 We're just a couple minutes late, so thank you for bearing with us, and it's so great to see so many of you here tonight. Our panel discussion tonight is intended to give you a variety of perspectives. Our panelists about the issues that they work with on a daily basis and have time to take your questions and comments as part of the discussion. JJ and others will be gathering questions on note cards out there, so if you have them, please raise your hand and someone will get to you. We don't expect to resolve any particular questions tonight, but we hope that in hearing from various perspectives that we can all come away with a better understanding of those issues and how we might approach them going forward. So let me first introduce our panel. Margaret Anderson-Kellahur, we are proud to say, is a Gustavus graduate from 1990. And the parent of another Gustavus graduate, Patrick, class of 2016. She spent 12 years in the Minnesota House of Representatives and served as Speaker of the House. She has served as a trustee for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, and is currently President and CEO of the Minnesota High Tech Association, and she also lectures about conflict management at the University of Minnesota. Jody Harbstead worked for 20 years at Medtronic, which we think of as a good company to try and poach talent from, with our president coming from there. Before moving on to Lutheran Social Services in 2004, which she now serves as CEO, at Lutheran Social Services, she has led efforts in services, human resources, information technology, and finance. Anne Kriznik is the Executive Director at the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition. She previously spent seven years with Education Minnesota as general counsel and field representative. She is an active member of the Church of St. Mark and St. Paul, and volunteers in several community initiatives. Robert Rabambard is also a father of a Gusty, Tim, from the class of 2013. Bob is the CEO of Gradstaff, which has grown to serve nine major metropolitan areas and field positions in more than 85 cities across the United States. Bob has 35 years of experience as an entrepreneur and a business leader and is known as an expert in the entry-level job market. Yutip Prafke works as the Special Programs Administrator for the St. Peter's School District, and she leads educational programs, including Title I, Early Childhood Special Education, and Early Childhood Family Education and School Readiness. And our moderator this evening will be Matt Kuselek. Matt is also a Gustavus graduate from the class of 1998, our tornado year. He currently serves as publisher for Minnesota Business Magazine and has served previously as senior associate publisher at Thompson Reuters and has over 18 years of experience in the print and digital media industry. So when we invited our panelists, we shared with them several recent articles that we thought would provide them with some context for thinking about the subject of economic balance. We are not asking them to specifically reference those articles tonight, and we don't expect that any of you would have necessarily read any of them. So let me just briefly give you a sense of what they read about. One article appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and was also the subject of a pretty big piece on NPR. Its title was The Secret Shame of Middle Class Americans. Its author, Neil Gabler, was responding to a report by the Federal Reserve that found that 47% of Americans reported that they would have difficulty coming up with $400 to handle an emergency expenditure either coming up with it at all or could only come up with it by borrowing the money or selling something. So that struck us as quite an interesting piece. A second article from Bloomberg Business Week reported that more young adults 18 to 34 now live with their parents than with a spouse or a partner in their own household. 35% of those are males or, excuse me, 35% of males rather than that age group, 29% of females, but the rates have been rising among both groups. A third article by the Pew Research Center reported that the American middle class has been matched in size now by the combination of the lower and upper class, for lack of better names. The share of income received by the middle has fallen from 62% in 1970 to 43% in 2014. And then finally a Reuters article discussed the new Obama Administration regulations for overtime that will double the salary threshold that automatically entitles workers to overtime pay from $23,660 per year to $47,000 roughly $500. According to this report, just 7% of all workers are now paid overtime in the United States compared to 63% in 1975. So from these articles and numerous others we were reading at the time and have read since, we identified three themes that we thought would be worthy of discussion. Number one, we have a lot of people in this country who are living very close to the edge, just one emergency or crisis away from something that could be a huge economic problem for them. Number two, the talk about growing inequality is more than just some abstract statistics. There's good news in the data, the high income group is growing, but the bad news of course is that the middle is shrinking and the bottom group is also growing fairly significantly. Third, our global economy has combined with technology to create an intensely level of competition particularly for small businesses so that any policies we decide to impose for what seem like the very best of reasons could create burdens on those businesses that we may not be comfortable with the outcomes of that. So on behalf of Nobel 52, again I want to thank you all for coming tonight and today for those of you who've been with us all day to be a part of this discussion and thanks very much to our panelists and our moderator for leading us in the search for economic balance and I now turn it over to Matt and I guess the one thing we forgot to do at dinner was to pick an order of speakers. If you want to quickly draw straws or do it alphabetically however you want to do that. I don't think you put us in order of who would speak so we'll just follow this unless someone has a better idea but I think this will be a good start. I think what we'll, thanks Larry and I'm excited to be part of the panel and some of the conversation we had at dinner already tonight is really interesting to get some different perspectives on how all this comes together, how this works and the realities. So I think what, to start off, if each of you can just take a few minutes to talk about either one of the articles that we discussed or that Larry had sent out or anything in your personal or business life maybe you don't want to get as personal as the first author but you know that you're kind of seeing out there what's going on do these things resonate in the real world here today with people that you know or work with or see in the community so we'll just kind of