FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Candace Daly, Utah State Director, candacedaly.cjd@gmail.com
or Tony Malandra, Senior Media Manager, anthony.malandra@nfib.org

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, June 3, 2021—From Candace Daly, Utah state director for the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), the nation’s largest small-business association, on today’s release of the monthly Jobs Report from NFIB showing a fourth consecutive month of record highs in unfilled job openings.

“With one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, Utah small-business owners are having a difficult time finding employees. One thing we did to help ourselves is when Gov. Spencer Cox decided to end our state’s participation in a federal program that added $300 a week on top of the state’s unemployment benefits. In a poll of small-business owners taken by Alignable, it found 30% of small-business owners attributing that extra $300 to their inability to fill open positions, a classic case of a good intention on the part of the feds that not only didn’t produce the desired effect, but instead exacerbated a problem.”

Click here to read NFIB’s national news release, which contains a link to the full report.

From NFIB Chief Economist Bill Dunkelberg

“Small business owners are struggling at record levels trying to get workers back in open positions. Owners are offering higher wages to try to remedy the labor shortage problem. Ultimately, higher labor costs are being passed on to customers in higher selling prices.”

NFIB’s Jobs Report is a national snapshot not broken down by state. Today’s results are based on 659 respondents to the May survey of a random sample of NFIB’s member firms, surveyed through 5/28/2021. The NFIB Research Foundation has collected Small Business Economic Trends data with quarterly surveys since 1974 and monthly surveys since 1986.

Keep up with the latest Utah small-business news at www.nfib.com/utah

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For 78 years, NFIB has been advocating on behalf of America’s small and independent business owners, both in Washington, D.C., and in all 50 state capitals. NFIB is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, and member-driven association. Since our founding in 1943, NFIB has been exclusively dedicated to small and independent businesses and remains so today. For more information, please visit nfib.com.

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