Flush With Jobs, Wyoming Woos Rust Belt Labor. Labor-starved Wyoming, with its energy boom in coal, oil and natural gas, is vigorously courting the workers of the Rust Belt.
What?
lets get bus-loads of people accross the Rio Grande to help Wyoming!
Flush With Jobs, Wyoming Woos Rust Belt Labor
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By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: September 13, 2006
GILLETTE, Wyo., Sept. 6 — Houston Mellentine, 10, held up the rattlesnake tail he kept in a box. “Killed it right over there,” he said, pointing to the edge of his family’s dirt front yard.
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This recruitment billboard will go up outside Flint, Mich., before Wyoming officials and employers participate in a job fair there next month.
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Bobby Model for The New York Times
Joe Mellentine, a former ironworker and landscaper from Michigan, moved his family to Wyoming this year.
His mother, Melissa, sat in a folding chair as the sun set one recent evening, eyeing the snake’s tail in her son’s hand. “They don’t have rattlesnakes in Michigan,” she said somewhat longingly, at least not in her old front yard.
But then, Michigan has few of the types of jobs that brought the Mellentines here.
Labor-starved Wyoming, with its energy boom in coal, oil and natural gas, is vigorously courting the workers of the Rust Belt — in particular, those in Michigan’s struggling auto industry. And the workers are responding, and adjusting to a very different life in the West.
Wyoming economic development officials and company representatives are planning their third recruiting trip this year, visiting job fairs next month in Flint, Lansing and Grand Rapids. A billboard depicting a lush Wyoming will go up on the highway outside Flint later this month and be seen by an estimated 65,000 people a day.
“Michigan has been very good for us,” said Ruth Benson, the director of the Campbell County Economic Development Corporation, who has twice led recruiting expeditions to depressed cities in Michigan.
So far, about 1,500 Michigan residents have signed up to receive job postings through the Wyoming work force Web site, and at least several hundred, employers and recruiters say, have moved to the state.
Mrs. Mellentine’s husband, Joe, is one of those who heard the call. Mr. Mellentine, 35, a former ironworker and landscaper from Chesaning, just outside Flint, moved here in March after hearing about Wyoming at a job fair. “I came to get a piece of the American pie,” said Mr. Mellentine, who works for a company that prepares sites for natural gas drilling.
Mrs. Mellentine and their two sons joined him in July, and he has since talked three of his childhood friends in Michigan into heading West as well.
They are all still very much adjusting to the change. But many former Michigan residents say their Wyoming experience — voting for change with their feet, trading the comfortable and familiar for a boomtown life more than 1,000 miles from home — has reaffirmed their faith that good things can still happen with a little gumption.
“A lot of people are afraid to take a chance,” said Eric Chapdelaine, 33, who was lured here by Mr. Mellentine and is now driving a cargo truck to coal mines and drilling sites. “But you’ve got to make it happen — or sit back and let it happen.”
The local police are also aware of the Michigan labor pool. Chief Richard Adriaens of the Gillette police was hired in 2004 from a suburb near Detroit. Since then, he has returned and found three more fellow Michiganders to add to the town’s 48-officer roster, with another recruiting swing planned for later this year.
Michigan is attractive, Chief Adriaens said, because the police training is excellent, but the job market is not. “We’ve tried some other areas that had depressed economies, but they weren’t the same,” he said.
Officials in Michigan, where the unemployment rate was about 7 percent in July, said they were unconcerned about the Wyoming employment campaign, mostly because it had involved only a small fraction of the state’s workers and had not signaled a wholesale migration. The state also has some experience with this situation: in the early 1980’s, thousands of laid-off auto workers moved to Texas during the oil boom there.
“It’s a good thing that people that have salable skills use them, even when we have to lose them,” said Michael Shore, a spokesman for the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.
By the standards of the nation’s past great labor migrations — the industrial revolution in the late 1800’s that filled urban factories with former farmers, the Dust Bowl diaspora to California in the 1930’s, the tide of blacks from the South in World War II seeking work in northern factories — what is happening here is an aberration, historians and geographers say. |
