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No lunch at The Fork at Skagit Bay. No summer patio service at the Calico Cupboard. One person filling parts orders at the Morris Street NAPA store. A dozen-plus openings on the La Conner School District website.
These are among the local impacts of a national scenario that in July saw 10.1 million job openings and 9.5 million unemployed people.
“That’s backwards,” said Scott Price of Edward Jones in La Conner. “Now we are at about 4.8 million unemployed, but there are still a lot of job openings out there, especially in the restaurant and service industries.”
According to the Washington State Employment Security Department, 37,000 new jobs in food service and drinking places have been added in the last 12 months.
“I am always looking for new people,” said David Kas of The Fork at Skagit Bay. “They are out there, but the competition is intense.”
The typical young restaurant worker is not a La Conner resident. “If you’re going to drive from Mount Vernon, Burlington, or Anacortes, you’re going to pass two dozen restaurants that are hiring on your way to La Conner,” said Kas.
Kas and Calico Cupboard manager Hilary Freed agree that the seasonal nature of business in town is an obstacle. “Because we can’t always give people full-time work, many don’t want to drive to La Conner for a part-time position,” said Fried.
In general, she thinks La Conner doesn’t have the population to sustain the workforce needed by the town’s hotels and restaurants.
Kas dropped his lunch shift about six weeks ago. Freed now closes at 2 p.m. or 2:30 p.m. – “even 1:30 on really busy days, because staff has already worked 10 days in a row and are ready to crumble.”
Fortunately, the three-location chain can shift staff between restaurants and until school started, Freed could rely on high school and college students.
“They really saved us. They were rock stars,” she said. “Without my core employees who live in town and have been with me for years, we would really be struggling.”
Fewer staff also means longer waits for diners. Freed says her customers have mostly been sympathetic and understanding. Kas says angry customers make it harder to retain and recruit wait staff.
“When you are crying in the walk-in fridge every weekend and the money you are taking home has gone down, you start looking for something else to do,” he said of his staff.
The Slider Café is small, doesn’t serve dinner or alcohol and has only eight employees. Still, owner Pat Ball says he gets “almost zero response from help wanted ads. If it wasn’t for my current staff recommending friends and acquaintances, I would be in trouble.”
The retail sector is also understaffed. The NAPA store staff is “just me,” says manager Steve Horton. “I usually have another guy, but they are short staffed in Burlington so he went there.”
The downtown Mount Vernon NAPA store closed recently, after “everybody quit, one guy retired and there was nobody to run it.” Horton expects that closure to be permanent.
La Conner Drug could use another pharmacy assistant or technician. Assistant Talia Bill says that when pharmacy technical staffer Winona Knippers worked remotely to handle all the extra paper and digital work created by giving vaccines, only two people staffed the store. That is not nearly enough.
At Roozengaarde last spring, “I was parking people, selling flowers, doing everything except my job,” said manager Brent Roozen. Low staff levels continue to affect fall bulb packing.
The La Conner School District website shows a dozen openings, several for substitutes.
“We should have another eight jobs listed, but for two months we have been without the HR payroll specialist who would post these positions,” said human resources director Brian Gianello.
The culprit is the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Even with mitigation efforts, people have concerns about working in schools. And while everyone is careful and temperatures of students and staff are checked daily, “we have had a couple positive test results,” he said. No one has been seriously ill, but any positive test means “that person is out for 10 days and we are looking for somebody to fill that spot.”
Meanwhile, Gianello says all the county’s districts “are casting the same net and competing against one another for paraprofessionals, food service employees and transportation drivers.”
So where are all the workers?
Several factors are at play, says Edward Jones’ Price, citing national economic data. A steadily decreasing birth rate means fewer people entering the job market. A tremendous wave of experienced workers retired early and left the job market during the pandemic. An increase in the national savings rate, driven in part by stimulus payments and unemployment, means people can afford to be pickier about the job they take.
And being picky is the story for many people, says Price. “Workers are re-evaluating what they want to do, especially restaurant workers and service employees, who are moving away from that industry.”
One exception to local trends is John Thulen of Pioneer Potatoes. He has plenty of people driving potatoes from field to plant this year – all men whose dads drove for his dad, Gale.
A more worrisome issue for his workforce is the impact of new agricultural worker overtime laws that go into effect in January.
“We will adapt,” he said. “The sky is not falling. We just have to figure out how to catch it!
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