A Maddening Labor Mismatch

• Share

In the huge Hanover Room of downtown Atlanta's Hyatt Regency Hotel late last week, the air was filled with hubbub--and a sense of desperation. A total of 31 public and private corporations had set up interviewing tables to try to fill some 2,000 white-collar jobs, ranging from electrical engineer to word processor to bank teller, in the city's central business district. Some of the vacancies had gone unfilled for six months or more.

In Boston, the Burger King fast-food chain, which employs 160,000 people nationwide, took the unusual step of advertising jobs on MTV, the cable rock-music channel, to attract young prospective workers into its management program. In the throes of a rapid expansion, Burger King felt a strong need to try new avenues that might help ease its worker shortage.

In Chicago, Andy Frain Services, a supplier of ushers and ticket takers for concert halls and sports arenas like Comiskey Park, is faced with new recruiting headaches. Says Operations Director James Wronski: "The bonus of * seeing a ball game or hearing a concert used to be enough to attract the workers we needed. We used to sign up half the kids we solicited for jobs. Now it's below 20%."

From shopping malls to corporate computer centers, from fast-food joints to high-tech industrial plants, a common plea is popping up all across the U.S.: HELP WANTED. APPLY WITHIN. Suddenly America is running up against serious labor shortages that are crimping many businesses and forcing corporate headhunters to work overtime. As a result, says Richard Kappus, an analyst at the New York State department of labor, companies are having to "do more, spend more and bend over backward to attract workers." The shortages are most severe in low-paying service jobs and in many positions that require technical skills. The maddening worker deficit has come about in part because of the low birthrate, or "baby bust," of the 1960s and early 1970s, which is causing fewer young Americans to enter the job market. That trend will continue over the next decade.

The labor shortages could worsen considerably this year as the U.S. economy starts to grow with renewed vigor. Government figures released last week showed that the gross national product expanded at a 3.2% annual rate in the first quarter of 1986, nearly five times as fast as in the last quarter of 1985. The sharp pickup in growth may prove to be quirky, but it got an additional boost late in the week when the Federal Reserve Board cut its discount rate, which is the interest charged on loans to member banks, from 7% to 6.5%, its lowest level in eight years.

But the economic statistics contain a striking anomaly. Even as business activity increases and worker shortages grow more troublesome, the number of Americans on the jobless rolls remains high by historical standards. The unemployment rate stands at 7.2%, which is less than the 9.7% registered in 1982 but still well above the 5.6% reached in 1979, near the peak of the last economic expansion.

For many worker-hungry employers, the jobless figures are a major mystery. "Who are these people who make up the unemployment statistics?" asks Thomas Anton, executive vice president of Troy, Mich.-based Kelly Services, the temporary office-help firm. "We're doing our best to find them because we can put them to work. Still, we don't get enough."