Pulaski County industries are planning for expansion, but finding workers to fill the new jobs continues to be a challenge.
Bobby Rugg with JSI Steel told the county council last week that while she would like to give jobs to Pulaski County residents, finding employees locally can be difficult. “If you really want me to be honest, I look for employees every day,” she said. “I have an ongoing ad in probably every paper in the surrounding counties. I bring people in every day, and it really just depends. It’s hard. It’s really hard to find employees.”
Community Development Commission Executive Director Nathan Origer said that a couple local companies still report employing more Pulaski County residents than those who live elsewhere. But the county’s population size and low unemployment rate, among other factors, are making that difficult. “We haven’t done a lot with it, but we were talking with our regional partners last year, maybe two years ago, if we could get enough companies whose shifts line up well enough and they’d be willing to pay for the service, dropping a bus off in Merrillville or something where the unemployment rate is so much higher, and bring them down to Winamac for the day,” Origer told council members.
Meanwhile, Rugg said she’s begun having high school students do some work at JSI as part of a co-op program. “We are going to try to start bringing in some more of the kids right out of school and trying to teach them and stuff like that,” she added. “I did some work with Purdue to talk about what do we have to do and what do we have to teach people to get people back into the blue-collar jobs.”
Adding jobs for local residents is also important to Joel Putt. He and his family are considering a Francesville site for a planned commercial produce operation. “As you probably well know, the 2020 census around the corner is probably going to show again Pulaski County with a drop in population,” he told council members. “Now, we’re trying to fight against that, and if there’s no jobs, no one can live there. So the first step is to try and get the jobs there.”
The December unemployment report released this week showed a 3.2-percent unemployment rate in Pulaski County, which is lower than the state or national levels. Only about 200 Pulaski County residents were believed to be unemployed and actively looking for work.
