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Door County’s Work Force – The Pains of Growing Old

Through the years of writing this column I have, on several occasions, commented on our peninsula’s aging population. Sometimes these comments have been humorous but, more often, they have expressed concern about our rapidly shrinking younger population base.

Our struggles keeping our younger population and/or attracting younger people to the county are well documented, with hard data that supports what we all know to be true. And while this struggle has been with us for years, the impact is beginning to be felt throughout the county, particularly from Sturgeon Bay north.

Take a moment, either now or when you finish reading this column, to visit the classified section of our newspaper. When you do you will immediately notice the enormous number of “help wanted” ads, both display ads and line classified listings. Yes, there are always a significant number of help wanted ads at the outset of the tourist season, but I have personally never seen the number of open positions that currently exist.

In a normal environment oodles of job opportunities are a good thing, a sign of a strong economy. But as I tour around the county each week visiting businesses, most of whom are looking for help, I continually hear how few (if any) applicants these businesses are hearing from, and one of the reasons is that there simply aren’t enough workers.

Above is some of the hard data I referred to earlier. This shows our population changes, by age group, from 2000 to 2010. I have shortened the list to the primary work force age groups. I should note that the young end of 15 – 19 years, are still, primarily students with a shortened availability to work due to school and age-related work restrictions and the older end of 65 – 74 years includes many individuals who choose not to work or work limited hours.

What immediately jumps out at you when you review this table is the drop of 1,523 individuals in the 35 – 44 year age group. And if you combine the ages from 15 years to 44 years you see that the peninsula “lost” 2,022 potential workers.

Contrasting this is the 55 – 59 years age group, which grew by 708 individuals, or 39.5 percent. And if you total the ages from 45 years to 74 years you discover that this age grouping grew by 2,380 individuals. Are you beginning to see what the data is showing us?

When you keep in mind that our overall, year-round population is relatively flat, the data shows that our work force is simply aging: one age group moves up into the next oldest age group in a sequential pattern. Still, this is 2015, five years past the data shown in the table above and five years before the next census. So where do we stand now, you wonder?

The table above shows an estimate of Door County’s 2014 population by age group compared to the data from the 2010 census. Note that the age groupings in this table are slightly different than they were in the first table, due to the organization that was used in the estimated figures.

So the good news is that the 20 – 24 age group grew by 118 individuals, but that’s the end of the good news. All the younger age groups decreased and I want you to take particular note of the decrease in the 45 – 54 group. This group dropped by 478 but the next age group, the 55 – 64 group, increased by 432.

And the oldest age group in the table, the 65 – 74 years, who either don’t work or generally work just part-time, showed the largest growth of 16 percent.

Between these two tables of data, it should be clear that the majority of our work force is moving from one age group up into the next oldest age group without any significant replenishment in the younger age groups.

Obviously, our seasonal skew plays a big role in our employment and our work force. The long, seven-month off-season with limited employment opportunities hurts us when the tourist season rolls around. But I am old enough, and have been around long enough, to remember when people drove up from Green Bay to work in the summer tourist season and workers traveling north to work from Sturgeon Bay were common. Those days are long past – even with four lanes, no one comes up from Green Bay to work anymore and Sturgeon Bay residents have plenty of jobs to choose from in their own community.

But the problem of an aging work force is not just a seasonal problem. Without younger members in our work force even the most commonplace jobs become hard to fill.

Back when I was involved in the project to build what is now the Northern Door Children’s Center, I spoke to lots of people and groups about the importance of quality child care in keeping and attracting young people and couples to our community. A friend I had known a long time, some 25 years my senior, was (like many) skeptical of the project, but he would listen patiently to my arguments and reply thoughtfully, if not receptively.

One morning over coffee at Al’s, he told me he had changed his mind and was willing to support the child care project. Naturally, I asked him why the change of heart and he responded that the previous day he had been sitting at his deck and he watched the garbage truck pull up at the end of his driveway and that he suddenly realized that the same man had been driving that truck for almost 20 years. In other words, his garbage man was no longer a young man and that realization led him to wonder, who was going to be picking up his garbage once his garbage man retired?

This, in simplest terms, is the challenge we face with an aging work force population. Like most challenges, the factors contributing to this challenge are many, and the solutions are not simple. But we can no longer ignore what faces us, hoping that it will resolve itself or go away.