RUSH: Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Hey, Beth, you’re next on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi.
RUSH: Hey, how are you?
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Dittos from the diary state.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I am a medium-sized employer of an industrial painting company, and I can’t find employees in this economy.
RUSH: What do you need them to do?
CALLER: Hard physical labor that apparently people don’t want to do. But the weird thing is they don’t know what the job entails until they come in, yet nobody is coming in.
RUSH: Define for me in your business what hard physical labor is. I know you said industrial painting, but what is it that they do?
CALLER: Well, we do water blasting and sandblasting and painting and flooring.
RUSH: So they show up and apply, and when they find out what it is they’re not interested?
CALLER: No, nobody’s showing up to apply.
RUSH: Oh.
CALLER: We only had eight people even come in to fill out an application in a week and a half.
RUSH: Do you publish what earning potential is?
CALLER: No. No, just two full-time positions are available, and —
RUSH: Let me help you out here. Here’s what you’re doing wrong. Ha-ha-ha-ha. Here’s what you’re doing wrong. You need to first tell ’em what the sick day schedule is, how many vacation days they’re going to get, how many personal days to take the dog to the vet and then you’ll be overrun with applications.
CALLER: Yeah, you mistook me for a government employer.
RUSH: Yeah. (laughing) Have you thought about running ads in Spanish?
CALLER: But those people only want to work eight hours a day. Then they want to go home.
RUSH: Wait a minute. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with only wanting to work eight hours a day? What kind of a slave shop are you running?
CALLER: I’m running a shop where we get jobs done that the customers need done when they need ’em done.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: That’s holidays, weekends, overtime, but that’s what it takes.
RUSH: And you pay them fairly, do you?
CALLER: Yeah, I do. They can make probably, you know, 40 to $60,000 a year. That’s pretty good pay.
RUSH: Forty to $60,000 a year.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Well, you need to do some numbers crunching and find out what with unemployment and food stamps and other things, you might find people get pretty close to the 40 —
CALLER: Well, you know, that’s one of the other things that concerns me greatly about the future of the country is the entitlement mentality and how it appears to (unintelligble) really grabbed hold because most people are making a decision, “Well, am I better staying home or working?” That never used to be a question that we had —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — you know, ten, 15 years ago.
RUSH: What’s the unemployment rate in Wisconsin, do you know?
CALLER: I think it’s about 9%.
RUSH: Nine percent. And do you happen to know what weekly unemployment benefits are in Wisconsin?
CALLER: Well, I think it depends on what you made at your last job.
RUSH: Well, I’m trying to come up with a formula where you’re competing —
CALLER: I’m competing with people not working getting paid to do nothing.
RUSH: Yeah, you’re competing with the sloth industry.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: You may have to double what the unemployment benefit is to get people to come to work.
CALLER: You know, I think the biggest issue here in Wisconsin is BadgerCare. We have free medical care for people who don’t have an income.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: And they get better insurance than I get —
RUSH: You know, it is amazing what they’ve done. I have run into people who, if they can be assured that their health care is taken care of they’ll forget trying to get a job. They’ll go on unemployment, health care is the big deal. It’s as though people think that every day is a medical emergency and they need emergency treatment every day. That’s always been the thing that amazed me about health care, is the vast majority of people don’t need it very often, and yet they base their life around having it, and so forth. Anyway, I can understand your situation. A lot of people, a lot of business owners who have over the years called this program and discussed how difficult it’s been filling jobs, not because of lack of people, but because people who are willing to actually work. Anyway, I appreciate the call, Beth. All the best to you.
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