Discussing Massachusetts’s boutique job market
MassInc held a breakfast forum couple of weeks ago to discuss the state and direction of Massachusetts’ labor market. I was unable to attend but a partial transcript is available on the organization’s website (free registration required). Below are a couple of quotes to whet your appetite:
Moderator Paul Grogan, The Boston Foundation, on the state of Massachusetts’s workforce:
Talented young workers are exiting the state in larger numbers than we would like to see and they are being replaced by less skilled and unskilled immigrants. Talent has always been our salvation. That’s basically what we’ve got. We are going to have to have a human capital strategy that is very strong. I am heartened by what Secretary Bump said. A second pool of potential labor productivity is inner city young people. Enormous advances have come from the 1993 education reform law but there has been much less progress in the cities than we would like to see. There is going to be a forthcoming study on college completion among Boston students. Other cities that have done this study have shown that in the big cities, if you are an entering 9th grade in the Boston public schools, you have less than a 10 percent chance of achieving a college degree of any kind.
Grogan and Rick Lord, Associated Industries of Massachusetts, talk about the Bristol Myers Squibb investment:
GROGAN: There has been celebration of the Bristol-Myers Squibb achievement in Devens. Do you see other possibilities for this kind of approach?
LORD: The Bristol-Myers Squibb announcement was a great success. Six hundred new jobs. They really wooed the company, something Massachusetts hasn’t done a lot of in the past which other states do very aggressively. The reality is we are mostly small employers and our growth comes from employers who are here. That worked beautifully because it was at Devens and it was pre-permitted and the state gave them generous tax incentives. I don’t think we can do that for every business. We have to create an environment that is attractive for our existing employers, whether it’s permitting or workers comp we were able to tackle the business costs I’d like to see a concerted effort on health care costs. We have to tackle those issues.
Here’s a comment I made regarding the cost of the BSM deal and what it might tell us about the benefits that can be gained from the $1bn life-sciences initiative that is likely to sail through the Legislature. Here are some thoughts of mine on a MassInc report that preceded the breakfast forum.
