Labor Shortages: Texas

Labor shortages in Texas? Texas is booming economically and according to NAR has the second most inward migration from other states at 231,000 new resident. So how can Texas have labor shortages?

According to the Texas Tribune, the labor shortages are in small towns and in government positions.

Since 2018, Norrod has been tapped three times to help the nearby small town of Zavalla with its water system. The working-class community of fewer than 700 people struggles with aging water infrastructure and lacks the budget and skilled workforce to fix it. Last year, the problems intensified after water line breaks and system failures left residents without potable drinking water for nearly 10 days — and a boil-water notice during the Thanksgiving holiday. Adding to the disaster: Two well workers and the city’s public works director resigned during the debacle.

TexasTribune.org

The government job labor shortage isn’t unique to Texas. We’ve written about this issue in the past, in Tough Choices: Prison Guards or 911 Dispatchers we wrote how some communities are having to choose between the types of government workers they hire because they don’t have the money or people to hire both.

In Rural Demographics in Decline we pointed out that rural communities are losing population faster than ever and wrote about the key reason why: better opportunities elsewhere.

There is no easy way to address this problem because there people to fill these jobs simply don’t exist. In rural Texas, 79 year-old retirees are stepping in to fill the void but that’s not a realistic future for the country. It’s entirely possible that these services become privatized and end up becoming even more expensive forcing rural communities to abandon their communities. If these services do become privatized there will be hefty profits to be made.

Stay tuned, stay profitable and stay solvent…