High Income Jobs To San Antonio example essay topic

LOST REWARD IF FOUND Higher Paying Jobs There are too many low paying jobs here in San Antonio. If this continues we will see San Antonio's economy decline and this city will become nothing but a low income tourism town. The military presence at one time gave San Antonio its backbone to fall back to. With the closing of Kelly Air Force base that backbone is now diminishing. Many skilled labor workers, some who worked at the base for many years were forced to go back into a workforce, which did not pay as much as they were used to making at the base. Unfortunately, being a tourism town also brings with it the low service / low paying jobs and we are dependent on outside money to stimulate the local economy.

You always hear about new jobs coming to San Antonio, but the majority of them are companies looking for low skilled workers. What is the Economic development foundation doing to attract big business here? What are our leaders thinking when they say they are promoting San Antonio and pushing for more jobs? Is this what they deliver, more hotels and restaurants so we can continue to serve the rich?

We must focus on luring new big businesses with higher skilled / high wage jobs. We must also educate our workforce to be able to compete for those positions. The primary fix to this problem is to bring high-income jobs to San Antonio. We need more jobs such as those in technology, industry, finance and healthcare. Cities like Dallas, Austin and Houston have been successful in attracting large corporations in bringing high-income jobs into their cities.

We must be as creative if not more when convincing companies to move here. If we can offer hotels tax abatements to lure them into building here, why cant we do the same for high skilled worker type companies that want to make San Antonio a home. Cities such as Dallas and Houston suffer from things like high cost of living, crime, pollution and bad traffic. These items should be carrots for us when companies are looking for a place to move into. Consider the following average annual salaries in San Antonio during 1998, a housekeeping supervisor earns around $17,600, a waitress about $12,550, an electronic engineer $57,290, financial managers $56,610, and medical scientists around $70,060.

Looking at the previous salaries it is safe to say the here in San Antonio there is a wide disparity of salaries. Again unfortunately our majority of available jobs are in the lower end. (BLS) There are those out there that would disagree with us focusing on bringing in big business. The hotel and restaurant business's that primarily rely on tourism would not want this city to take away its focus on tourism. This city is big enough to focus on other market industries. A balance needs to be achieved and hotels and restaurants would not shy away from business that would be generated from people flying in to conduct business here.

This would be a great postcard to attract more tourism. Lets not forget that with higher incomes there would be more spending. Others would not want big business here because they are afraid of what has become to cities like Dallas, Austin the Houston. They are afraid of the pollution, cost of living expenses, and rising of taxes. Do we want our city to turn into an ugly place to live? With higher wages, people can afford to pay more taxes to keep their areas clean.

Businesses can have stipulations placed on them to keep up with the beautification of this city. San Antonio has always had a strong relationship with its local businesses. This I tell you can be controlled. Others would also argue that we would be sacrificing too much up to have businesses here. We have to become more competitive and more attractive to lure companies here. With that we also need to hold on to those things we treasure the most.

Lets think about our children and what type of society they will be living in once we are gone. A supplementary / secondary fix to this problem are job programs that focus in educating our internal city workforce so they can fill those higher income roles. When businesses move into town, these higher wage positions sometimes get filled with people moving in from other cities. The local workforce usually fills the low-income jobs. We need to begin training programs that focus on bringing our local workforce to a higher level. This needs to start from early on in the education system.

Most schools here in San Antonio focus on developing our young adults in trade jobs such a mechanics, welders and technicians. With this mentally we are developing a population of nothing but low-income roles. Instead, we should be focusing our programs to have our children learn how to be bankers, doctors and engineers. San Antonio's population is a boiling pot consisting mostly of Latinos, An glos and African American. This is something to be proud of. Our citizens take a lot of pride in what they do.

We should teach our local workforce how to fish for bigger fish and not keep handing them small fish. Some high schools have already created gift and talented programs for health careers, engineering and banking. As taxpayers we need to fund more programs that will train our workforce in things like computers. Taxing the tourism population is one way of doing it. We can fund programs by increasing the tourism tax and having those people that travel into our city fund our programs. Businesses can also contribute and the city can offer them some time of tax abatement or ride off.

We need to develop the workforce in simple things like computer usage, basic communication skills, and business. There are those that would say that the reason businesses don't move to San Antonio is because there is not an existing skilled workforce. We have to invest in the training of this workforce if we are ever to attract any other jobs besides call centers and service industries. Dallas, Houston and Austin were successful because of the universities that are located within those cities. Lets push and develop our local universities here in San Antonio.

We have respected institutions like Trinity, St Mary's and Our Lady of the Lake universities. Lets fund our universities in developing stronger skilled programs that benefit our community. We do have our challenges ahead of us in attracting big business with high skilled jobs. There are other issues to consider. Issues like San Antonio's having one water source. These issues regardless are being addressed already though and these in time will be resolved.

Without the stimulation of higher wage jobs, the landscape of San Antonio will begin to deteriorate. With mayor elections coming up, there will be talk about bringing in new businesses and jobs. It is going to be up to us to keep our leaders accountable and let them know that we don't just want jobs, we want higher paying jobs.

Bibliography

1998 Metropolitan Area Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates. 1998.
Occupational Employment Statistics. February 11, 2001.
web 7240 m. htm#b 10000 Gottschalk, Peter The Low-Wage Labor Market: Challenges and Opportunities for Economic Self-Sufficiency. Dept Health and Human Services. February 12, 2001.
web Jared, and Heidi Hartman The Low-Wage Labor Market: Challenges and Opportunities for Economic Self-Sufficiency Defining and Characterizing the Low-Wage Labor Market. February 12, 2001 web.