NEWTON — Former Assistant Planning Director Chris Timberlake, AICP, has been promoted to Planning & Parks director for Catawba County. He is currently serving as co-director alongside longtime Planning &
Catawba County hires new tax administrator hickoryrecord.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from hickoryrecord.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Rolls of fabric are piling up in TSG Finishingâs intake area.
The company adds finishes to fabrics â making them waterproof, fire retardant, softer and stiffer â and is seeing increasing demand for their services. They just donât have enough employees to keep up with the demand.
The struggle to hire is the number one issue facing employers right now, TSG President Michael Goldman said. The company is urging local and state officials to do something about it.
âWe all know itâs a problem, but we donât want to complain without presenting any solutions,â Goldman said.
The company convened with a dozen manufacturing leaders and public officials Friday morning in Long View to talk through the hiring stagnation.
That conclusion is not immediately clear from looking at the data of the last 20 years.
Even as the population has increased from roughly 141,700 people in 2000 to nearly 160,000 now, the total workforce has fallen.
In 2000, there were nearly 101,900 people employed across all industries in the county, according to state data for the second quarter of that year.
The workforce has still not reached its turn-of-the-century peak. The closest it got was when the total number employed surpassed 89,000 in 2019 before falling to roughly 78,200 under the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic this year.
Taylor Dellinger, a data analyst at the Western Piedmont Council of Governments, said the drop is a testament to both the severity of the 2000s recessions in the area and the increasing age of the population.