Will the Jobs Boom End Too Soon?

When Jack Schreiner needs more workers for his rubber-products factory in Nebraska, he frequently hires former prisoners. “I often think, There but for the grace of God go I. We’ve got a couple of folks who have been with us for some time and have been pretty darn good employees,” says Schreiner, president of Bruckman Rubber in Hastings. It’s not only charity that motivates him: Nebraska’s low unemployment rate, 2.9 percent in October, has driven him to take a serious look at applicants with blemished records. If not for that, he says, “I can’t say in all honesty that I would have been quite as open.”

As the labor market tightens across the country, employers are stepping up their hiring of people who often have a hard time landing jobs: ex-convicts, people with disabilities, African Americans, Hispanics, teenagers, and those without a high school education. Starbucks, for example, is leading a coalition of more than 30 companies facing talent shortages that have committed to giving jobs or apprenticeships to 100,000 “opportunity youth”—young people who are out of school and out of work. “When the items are flying off your shelves and you can’t keep up, you get a little more open-minded” about whom you hire, says Laurence Ball, a Johns Hopkins University economist.