Episode 15
The State of Vermont can't be just any employer
April 12, 2024: Rep. Tristan Toleno serves on the House Committee on Appropriations and the State Workforce Development Board. It's one of the reasons he read the entire State of Vermont Workforce Report. As he characterizes it, the state has a hiring AND retention problem. Tristan walks us through some of the issues he's seeing and the pressures its putting of the state budget.
Theme music by Red Heart the Ticker: http://rhtt.net
To read the report: https://humanresources.vermont.gov/sites/humanresources/files/documents/DHR-Workforce_Report_0.pdf
Additional information and notes from Tristan Toleno:
Vacancy Savings Notes
Governor is using 57m of anticipated workforce vacancies across all budgets and funding sources (including global commitment) to mask the pressure of his revenue and fee contractions and the negative impacts of the workforce crisis. They assert they are using “historical” data to determine the allocations, but there are several fundamental reasons to doubt that claim. The data suggests they took an overall level of savings to keep their top line budget close to the Governor’s guidance of 3% increases and to ensure more is available for carry forward reversions in Jan 2025.
How and why the line by line determinations were made is unclear and raises questions. Among them:
- Why would they budget a vacancy savings rate of nearly 30% for the budget for the Governor’s office, when they have only one open position?
- Why would they budget no vacancy savings for DOL, which has been dealing with significant staffing problems for years?
- Why would they direct (24,862) in savings to the Human Rights Commission, who are fully staffed, forcing them to possibly cut staff hours?
- What history is most predictive of how to budget well now? The Governors budgeted vacancy savings of 57m as applied by the Gov Rec against the personal services lines of these same dept and agencies = 3.3%. Personal services is a pretty good proxy for state workforce costs, though it does include some non-state workforce costs. The two year vacancy rate has been closer to 11% and the DHR data does not support the theory that we can return to a pre-pandemic “normal” history any time soon.
Budgeting slightly more now in vacancy savings is defensible, and we are also doing it in a way which doesn’t lead to the kind of distortions being experienced by the HRC, since we direct the Governor to find the additional savings across all of the budgets.
State Workforce Crisis Data
From DHR
Unique Applications for state jobs 2019 18,778 to 2023 12,690
Down to 10.8 Apps per Opening
“Even more striking is that nearly 70% of all job openings posted had 10 or fewer applicants.”
“The offer acceptance rate was 75.8%, which is low by most standards.”
Turnover Rate: 13%
Net gain of only 256 from last year
Higher rate than any year since 1998, even counting years with retirement incentives.
“For Fiscal Year 2023 nearly 75% (74.4%) of voluntary terminations occurred in the first five years of service. Nearly 40% occurred in the first year of employment. A startling 10% of hires didn't make it beyond 30 days. And over 26% did not complete six months.”
“Over that past five fiscal years the entire salary distribution has “shifted.” The number of employees decreased in the lower pay ranges and increased in the higher pay ranges.”
https://humanresources.vermont.gov/data/workforce-reporting
For watch Toleno's interrogations related to this issue: links are cued to the right point
DOL - https://www.youtube.com/live/z-Hf_Jjbjek?si=dR47w5gIAhTn5tVt&t=4524
DHR - https://www.youtube.com/live/sJ4q-0diCFA?si=35ZtGWBJPachyK5b&t=1681
Budget and Finance - https://www.youtube.com/live/pOOUTKoasWw?si=qqs4TGAKPZlgCrQL&t=1621
Record RFRs and Market Factor -Two years of record requests
69 days to hire from requisition to hire
https://humanresources.vermont.gov/data/workforce-reporting
Jan 2020 Labor Force 352193 Employed 344,899 Unemp 7294
Nov 2021 Labor Force 337,824 Employed 327,678 Unemp 10,146
Dec 2023 Labor Force 352,076 Employed 344,337 Unemp 7739
Data Source: http://www.vtlmi.info/laus.cfm
Toleno quoted older numbers about the Labor Force at one point. He looked again and they adjusted the old numbers up. Bottom line - we are at the same point we were pre-pandemic.
