South DaCola

Editorial Cartoonist from South Dakota

Employment

Employment South Dakotans

Need qualified workers (welders)? Train them yourself

l3wis 10Comments

Well the Hubbel craft doesn’t say many wise things, but when she does, they are whoppers. This is Lora’s online comment to the Argus story about hiring welders;

Lora Hubbel · Top Commenter · Sioux Falls, South Dakota

I don’t get it. Sioux Steel, if you need welders….THEN TRAIN THEM! Why look to the government to educate and train someone for your business…DO IT YOURSELF! You don’t have to do the “schooling”…just give them hands on training. Give them a small job at first and as they learn more they can do more complicated jobs. Since WHEN have we pouted about not having enough STATE TRAINED workers? Man up Sioux Steel…take control of your own destiny and train your own workers.

Besides having the desire to want to be a welder and having skills working with your hands, there really isn’t a reason why you can’t train welders on the job. As someone who has worked in manufacturing in the past said to me;

The training schools do not teach useable welding skills. Through the last 40 years of our trying to use their trained skills in many South Dakota factories, the first thing we learned to do with the new employee was to break all the bad habits taught at the SD schools. This is a reason these students have to leave South Dakota. We do not have programs being taught matching the needs of the factories.  The necessary skills for South Dakota welding shops / factories are not taught by the instructors not understanding the businesses. Most South Dakota businesses do not need “certified” welders. These shops need to train their own employees to do the light gauge work South Dakota factories utilize. The need for the training academies is expensive bullshit to force under-educated kids to get sucked into paying high priced loans to study useless skills.

These factory owners do not want to take the farm and city kids into their factories anymore to go through a rigorous training period. We taught many workers everything about welding the way we needed them to weld and some are still at it 30 years and more later at the factory we started in 1965. This is the way it needs to be done to build South Dakota and a dedicated workforce.

No money for public education, but $50 million to subsidize training for private industry, go figure.

Employment Sioux Falls

Let’s get serious about workforce development

l3wis 3Comments

hard_working_well_digger_button-rc152a7dd41bb49cfa021dfe817645edc_x7j1a_8byvr_324

Yesterday at the Sioux Falls City council informational meeting, Darrin Smith did a presentation on the $500K the city will be granting to businesses to recruit workers. Some interesting points he made;

1) He said employers are telling him they are having trouble recruiting workers in the $20 an hour an lower range.

2) He said recently in Sioux Falls there was 2,300 available openings and in the same period 3,800 people applied for unemployment.

Am I the only one that sees the correlation here? I think some people would just rather draw unemployment then work for a low wage.

I think to put some teeth in this grant process the city should require anyone seeking the recruitment money that they pay market scale-living wages. In other words $16 an hour or higher.

I also think for every dollar a business gets in grant money they should roll over as a bonus to employees that get recruited and stay with the company over one year. In other words, if Company A receives $5000 from the city in grant money, and they hire 5 people that stay with the company for over a year, each employee would receive a $1000 bonus.

We can recruit low wage employees until the cows come home, but it doesn’t have much of an affect on our local economy and is really just a waste of tax dollars.

 

Drugs Employment

Should elected officials be drug tested?

l3wis 3Comments

goose

Before I get smoking on this post, I will say I don’t think anyone should be drug tested unless you are working in public safety, trucking or other jobs where safety can be compromised. I think people should be judged on their accomplishments and experience.

That being said, I have often wondered why lawmakers require public employees, and some have even suggested welfare recipients, to be drug tested when they are not? I thought about this the other day after turning in my resume for the county commission seat.

What do you think? Should we drug test elected officials before they are sworn into office? Or better yet, drug test them when they turn their petitions in for candidacy?

Hey, what’s good for the goose, is good for the gander.

Employment

Wage increase for tipped employees takes effect January 1st

l3wis 4Comments

handing-over-money-sized

­While most would be happy with a $2 an hour raise, it really doesn’t address the bigger issue of employers paying employees fairly. While I supported a minimum wage increase for hourly folks, I didn’t like the portion of the law that doubles tipped employees wages from $2.13 to $4.25.

Why?

It doesn’t address the bigger issue of tipped employees paying non-tipped employees. What most diners don’t realize is that restaurants in South Dakota can force tipped employees to give a portion (10-25%) of their tips to non-tipped employees (bussers, cooks, dishwashers, hosts). Of course no employer really forces you to do this, but they do sucker you into signing an agreement that you will, or they won’t hire you. While a $2 an hour raise will help a lot of full-time servers (even though many restaurants already pay more then $4 an hour to tipped employees) we are still stuck paying other employees from our tips when this should be the business’ responsibility.

I would have liked to seen a provision in the law eliminating the tip share option for tipped employees, forcing employers to pay their non-tipped staff more instead putting it on the backs of their tipped employees.

While I only work about 10 hours a week serving nowadays, when I worked full-time a couple of years ago I tipped out $4,500 in one year (these are tips I EARNED given directly to me from customers I served). In that same period of time, let’s say I was making that extra $2 an hour, that only adds up to $4,160 before taxes.

Eliminating the tip share would be more beneficial to tipped employees then any silly $2 an hour raise.

Furthermore, the media will have a feeding frenzy about how tipped employees are now making double of what they did before (not really), so the unintended consequences will be people tipping less while giving restaurants an excuse to raise meal prices.

Employment Sioux Falls

Want to get ahead in Sioux Falls? Work multiple jobs.

l3wis 3Comments

The irony of this story, was just to hard to resist:

So Drew came up with a crazy plan to pay off the debt as soon as possible and that involved him taking on not just a second job, but a third–putting in an average of 70 to 80 hours a week.

“My friends joke, ‘How many jobs do you have now Drew?’ Also did—house sat for people, dog sat, gave plasma, sold stuff,” Drew said.

Stacey stocked retail shelves nights and weekends and there were no dinners out or other luxuries.

So, as you can see, if you want to live the American dream, you must eliminate fun and work like a dog, or at least sit a dog or sell some bodily fluids.

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