It’s not the best of times in the workplace. If you read our special report beginning on page 1, you’ll find out that there’s downright turbulence in many companies in terms of staffing and hiring. Business owners and managers are being hit from all sides when it comes to finding the right employees to fill positions. And the bottom line is that many companies are having problems filling positions with competent, engaged, hard-working individuals. This trouble is rooted in many different areas a poor educational system, battles between generations, overprotective parents and the tremendous growth of technology in just a few short years. Answers are hard to come by. But if we don’t find some answers soon, productivity in our economy will be hurt severely. It may be already. Reporter Mark Madler has found in talking to local business owners and managers that they often must look far, wide and long to get employees and in many instances these people must then be given extensive training in-house just to learn the job. Many secondary schools have done away with technical or so-called vocational education. This leaves some manufacturing companies crippled in filling some positions with new, younger, employees. They just don’t have skills that come even close to what the manufacturer needs. When it comes to technology-related jobs, software changes so quickly that the prospective employee probably hasn’t kept up. Once again, the company needs to train. All these problems should be fixable. Business owners need to get involved heavily in the debate about how to fix our public primary and secondary schools. Tell our elected leaders and education officials just what they need. Force themselves into helping build a better curriculum. It’s for their own best interest. Stronger ties need to be established between businesses and our vocational schools as well as community colleges. This is currently the place where most job training work exists and these schools are doing a fantastic job. But we can’t get enough of such facilities. Companies need to give more money to such schools to build larger and better job training programs. The generational problems and overprotective parents may be harder to fix. As a manager of employees and someone who hires people, I find it astounding how hard both of those jobs can be. I’m a baby boomer whose parents expected that I leave the house at 18 years old, go to college or get a job and begin to support myself. I was to be a good law-abiding tax-paying citizen. That’s all they expected. In return they would interfere as little as possible in my life. I’m not a parent so I say things from the perspective of a manager at a business: I just can’t believe how many younger people these days just refuse to cut the cord from their parents. And many parents seem to encourage this. Shelly Garcia’s article in our workplace report this issue about how some parents try to meddle in their child’s employee-employer relationship is actually quite scary. How can you effectively do your job as a manager when you’ve got an employee’s mother knocking on your office door every time you criticize their kid’s performance? Ridiculous. These parents need to get a life. Power to the Councils? City Councilpeople Jack Weiss and Wendy Greuel are trying to put more teeth into the many neighborhood councils we have across L.A. Currently, these groups may make a lot of noise, but act in purely an advisory capacity to city government. But a council motion introduced last week by Weiss and Greuel would allow neighborhood councils to appeal certain entitlement requests such as tentative tract maps, parcel maps, specific plan exceptions, conditional use permits and variances. This would be a huge step forward in giving neighborhoods some power, good or bad, to stop or slow down projects within their areas. This change was devised by the Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Council and pushed by the Valley Alliance of Neighborhood Councils, which has received support from other such groups across the city. It will be assigned to a committee for study. Business Journal Editor Jason Schaff can be reached at (818) 316-3125 or at [email protected].