Competition for local jobs on the rise

Albino Rozano said he normally gets a call back.

The retail manager has been looking for another job, one with more money and hours that will match his school schedule.

But several weeks have passed and the 31-year-old University of Texas-Pan American student said he has not heard back yet from the three retailers with which he’s applied, despite persistence and years of retail experience.

“Usually they call me back within a week,” Rozano said recently. “There have been some similar businesses that closed recently. I’m assuming those people are also applying.”

With unemployment in double digits and job growth confined to government and medical work, job seekers in other industries are facing stiffer competition in Hidalgo County for a smaller pool of jobs.

McAllen’s job market has been highlighted for remaining strong and growing during the recession, but most of the growth has been among two industries that generally offer relatively high-paying, high-skill jobs: health care and government work.

In all other industries, including retail, manufacturing, transportation, and leisure and hospitality, jobs have been lost, and the few that have been added have largely been seasonal.

Aside from health care, about the only employer adding jobs throughout the past year was the government, according to the Texas Workforce Commission.

Federal, state and local governments added 2,800 jobs through November this year, while health care and education — industries that are combined in labor market data — added 2,800 jobs, according to statistics from the workforce commission.

Most of those jobs were in health care, according to a report from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Retail, especially, has been slammed this recession. While retailers added 1,110 jobs in November as they geared up for the Christmas shopping season, there are still 1,200 fewer retail jobs than there were last year at this time. Rozano and others like 23-year-old Jose Garza are finding fewer opportunities.

Garza, who worked part-time as a substitute teacher in Mission and is studying for a teaching degree at UTPA, said he will likely expand his job search to other industries.

“They said that they’re going to call me, but they don’t call me,” he said. “Wherever there is money, I will go find a job.”

While there’s little worry that the health care industry will cut jobs anytime soon, there’s some concern that government jobs could soon be lost as falling sales tax and property tax revenues deplete budgets at the state and local level.

In Hidalgo County, one out of four people in the workforce is directly employed by the government. More than 80 percent of those public-sector employees are employed in local government, according to the workforce commission.
Tom Pauken, the chairman of the commission, said that with the persistent recession, governments at the local level will be pressured to slash budgets so deeply that their job growth may halt or even reverse.

“There’s a tendency to treat tax dollars as other people’s money,” Pauken said. “We’re going into a different environment where the revenues will not be there and there will be pressure to stop the job growth in local government.”

All this means that it’s far more competitive out there for those looking for jobs. While there is no empirical measure of how competitive the job market is, a recent survey by employment Web site SimplyHired.com found that the McAllen metro area is one of the worst places in the nation to look for work.

The San Francisco-based company, which compiles classified listings from newspapers such as The Monitor and Web sites such as Monster.com, said in late November that there is roughly one job for every 43 people who are receiving unemployment benefits in the country.

But that measure has its drawbacks, because many businesses, including entry-level employers, find new hires through word of mouth and not by posting classified ads, said Robert Crawley, a labor market analyst with the Texas Workforce Commission.

Still, with many low-skill industries suffering, competition for jobs has probably gotten tougher, Crawley said.
“Your chances of getting a job depends on the qualifications of the people that you are competing with,” he said. “As the unemployment rate goes up, the higher number of job seekers increases your competition.”

Sean Gaffney covers business, the economy and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4434.