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The business of business continues to shift on Long Island and the trend lines show more jobs but at lower salaries.
In a high-cost region like ours, that is unsustainable.
Northrop Grumman’s springtime decision to relocate more than 800 jobs from Bethpage to Florida for work on early-warning Hawkeye aircraft reveals Long Island’s systemic issues regarding the cost of doing business here.
As a result, county administrations traditionally concerned with essential services such as police, infrastructure and parks are putting job creation into their “essential services bucket.”
Nassau County Executive Mangano has just conducted a job fair that puts potential employees face to face with employers, an arena usually reserved for business networking groups.
But Mangano has gone one step further in recognizing that traditional government must harness the power of social media if it is to play a substantive role in protecting the region’s job base.
He has partnered with a company called tweetmyjobs.com that allows job seekers and job providers to connect. As a result, there is now a free, online platform that notifies job seekers of job opportunities and provides social and mobile solutions to the challenge of linking employer with potential employee.
Equally important, it has created awareness inside the county executive’s office of the pulse of business. No longer dependent on quarterly economic reports or academic studies, this is real-time data on who is hiring and at what pace.
And don’t count out Northrop Grumman. If the firm wins contracts for electronic jamming, its key executives say they will need to hire some of the best and the brightest for their Bethpage campus.
One suspects they will turn to the latest online recruitment tools to do so, courtesy of a county government that understands it needs to use the resources of the Information Age as it makes job creation an essential service right next to parks, police and roads.
Polimeni is a developer and executive board member of the Association for a Better Long Island, a business advocacy group.