Mirroring a national trend, Lane County employers are having a hard time filling jobs. Workforce analyst Henry Fields with the Oregon Employment Department told the Springfield City ClubThursday that a lack of qualified applicants is one reason. Another is a lack of applicants for low wage jobs.
Fields said they're seeing a record number of people starting their own businesses in Oregon.
“And it really reflects, I think, on both more comfort with where they are in terms of their financial situation or their ability to get a job,” Fields said. “And then the other element, which is difficult to quantify, might be that the disruption of the last 18 months really adjusted people’s expectations for what they want to do with their life or how they expect their relationship to work to look like.”
Fields said a long-term, thorny issue in Lane County is low wages—$10,000 lower per worker than the rest of Oregon, which pays less than the national average. He said wages are growing, but not any faster than the rest of the state or nation. Fields said, for now, people are willing to move to Lane County despite low wages and a rising cost of living, but that could change.