The Official Newspaper for Foster County
The Official Newspaper for Foster County
It doesn’t matter where you go in North Dakota, you’re going to find that retail, health care, government, farming, education and even sports franchises have job openings.
Just walk down the street in almost any community and you will see signs in windows that say “now hiring.” Those messages used to say “now accepting applications,” if there was a sign at all. Now, it’s a little more blunt.
North Dakota is a growing state in economy and population, yet there remains a disparity between jobs available and population. From 2000 to 2022, the state’s economy grew by 115%, but according to the Department of Commerce, there are now only 30 workers for every 100 jobs.
With a population of about 780,000, there are roughly 23,000 job openings across the state, according to Job Service North Dakota, and those are positions that are advertised. There may be many more such as openings for doctors or professors that don’t go out to the general public.
At last report, the state had 9,900 people on unemployment and if every one of those people suddenly went to work, there would still be a labor shortage.
Some organizations are getting more aggressive about handling their local openings. One example is in the fast-food industry. Labor shortages have been so severe that some of these chains close their restaurants during parts of the day and focus only on drive-through business.
That’s slowly changing, however, as restaurant chain administrations are realizing that if they had better salaries, the shortage would be minimal. Recent pay hikes are also attracting many retired people.
Medical has been hit hard. A shortage of doctors and nurses is apparent across the board. In many cases, clinics lack doctors, but are staffed by nurse practitioners. Some clinics and hospitals use traveling doctors and nurses brought in from outside the United States, most notably from the Philippines.
Because farming is largely seasonal, it also has its challenges. Every aspect of farming is affected by this; livestock, sugar beets, grain, rail facilities, trucking and farm education.
Schools have relaxed their standards to participate in teaching. In many cases you can teach in a public school with any degree and in others you can teach as long as you are working toward a teaching degree.
Something is now being done on a larger scale to address these issues. In summer 2023, the Legislature passed a bill establishing the Office of Legal Immigration that is within the Department of Commerce.
It was created solely for the purpose of bringing foreign-born workers to North Dakota to address the labor shortage.
It has a long way to go, but is stepping out in the right direction. OLI was established, it has recognized the problem and now it is working on ways to solve it.
One of the ways to do that is by looking at case studies and one of them is in Utah. Between 2000 and 2019, the number of immigrants in Utah increased by 64 percent, almost double the amount of U.S.-born growth.
The top industries for immigrants in Utah include manufacturing, education, health care, construction, professional and retail. So it’s much like our state with the only difference being population. Utah has 3.4 million residents with nearly half of them living in the Salt Lake City metro.
Utah has created refugee-friendly policies and legal pathways to arrive in Salt Lake City paving the way for attracting immigrants. North Dakota is now analyzing this initiative.
Utah isn’t Shangri-la, but it has solved a lot of its employment issues since 2000. And as long as North Dakota continues to grow, so will the labor shortage if the status quo continues. It’s good that somebody is taking a look at this on a statewide scale.
