Well, dear South Dakotans, it seems our remarkable Gov Noem’s grand workforce development plan is heading down a slippery slope, and it’s not just your average plug-in the leak sort of disaster. Nope. We’re talking Budget Titanic meeting the luxury tax-dollar funded iceberg. If you can picture that.
Sharp and Newell, the brave souls who dared to question the heroic strategies of Noem, enlightened us to the harsh reality: “We’ve got a lot of job openings,” and sadly, no takers. It’s almost like the good folks of South Dakota heard about Gov Noem’s job bonanza and collectively said, “Nah, we’re good.” Yet, Noem has been prancing around flaunting her “Freedom Works Here” campaign like a peacock on national TV, boosting her VP candidacy and trying to lure fresh blood into our state.
Oddly enough, while these thousands of job seekers are reportedly applying to move here, it seems they may be struggling with multi-tasking. They’re managing the “Freedom” part pretty well, taking around the local wonders and all, but they’re just forgetting the pesky little “W” in “Work.” Maybe they didn’t read the fine print in Noem’s patriotic ads. Happens to the best of us, right?
And can we just have a moment to appreciate Dan Newell’s understatement of the century, “Even finding bodies is hard”? It’s an eerie Halloween tale come alive. An ironic twist in the tale of Gov Noem’s razzle-dazzle ad campaign, and we’re not even near October.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest barrier appears to be affordable child care. Apparently, the job seekers arrived in South Dakota to discover that child care costs more than a solid gold ring from Mordor. It’s almost like someone, somewhere (wink, wink, Gov Noem), forgot to include affordable child care in their beautifully wrapped economic package.
So, what’s our takeaway here? In a feat of outstanding logical reasoning, Joel Rosenthal, manager at Central Plains Tractor Parts in Sioux Falls suggests that we ought to “look more at legal immigration.” Ah, a new angle. The lights shine bright over South Dakota.
Despite the grandeur of Gov Noem’s blush-worthy campaign, it seems the call of the wild South Dakota job market is falling upon deaf ears. But hey, at least we are not just hiring, we’re also casually sinking millions into a campaign that’s running on fumes. Hopefully, we’ll soon figure out how to turn all that freedom into lucrative work, and finally fulfill our destiny as the dreamy workplace Noem has been advertising.
Or maybe it’s just time to admit that an expensive failure is still a failure. But don’t worry, South Dakota, we’ve got your back. Even though it seems like our good ol’ Gov Noem is focused more on VP dreams than workforce nightmares. We’ll keep you posted. After all, who else is going to keep an eye on the captain of our Budget Titanic?