How Covid impacted the Adirondack labor market, which faces new challenges and adaptations
By Tim Rowland
Job recruiter Gabrielle Neidlinger knew a sweet deal when she saw it: a company offering an accounting job with excellent pay and benefits, opportunity for advancement and a willingness to hire the right candidate straight from college.
Openings like this one, which portended a lifetime of professional success, didn’t come around often, and Neidlinger had someone in mind who would be a perfect fit.
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But when Neidlinger called her employment-seeking client, the young woman was hesitant. She had a soccer commitment that would last for a few more months, so would they hold the position for her? To Neidlinger’s surprise, the company agreed, saying the new hire need only come in on a semi-regular basis for training. No, the woman countered, soccer really needed her entire focus.
“It’s mind-blowing,” said Neidlinger, who lives in the town of Jay and focuses on North Country employers.
Covid changed the employment landscape
But it’s also representative of the effects the pandemic have had on the labor market in the North Country, in which workers vanished, and those who carried on were able to dictate the work terms.
In March 2020, nonessential workers were sent home for months in an attempt to control the contagion sweeping the nation. This brief slumber turned out to be Van Winkle-like: When the economy woke up, everything was different. “These changes began way before the pandemic hit, but were they exacerbated by COVID? One hundred percent,” Neidlinger said.
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It is difficult to tease hard data out of the Adirondack Park’s labor condition. The state’s North Country data includes populous cities that ring the park and skew the numbers.
But a macro view of U.S. employment offers clues.
Choosing early retirement
According to the Pew Research Center, 2 million Baby Boomers typically retire each year. But in 2020, the year of the pandemic, it was 3 million.
Since COVID had more serious consequences for older workers, those in their 50s and 60s who could afford to do so, found the pandemic “as good a time to retire as any,” according to Emsi, a company that compiles labor data.
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The sparsely populated Adirondacks, already dependent on an aging workforce, simply did not have replacements for the retirees. Help wanted signs popped up like mushrooms. Businesses that wanted to reopen had to do so with scaled-back hours for lack of staff. In Essex County, the most populous county entirely in the park, between 10% and 15% of the positions in county government went unfilled.
Supervisors sometimes blamed the pandemic aid checks from the federal government for the loss of labor, but the reality was more complicated.
“It’s not that people don’t want to work, because fundamentally they do. But they want good compensation, benefits, flexibility and time with their families.”
Job recruiter Gabrielle Neidlinger
Spike in tourism
The tourist economy — the Adirondacks’ bread and butter — is more known for lousy pay, few benefits, heavy hours in-season and termination when the visitors went home.
The pandemic brought a tsunami of people seeking recreation as the outdoors became a haven. But many tourism businesses were unable to capitalize because they didn’t have the staff to open. These businesses began to offer better pay and more manageable hours, but employees would vanish anyway.
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Rick Vidal, owner of the NewVida Preserve in Jay, said that travel industry employers and employees need to think in a new way.
“A lot of people jump from place to place in hospitality because they don't see a career progression for themselves,” he said. “They need to pay their bills and have a babysitter and buy gas, but there really isn't the thought of, like, what do I want to be doing 10 years from now, and how is this business going to help coach me and create the opportunity and the platform for me to get there?”
The need for more workers
The state Bureau of Labor predicts that the need for more hospitality workers will only increase. Through the 2020s, demand for hotel desk clerks will rise 84%, fitness trainers 92%, cooks 134% and servers 90%.
Where these workers will come from is anyone’s guess. The Adirondacks have 123,316 residents, according to the latest census, down from 130,137 in 2010. “It’s almost like a war occurred and we lost a big swath of our population,” said Jim Siplon, director of the Warren County Economic Development Commission.
Like Vidal, Silpon believes hospitality needs to be seen as a serious and rewarding year-round occupation and promoted early to students as a pathway to a fulfilling career. “We need to create a sense of ‘How I could stay here’ and work,” Silpon said. “We don’t need a factory, the park is our factory.”
Other factors at play
The trend of young people moving away from their Adirondack homes has been well-documented, but there are other trends, too.
Opioids have reduced the labor pool. By the end of the decade, the need for substance abuse and mental health counselors in the North Country is projected to grow by 24%.
More people are choosing occasional employment when they need the money and young adults are increasingly turning to parents and grandparents for assistance. Nationwide, the last time as many 25- to 29-year-olds were living with their parents was in 1880.
The pandemic also marked a breaking point with the Adirondack employment model in other ways. When the park’s industrial base shut down in the 1970s, the public sector took up much of the slack, most notably at dozens of prisons in and around the park.
But by the time of the pandemic, Albany had already decided the state’s prison model was unsustainable and was in the process of reducing both prisoners and prisons. Prison population is now less than half of its 73,000 high. And since the pandemic, prison work, once precious as gold, was something no one wanted to do anyway.
What's next?
If there is a large-scale profession poised to take over the role of prisons, it is almost certain to be health care. “There will be health care, tourism and then everything else,” Silpon said. Health care represents one in six jobs in Warren County, which includes the Adirondack village of Lake George and Glens Falls, just outside the park.
The labor department and a related report from the Adirondack Foundation forecasts confirm the importance of health care in a region that, like the rest of rural America, is rapidly aging. By 2030, the North Country will need 580 more registered nurses than in 2020, 220 more nurse practitioners and 170 more EMTs and paramedics.
The demand for in-home health and personal care aids will reach 2,000 positions, an increase of 37%, partly to help elderly people remain in their residences and avoid living in institutions.
Ongoing housing shortages
While that’s good from a cost and quality of life standpoint, it also means fewer houses are opening up for potential workers — a critical shortcoming in the universe of Adirondack labor.
Also eating into Adirondack housing stock in 2020 were a sizable number of vacation homes, which ate into the housing for full-time residents. Some of these “vacationers,” however, were about to become full-time residents themselves.
During the pandemic, many employees worked remotely and discovered that they liked it, to the point where for much of the economy the 9-to-5 Monday through Friday is a dusty relic from five years ago.
Neidlinger pointed to the plight of a one large North Country employer trying to fill the job of comptroller, insisting on a 40-hour in-person schedule. “They probably weren’t going to attract anyone they hadn’t already talked to,” she said. “It really limits the labor pool.”
Jobs 2.0: About this series
Fifty years ago, much of the Adirondacks’ industrial base shut down, taking jobs, capital and tax revenue with it. This introduced an era of high unemployment and poverty and a growing reliance on government jobs. By the 2020 pandemic, this era was itself fading. In this ongoing series, Adirondack Explorer traces the losses of the industrial age. We also look to the future: With a declining and aging population, the rise of remote work, an entrepreneurial renaissance, and the impacts of climate change and artificial intelligence on a new era for North Country employment.
Thanks to Adirondack Foundation for their financial support of this series.
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“The tourist economy — the Adirondacks’ bread and butter”.
People always say this and as you can see from the chart and other data this isn’t accurate. It is an important sector of the economy, but the most important “bread and butter” is public sector jobs. Also, much of these articles still based things on the 2020 census – that data was completely changed by the pandemic.
Not the employment data, Paul – that comes from the NYS Department (not Bureau) of Labor, and is reasonably up to date. I would add that the so-called “Leisure and Hospitality” sector includes jobs in food service, lodging, and arts, entertainment, and recreation, but not retail, an industry that is influenced by tourism as well. In any event, you’re right that the public sector is, and has long been, a big part of the North Country economy. That’s typical of many rural communities. But prison closures could cut into those numbers substantially.