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A Serious Worker Shortage?
ASK IF GREATER BOSTON faces a potentially severe, even economically crippling worker shortage in the next years, and you hear sharply contrasting points of view.
“Absolutely,” says Paul Harrington, associate director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. In the 1970s, Harrington reminds us, the Boston area, indeed all of New England’s labor force was growing more rapidly than the United States as a whole. It hummed along at about the national average for the 80s, except for New Hampshire (often both admired and dismissed as the “Hong Kong” of the region), where it was higher.
But then came the 1990s. While the US as a whole spread its economic wings to new heights and saw its labor capacity grow by nearly 14 percent, the growth curve cratered in Massachusetts – to less than 2 percent.
Here we are now early in the new century, reasons Richard Freeland, president of Northeastern University, “coming out of a downturn and we are not going to have enough workers.” In a 2003 talk to the New England Board of Higher Education, Freeland minced no words. The New England and Boston area workforce crisis, he said, is “severe, complex, structural and long-term.”
The statistics are startling. The nation got a bump in bachelor degree production of 18 percent through the 1990s. In all of New England the increase was only two percent. And at the associate degree level – community colleges, where the training programs exist for many unfilled jobs – the story is worse. The US gain was 25 percent more graduates than the decade before; in New England it was a negative seven percent – leaving no choice, as Northeastern president Freeland puts it, but to turn more and more to immigrants to fill the gap.
Interestingly, some New England experts and observers differ, seeing no great reason to be concerned about a workforce deficit at all. A Serious Worker Shortage?
Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff of the Taubman Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government suggest any shortages are likely, “over time, to be self-correcting.” Says Altshuler: “You train when you have to. What Boston does historically is maintain the center of the highest excellence.”
Cathy Minehan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, points to the region’s “highly “motivated creatives.” She’s confident that “this underlying strength will bring us through.”
Mara Aspinall, president of Genzyme Genetics and Genzyme Pharmaceuticals, sees some jobs harder to fill. “But this is a national story,” she says. “I don’t hear a fundamentally different story in New York or on the west coast.”
Economist Harrington, on the other hand, asserts: “Only foreign immigration is propping up our numbers. What if it stops?” Harrington warns regional leaders that the Boston area could slip to the “economic backwater.”
Our conclusion, as outsiders: the authorities who pooh-pooh the grave warnings could turn out to be right. But they might not. Many labor economists predict a severe nationwide labor shortage in the coming years, prompted by skilled Baby Boomers hitting retirement age, dramatically accelerating industry demand for higher skills in its work forces, a static share of the population projected to graduate from college, indeed a static overall workforce in its prime productive years. The grim projections hold up, they argue, even if one assumes some one million immigrants, legal and illegal, are added to the pool yearly.
Even increases in outsourcing of jobs won’t be enough, it’s argued, to avert a serious US worker shortage.
To us that suggests the Commonwealth would clearly benefit from a smart, activist agenda to strengthen workforce training and open employment opportunities, both for its traditional residents and its new immigrant populations.