on the cover / By Heidi Walters

No Work? No Workers!

Local employers are beating the bushes for willing and able bodies

(March 29, 2007)  Vince Campbell, he just got sick of it. He’d worked for Eel River Sawmills for 20 years as the environment and safety director. A good job. But for years, it seemed, the wood products industry had been crashing around him. A mill closed here, another mill closed there. When it was Eel River’s time to close, a few years ago after having gone from 565 employees to 60, Campbell asked himself, “Why work in an industry that’s dying?”

He was nearing 50. But instead of trying to hire on at some remaining mill, he jumped ship - to an engineering firm in Santa Rosa at first, working as a groundwater technician. “It was a good job, but I was away from home three, four days a week. It was hard on the family.” He sought counseling at Humboldt County’s The Job Market, and then a friend at the Redwood Harley-Davidson shop in Eureka told him to put in an application. He did, and trained for six months to learn computer applications. Now he works in the parts department. He loves it.

Jobs lifting lumber may have dwindled, but there’s still some work in the industry. Photo by Kyana Taillon.

GALLERY >

“Me, I’ve been a Harley rider all my life,” Campbell says. “Personally, I’m very, very happy.”

Yeah, he admits, the pay’s “different” from the really good money he was making at the sawmill. “So, you’ve gotta do a lot of lifestyle changes,” he says, when you switch from lumber to Harleys.

This is a story about jobs. So, for starters, raise your hand if you got one of those mailers. You know, the one from HELP — the Humboldt Economic and Land Plan outfit - with an inviting photo of an open door to a pretty house with a fat bundle of keys hanging from the lock and the big, bold-type question beneath it: “Will the Door to Jobs and Homeownership be Opened for Humboldt County Working Families?” Inside, it becomes clear that this message is mostly about housing - or lack thereof, according to HELP, and how that is “driving young, working families out of Humboldt County.”

But what’s more intriguing in HELP’s mailer is the bit about there being a “lack of jobs” here in Humboldt County. “Jobs,” says HELP, “are hard to find.” And it isn’t just HELP saying it. “I hear it all the time, `There are no jobs,’” says Randy Hansen, owner of Express Personnel Services.

It’s just weird. Because, what we’ve been hearing? There are loads of jobs here. Including some really good ones. And employers are having trouble filling them. “Right now we at Sequoia Personnel are busier in job placement than we have been in the past four or five years,” says Liana Simpson, who started Sequoia Personnel 28 years ago. “The job market is exploding here. We’ve had several requests for chief financial officers. There’s a shortage of accountants in Humboldt County. And we are getting more six-figure openings than ever - or, $90,000 and up. I just placed a position, $78,000, for a person licensed in the engineering field.” She’s also in the process of finding workers for a big nonprofit - but she’s not at liberty to talk about it.

Jacqueline Debets, director of the Humboldt County Workforce Investment Board, which among other things helps people find work, says some industries here are “starved for workers.” Carlson Wireless, StreamGuys, Humboldt Creamery, Cypress Grove Chevre, Kokatat, Sun Valley Floral, Maples Plumbing: “Here are industries that have been growing and will continue to grow, and they need workers,” says Debets.

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