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Las Vegas Job Market Keeps Getting Tougher
The Las Vegas job market continue to be challenging for those out of work. The State of Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) released reports on December 2008 unemployment levels on Monday this week. Nevada’s unemployment level jumped to 9.1% unemployment. This is the highest it has been in over 25 years.
To shed more light on the matter…. if you take into consideration the 5,200 jobs that Wynn Encore added in December, the situation looks even more bleak. If you remove that job creation, Nevada would be over 10%. So…… it is pretty bad folks.
However, there is some hope on the horizon. It appears President Obama’s stimulus package will improve the employment outlook in Nevada. Nearly $1 trillion will be pushed out to the states to stimulate the economy. A large portion of that is dedicated to job creation. The areas where you will see growth will be in Public Works project such as roadways, bridges, telecommunication infrastructure, health care and education.
Nevada supposedly has some 300+ ’shovel ready’ projects that will be presented for funding. These projects will create many new jobs in Nevada. The money will flow from the feds to the states and then down to the counties and agencies performing the work. I anticipate the majority of the initial work will be outsourced so there will be a substantial amount of job creation in the private sectors as well as the public.�
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January 30th, 2009 11:04 am
The problem with those “shovel ready” projects is that they’re for people with shovels. Construction is/was big in Vegas, but you have to have people show up at all of those finished projects so they’re not empty.
All of that money isn’t going to show up right away. So it still may be a couple of years before those projects are able to start.
We need something in Vegas besides more construction. Even elsewhere, I’m not really seeing Engineers from Microsoft and Intel holding a stop sign on a road crew.
Of all of that trillion, there’s only a small percentage of anything that will create a real job. The government can’t create a job that lasts.
My wife is a case manager in Vegas that hands out food stamps and other support (she’s facing a 6% cut), but their lobby is packed standing room only every day now. Except for the pay cut, that job has an ironic kind of job security nowadays.
February 6th, 2009 4:46 pm
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February 9th, 2009 4:06 pm
Hi Wayne,
You are taking the term ’shovel ready’ to be construction related. Yes - many of these projects are construction related, but not all. And many of them do create long lasting jobs. I will provide a few examples:
(1) The Digital TV conversion date has been moved from February to June. This is to ensure that ALL homes are digital TV ready. If they are not, a team will be sent out to upgrade the technology of those homes that are not. Yes - these are short term jobs. But no - they are not construction related and are actually IT based. During this process, they will discover IT infrastructure shortcomings which will create more long term jobs as well. One of the goals of the stimulus package is to strengthen the IT grid. That will mean running fiber and wireless to our rural/frontier areas.
(2) Another piece of the stimulus package will be electronic health records to improve the quality of health care in Nevada. These jobs will be primarily IT and Medical Coding jobs.
Both of these are examples of ’shovel ready’ jobs meaning that they are ready to be completed immediately. What the administration wants to do is be able to write a check and put people to work immediately. So ’shovel ready’ means the plans are complete and all that is required is funding.
April 6th, 2009 12:37 pm
Wayne, your a realist, Doug, ur a dreamer. If you think electronicizing (for lack of a better word) medical records is going to create long term local jobs, get a clue. To take on any large projects (such as this) the work will be contracted out to huge contracting IT firms with so-called expertise. It will turn into a good old boy who knows who as to which company gets the contract. Then the workers will no doubt commute in and out of LV each weekend to do the work, not to mention, IT is a dieing industry, even the young people in India are thinking twice about getting into this industry. The mantra in IT for the last couple of years has been “if your going to spend millions on an IT system, why do you need to spend millions on salaries of people to maintain it?” Strengthing the IT grid, the way I see it, that will be good for the big TV Cable companies and Verizon and ATT, not sure how many of those companies have hi-paying headcount in the greater Southwest Nevada area.