The Columbus Consolidated Government has announced that a job fair will be held in hopes of filling its more than 500 job vacancies. The job fair will be held on August 26, 2022, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m at the Columbus Civic Center.
The city’s staffing shortage has been an ongoing problem since at least the spring of this year, as a similar job fair held in June sought to fill the same 500 vacancies. The announcement of the new August 26th job fair confirms the city has failed to fill most if not all of the vacant positions.
While many cities across the nation have struggled to retain government employees in recent months, the Columbus Consolidated Government has particularly failed at keeping its rolls filled.
New York City, as covered in a New York Times article in July, is currently experiencing a 7.7% vacancy rate for city jobs. In other words, the largest city in the country is only missing one employee for every thirteen it should have.
While NYC’s numbers may seem high, the city job vacancy rate in Columbus is measurably far worse — more than twice as bad, to be specific.
The Columbus Consolidated Government is currently understaffed by a whopping 16.7% — in other words, Columbus only has five employees for every six it is supposed to have; it is missing one-in-six.
With so many missing employees, fewer services can ultimately be delivered to residents. Fewer employees means fewer police, which unfortunately coincides with the recent increase in violent crime felt throughout the Chattahoochee valley. It also means decreased trash pick-up, fewer METRA transit routes, and longer wait times for most government services like the tag office, the courthouse, and the utilities department.
The employee shortage also comes after many years of measurable failure by the “Columbus 2025” initiative to retain talented and educated people within the Columbus workforce. In spite of the organization’s intent to better the economic development of the area, their actions have largely backfired throughout the organization’s entire existence. Combined with other factors such as local government policy, the measurable result has amounted to an ironically decreased workforce and hugely increased rates of both poverty and crime.
There have also been many notable instances of downtown organizations seemingly running people off, causing them to quit their jobs or be fired after numerous workplace complaints were ignored. The Muckraker recently covered several instances of workers quitting their jobs at the RiverCenter for the Performing Arts after a series of hostile workplace complaints went unanswered by the organization.
The thematic resignation of employees from the Columbus workforce also highlights a larger, more damaging cultural problem that does not bode well for the city’s future.
It begs the question of, “how amazing are we actually doing?”
The answer continues to be negative — and we can measure it. Hopefully the city’s job fair will yield positive results.
