Study puts Illinois employers eighth most hard up filling empty jobs

[July 21, 2022]  By Elyse Kelly | The Center Square contributor

(The Center Square) – Compared to other states, Illinois is having one of the hardest times finding employees, according to a new study.

A new ranking from WalletHub puts the Land of Lincoln eighth among the states for unfilled job openings, comparing the last 12 months but weighing the most recent month twice as heavily.

“You’ve got a slowdown in GDP, interest rates going up, but you still have all these jobs going unfilled, something that I don’t think anybody’s really experienced before,” Todd Maisch, president and CEO of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, told The Center Square. “People are going to be trying to figure this out for a long time.”

The easiest remedy, and he added it’s not actually easy, is to double down on the Illinois economy’s natural advantages like logistics, Maisch said.

“Part of the reason we have jobs going unfilled is because we can’t get goods and people from point A to point B efficiently at a reasonable cost,” he said.

While any one ranking should be taken with a grain of salt, there are things the state can do to improve the situation, he noted. Maisch suggested, while controversial, if the state allowed undocumented but otherwise law abiding residents to become commercial driver’s license truck drivers, this could help fill the gap.

“We think it makes perfect sense to go ahead and allow these individuals to go ahead and apply – probably through a special process – but to be a part of the solution,” he said.

He notes undocumented residents are already allowed to obtain driver’s licenses to run to the grocery store and other personal errands.

“If we trust them on the road in their own family car, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to say this person isn’t someone who can also contribute to the economy as a CDL driver,” he said.

While it would be hard to find an industry that would say this isn't an issue, the barge industry is being hit particularly hard, according to Maisch.

“Really good careers are going unfilled at the rate of 20% in the barge industry,” he said. “And if you think about supply chain, what it means for inflation, what it means for the fact that we don’t have enough toilet paper on the shelves, you’ve got to take a look at things like barge traffic.”

If the industry doesn’t figure out how to fill these good-paying, vital supply-chain jobs, Maisch says residents will be looking at years of inflation.

Maisch observed economists will be studying this era for years, adding if he or anyone knew the answer to why workers are sitting on the sidelines, they would be making a fortune.