Local, state governments struggle to replace exiting workers

As businesses recover from the coronavirus pandemic and jobless rates plunge to new lows, state and local governments are struggling to rehire hundreds of thousands of workers who left during or because of the crisis.

New data from the nonpartisan Rockefeller Institute of Government shows state and local governments lost 1.5 million jobs during the pandemic — and only a third of those jobs have been filled, leaving government agencies nearly a million workers short of their pre-crisis levels at a time when more Americans are relying on services than ever before.

Economists have noted the skyrocketing number of workers in both the public and private sectors who are quitting their jobs, a phenomenon dubbed the Great Resignation. But while many workers are finding new and better-paying positions elsewhere in the economy, few are choosing government work.

“The great resignation is accelerating what was a slow burning trend in local government,” said Liz Farmer, a fellow at the Rockefeller Institute’s Future of Labor Research Center. “Retirements are driving a lot of what we’re seeing now, but looking at the latest data, quits account for a growing number of separations.”

Before the pandemic, state and local governments had only just returned to staffing levels they reached before the recession a decade ago. Now, the setbacks have begun anew.

There are more government job openings now than at any time in the past 20 years, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the private sector now employs 97.9 percent of the workers it employed before the pandemic, state and local governments employ just 95.4 percent of their pre-pandemic workforces.

Experts who follow the government labor market say a confluence of simultaneous events is causing the staffing drought. Government workers tend to be older than the rest of the workforce, so the phenomenon of older workers retiring is taking a greater toll on the public sector.

At the same time, a previous generation of government workers relied on pensions, but governments are largely moving away from pensions and toward 401(k)-style retirement plans, robbing some government jobs of their attractiveness.

“You’ve got two classes of employees now. You’ve got an employee base that has a pension plan and an employee base that doesn’t have a pension plan, that has a 401k plan,” said Shane Evangelist, the chief executive of NeoGov, which advertises government jobs. “You’ve fundamentally got a structural problem.”

Evangelist said the ratio of potential workers who view a job advertisement on his site to the number who actually apply had dropped substantially in recent months.

Resignations and retirements are highest among law enforcement workers, from police officers to prison workers. In Kentucky, less than half of the corrections officers positions are filled. The Rockefeller Institute found the number of police officers who retired from their jobs in 2020 rose 45 percent over the previous year.

Workforce changes during the pandemic have sped up some advancements that were already underway in recent years, including a rush to embrace automation and online portals and new forays into artificial intelligence, Farmer said.

“Governments have long been talking about things like streamlining and putting things online and AI and all that cool tech stuff. But the pandemic really forced their hand,” Farmer said. “There is a strong sense that governments need to be able to provide services in a way that is what their constituents expect, but with fewer people behind the scenes.”

The American Rescue Plan, signed last year by President Biden, includes money for states to retain or hire new workers. But as wages rise in the private sector, government salaries — once a sure ticket to the middle class — have not kept pace.

“They’re not attracting as many workers for as long, those career employees, as they used to,” Farmer said. “Government salaries have not been competitive with the private sector, but for a very long time they at least had the pension benefits.”