Giving Compass' Take:

• The author explains the paradox of when bigger corporations such as Amazon want to move into  Midwestern cities and provide more jobs, they are actually taking away from the local organizations that are already struggling to find current employees.

• In the Midwest, it seems apparent that unemployment gets worse and worse, how can philanthropists help protect people's jobs and help companies find more employees? 

• Read about how manufacturing jobs in the Midwest were extremely affected by the opioid epidemic. 

Though hiring managers are struggling to fill jobs across the nation, the shortage of workers facing the country's employers is particularly pronounced in the Midwest, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.

In March, Amazon announced that it would build its first Missouri fulfillment center in my suburban St. Louis county, bringing about 1,500 warehouse jobs to the community.  More than two thousand new jobs coming to your community is good news, of course. But there's a catch: New jobs in a place like ours experiencing historically low unemployment will create added pressure on existing employers who already struggle to fill positions, to say nothing of the challenges that Amazon, Grove and Cenlar may face.

While one might expect that market forces would take care of that problem -- driving wages up to attract more people into the workforce -- that hasn't happened. Despite recent minimal increases, when adjusted for inflation the average wage earner's income has stagnated for years, and in some cases for decades.

The average Amazon fulfillment worker makes somewhere between $24,000 and $28,000 a year, depending on the location. An annual salary of $26,000 means a full-time worker is making $12.50 an hour. If those workers have to drive to work (which they will in my county) and have child-care expenses, the actual net salary is closer to between $6 and $8 an hour. That is why such a high percentage of Amazon fulfillment workers receive food stamps.

'Working full-time while needing food stamps is no one's idea of a "good job," and using taxpayer-funded incentives to recruit employers to bring low-wage jobs into cities and counties with almost no unemployment is not a winning economic development strategy.

Employers may not want to talk about that, but economic developers and elected officials need to have the courage to tell businesses they're trying to attract that they may have to spend more to find the workforce they need.

Read the full article about job development by Dustin McKissen  at Governing Magazine