Participation :: essays papers

Participation When the McDonalds patron in suburban Johnson County ordered a coffee and got a Coke, he came face to face with a middle west labor pool truth. Non-English-speaking immigrants are an increasingly large part of the labor force -- not just in the Sun Belt states but in the upper Midwest as well. The fast-food worker, who spoke Spanish and had trouble understanding the mans order, was one of tens of thousands of Hispanics who entered the Midwest job market in the past decade. Without them, economists say, the long-running labor shortage, peculiarly in entry-level jobs, would be even more severe than it is. For some business patrons, the immigrant influx means occasional difficulties in communication. For some business owners, immigrant labor -- twain documented and undocumented -- is the only way to fill jobs that otherwise would go begging. The most recent measure of unemployment in the Kansas City area, taken in May, was 2.8 percent. Missouris light rate was 2.6 percent Kansas rate was 3.2 percent. Unemployment throughout the Midwest is well below 5.5 percent, which is considered full employment. Michael Barrera, president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City, said the bedchamber had charted an explosive growth in the metropolitan areas Hispanic, blue-collar, minimum-wage work force, especially in Olathe and northeast Kansas City. Also, Barrera said, the 1990s brought a large increase in the number of entrepreneurial Hispanic immigrants, seen particularly in the blossoming of small stores and restaurants in Kansas City, Kan., and northeast Kansas City. The Hispanic chamber has no estimate of the size of the areas Hispanic work force, but Barrera said the Hispanic population may have grown to as many as 100,000, up from 58,000 in 1996. Throughout the Midwest, Hispanic immigrants are decision work. Census data, updated in 1998, found that 220,000 workers in the West northwest Central states were of Hispanic origin, up from 93,000 10 years earlier. The Census Bureau defines the West North Central region as Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota. Similar findings were reported last week by the Bureau of National Affairs Inc. in its free-and-easy Labor Report 2000 Regional Outlook on Labor Markets. The bureau said Illinois now had the nations fifth-largest Hispanic population, the highest ranking among states not in the Sun Belt. In Illinois and the other Midwest states, the bureau said, Hispanic immigrants are working in construction, restaurants, small manufacturing and farming.