A job slump in Williston would be a boom time in California.

 

Sign outside Williston Walmart on 9/20/15. Defacto minimum wage in town is still $17 an hour. Photo by James Ulvog.
Sign outside Williston Walmart on 9/20/15. That is the starting rate. Defacto minimum wage in town still looks to be $17 an hour. Photo by James Ulvog.

I wish we had news this terrible in Southern California.

9/23 – Williston Herald –  ‘Looking for work?  Job fair boasts 400 job openings in sold-out show’ (paper edition so no link) – Two day job fair has 400 jobs or more. There are a dozen companies on the waiting list to get a table at the job fair.

The number of jobs has dropped in the last year but companies are still looking for people.

Article from Williston Wire on 9-25 said there were over 800 applicants looking at 437 job listings. Not quite like a year ago but also nothing vaguely resembling a collapse.

Keep in mind that is in a city that had 11,000 residents 10 years ago and about 30,000 or so a year ago.

Let’s round off 437 in a city of 30,000 to a rate of current job openings equal to one percent of the population.

I really wish a job fair in my home town of Rancho Cucamonga with 1,500 listings was considered a slump. If I recall correctly, the last job fair here had one or two hundred job listings.

I really really wish that the greater Los Angeles area had 185,000 jobs available with companies ready to hire today. With the way the economy is in SoCal now, that would feel like a gold-rush style boom in Los Angeles. In Williston that is a slump.

Like I said, we should have such economic troubles.

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