'Where are the people?': Jobs are plentiful in RI this summer, but workers aren't

The first day of summer is days away, and Rhode Island employers are still looking to staff up — both in traditional summer jobs as well as year-round fields.

"They're all struggling to find bodies," said Dave Chenevert, executive director of the Rhode Island Manufacturers Association.

But the same is true in the restaurant and hotel industries.

"Where are the people? Where are they going?" Dale J. Venturini, president and chief executive of the Rhode Island Hospitality Association, said of the conundrum facing employers in her field.

Even park rangers and lifeguards at state beaches are not immune from the trend.

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The state has only 71 of its 157 lifeguard positions filled as of Tuesday, said Michael J. Healey, spokesman for the Department of Environmental Management.

The inability to get people for the jobs, which pay $14 to $17 an hour, means the DEM has to shrink the areas open to swimming with a lifeguard and move guards around more often.

"It could diminish our ability to serve the public," he said, noting that the agency has markedly fewer lifeguards than it did even in the summer of 2020, when much of life came to a standstill because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Child care shortage is still a barrier to employment

Chenevert places some of the blame for the shortage of factory workers on women leaving the workforce due to a shortage of affordable child care that has reached crisis levels.

"They're putting their families first," he said.

Matthew Weldon, director of the state Department of Labor and Training, also said it's the result of historically low unemployment rates in Rhode Island.

"Full employment" is generally thought to be when the unemployment rate gets as low as 4% to 5%, he said. "We're well below that."

In April, the state's rate was 3.2%, better than the rates in Massachusetts, 4.1%; Connecticut, 4.4%; and nationally, 3.6%. The last time Rhode Island's rate was that low was 1989, he said.

That makes it a job-seeker's market.

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"If there are qualified people looking for work," Weldon said, "I'm sure there are Rhode Island employers looking to hire them."

And, while some jobs with a high demand for workers, such as hospital nurses, require advanced training, others, such as some retail and restaurant jobs, are entry level.

"You just basically need the willingness to work," said Donna Murray, the DLT’s chief labor statistician.

And some fields promise to need additional workers for a long time to come, said Weldon, naming construction, which has more people working now than at any time since 2007, before the Great Recession.

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"They're looking at projects for the next 10 years," he said.

Youth-employment trends work against many industries

Healey said that the lifeguard corps has been hit by a trend reaching back more than 40 years: fewer young people are taking traditional summer jobs. Employment has fallen from the peak year of 1979, when 60% of American teenagers were in the workforce, Healey said, citing Federal Reserve Bank data. Today, that figure is 35%.

"There might be a tendency ... to suppose that teens today are lazy," said Healey, "but a much better answer is that kids are spending more time in the classroom than ever before."

He noted that schools often are in session later in June than they used to be and start before Labor Day, something unheard of decades ago.

Plus, more students are enrolled in summer classes, either at the high school or college levels. And more students take unpaid internships or volunteer at community-service jobs to make their college applications stand out, Healey said.

That can leave summer-job employers in the lurch later in the season.

Take Fernando Cardeal, owner of Josie's Ice Cream, in Cumberland.

Cardeal said that hiring the crew to start this year was easier than it was last year, with 35 applicants compared with last year's 10. With most of his workers returning this year and last year, Cardeal only had to hire a few new workers each year to fill out his workforce.

But the hiring won't end there. He will need to cover shifts in the late summer and early fall, when his student workers return to the classroom, or athletic-team commitments conflict with working hours.

While Cardeal is also contending with supply-chain issues — he can't always get the cups, spoons and straws that he wants — business has never been better in the four years he has owned the two-decade-old ice cream shop. "We just had our best month since I've been open."

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Business is great, but ...

That's a refrain that the hospitality association's Venturini is becoming all too familiar with.

"Business is great," she said. "Doing business is the hardest it's ever been."

Supply-chain issues can find restaurateurs scrambling when a food order comes in with less than expected, or some items missing altogether.

"You didn't get your product," she said. "You're changing your menu on the fly."

That challenge is compounded by a shortage of workers, she said, citing national statistics that show two job openings for every unemployed person in the industry.

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And pandemic-weary customers are hoping their favorite restaurants will return to pre-COVID levels of service, and pricing.

"People are weary. They're tired of gas prices. They're tired of inflation and a lot of things," she said, adding that hospitality workers are often at the end of the supply chain, the first workers dealing directly with consumers. She asked people to have patience when favorite menu items may be unavailable or when they can't be seated immediately — even when tables are open — because there aren't enough people in the kitchen to prepare everyone's meal at once.

Venturini said the hospitality industry is looking for workers — especially "back-of-the-house" positions, like cooks.

"We can accommodate anyone's schedule," she said, echoing leaders in other industries, who said flexible hours are the biggest draw for job seekers.

Training for everyone?

The hospitality industry is also doing a lot more training. A popular class offered through the association is for first-time managers, another position facing worker shortages. Bosses find they need to promote trusted employees who haven't had experience managing other workers.

The manufacturers association's Chenevert said his industry is likewise turning to training programs — with a previously untapped population: prisoners at the Adult Correctional Institutions.

"It's a pool of talent we were ignoring," he said.

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Historically, job-training programs for inmates preparing for their release have been a "train-and-pray" model, the Department of Labor and Training's Weldon said. Prisoners were taught skills without much consideration of whether employers were looking for workers with those skills.

Now, the state is "aligning programs inside with the jobs outside," he said.

The state's program, run through the Community College of Rhode Island and the Polaris MEP manufacturing industry consulting program, teaches entry-level technical skills, such as blueprint reading and operating computer-controlled machine tools.

It already has its first graduate, from the women's medium-security prison.

"She's got herself a job," said Chenevert.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RI summer employment outlook: Jobs are plentiful, but workers aren't