood. In recent days, some scaled back production because of not having enough employees.”

Light manufacturing employees are still in high demand, and those companies are bumping up wages, he said.

In other job sectors, such as business administration and other white-collar jobs, there has been an influx of workers visiting CareerLink trying to find a better job, Grove said.

TruFood, in RIDC Park in O’Hara, has raised wages twice in the past 16 months, said Ashley Jones, a recruiter for the company.

TruFood, a privately held company, is a manufacturer of nutrition bars, protein bars, chocolate molded products and baked goods. The company has a workforce of about 700 employees.

TruFood has been hiring new employees and plans to hire about 50 more through the summer, Jones said.

The company’s director of commercialization, Gina Cottrill, said salary alone isn’t enough.

“We try to give our employees the best possible environment,” she said.

The wage increases helped recruit and retain employees for TruFood, the women said.

“We have a good culture with growth opportunities, and that is why people stay,” Jones said.

TruFood expanded operations to a new building earlier this year and opened two new production lines, Cottrill said.

The expansion has been spurred by an increasing demand for healthier snacks.

Sales have grown by 30% each year for the past three years, she said.

Information about jobs at TruFood are on its website.

Details

Where did the workers go?
The Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry says that the pandemic and economic shifts already underway are causing the state's current labor shortage.
"To be clear, there are almost twice as many job openings today as there are unemployed people — a startling statistic for anyone who was of working age during the Great Recession," said Alex Peterson, press secretary for Labor & Industry.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 4.5 million American workers quit or changed their jobs in November — the highest number in the survey's 20-year history — and the fourth time that record was set in 2021, he said.
Below, Peterson summarizes factors related to the imbalance of having more jobs than workers:
• The Baby Boomer generation — those born between 1946 and 1964 — had begun to retire at a rate of about 1 million per year. The younger generations that account for the rest of the labor force — Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z — are considerably smaller than the Baby Boomers.
• According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of February 2022, there are 0.6 unemployed people per job opening in the United States. Compare that to 6.5 unemployed people per job opening at the height of the Great Recession in July 2009. Peterson noted: "Not all of these are quality jobs, and many require specific skills that take months or years to develop and are in short supply in today's labor force."
• The U.S. labor force participation rate, which calculates the percentage of workers 16 and older who are either working or looking for work, was 62.3% in February 2022, down more than 1% from the pre-pandemic level of 63.4% in February 2020, according to Peterson. "That decline results in millions of workers who are considered ‘missing' and would otherwise be expected to be in the labor force."

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