go in this order if that's all right and Margaret maybe you can start us off. Sure thanks Matt and I'm really glad to share the panel and got to share dinner with a couple of the panelists already and a couple conversations so I know that we'll get to react to the articles throughout the night. I'm going to start off with reacting to one of these big questions that directly relates to work that I get to do every day and work that I get to see and that's this question of how our world here in Minnesota and in the United States is intersecting with the rise of technology globally and something that I think about every day and how policies and policy prescriptions are interacting and so I have to say that here at Gustavus I probably wasn't a very good economics student in fact I know I wasn't so I apologize about that but I got a little bit better when I went to graduate school and actually my graduate school classmate John Dorn is out in the audience so I think he knows that. We went to the Kennedy School together and I did get to study economics there and I was grateful for that opportunity in graduate school and I also got to have the fabulous experience of getting to meet people from around the globe who helped educate me much more deeply about what was happening and it wasn't that long ago because I did that mid-career and it connects to what we see today happening with the rise of the rest of the world in terms of global technology so I don't mean to bum you out tonight but I am going to just begin this way that today we were sitting in the office as we were reviewing some companies for our upcoming venture conference and thinking about that when the close of the deal for St. Jude Medical closes soon that will be the last of the medical device companies in Minnesota owned in Minnesota we will not have a major medical device company owned in Minnesota that's quite striking I mean there's presence here no doubt but that is something that I think we have to examine now we have other things that are quite impressive happening here we have the rise of digital health we have the rise of digital analytics happening here we have a lot of other incredible things happening on retail technology but I do think we have to say that the world is changing and it's changing pretty rapidly for us in Minnesota and some things that we thought of as our identity are maybe not quite our identity as much as they once were and where is that shifting to that is shifting globally to other centers around the world in terms of research and so I think that that is part of what the story is here that instead of totally being the epicenter of where where global research was happening maybe 40 years ago or 50 years ago that's becoming more distributed around the world to where population centers are where diverse population centers are and there's also a rise in where the higher educational systems are becoming stronger and so we have to keep an eye on that and it's one of the stories that we need to be quite aware of that to be competitive in the future and to keep having I mean it's interesting that statistic about that the the upper incomes are rising to me because I think that that might I don't know if that's sustainable or if it's a little bit of an aberration in terms of the line because I would say and maybe it's more that middle class piece that we should be so worried about because that is the place that has great concern here for where sustainability is and where our economy is going so this is I think one of the things we need to always be looking at where technologies are rising now I think that there are some amazing things happening biotechnologies are rising personalized medicine is on the rise discovery is coming forward I watched a lot of companies last week in the Minnesota cup business plan competition come forward that are quite exciting but here is the other part of that a lot of the companies where the value is coming out of those companies are companies that often have fewer employees so when you look at a digital company those companies often have less employees than a large company used to have so I guess the comparison would be something like Kodak and its heyday Kodak and its heyday even as it went into bankruptcy had a hundred and forty four thousand employees or something like that when something like one of the Facebook acquisitions was purchased they had maybe forty employees and were purchased for a multi-billion dollar purchase so that gives you a sense of scale that when companies are being created today they have much fewer employees much higher valuation it partly has to do with how patents are acquired today how patents are protected and then how that value is created in our economy and that gets to a little bit how you know the top end is creating the wealth and how maybe that middle is having less wealth being created. Thanks Margaret. Bob in your experience I mean we'll let you kind of touch on one of those pieces but is there anything from what Margaret's discussing that sort of resonates with you immediately in your world and your connection with recent grads I'll let you explain your business but recent grads and the connections you're trying to make for them finding a job. Absolutely I think the technology is driving the world out there in a way and our business has changed a lot over the last 14 years that I've been with it where now many of the positions were filling a technology related positions and these are jobs that we wouldn't have thought of even five years ago and so we place a lot of people in social media software implementation help desk positions all the liberal arts grads for the most part but they're very tech savvy these days so that in a very quick statement just shows you what's happening in the workforce and three years from now there will be many many other technology positions at the same time but I bring the perspective today of an entrepreneur and that's my life I've been working in small companies for over 30 years now and you know what's really important to keep in mind is that over 75 percent of the jobs created new jobs created in the economy are created by employees of 500 employees or less and so it's a very important part of the economy but I'm very concerned about the entrepreneur right now because statistics show that from the late 1970s to now every year the number of new startups has declined and in the last three or four years as a matter of fact there are more business closures there have been more business closures than there have been startups to the tune of 70,000 businesses closing and that closes 70,000 businesses over that each year over that four-year period if that sustains for the long term we're in deep trouble because if you look at who's starting companies it's not Bill Gates type person or even Zuckerberg with Facebook it's a guy opening a plumbing business an electrical contracting business a small retail shop those are great employers there's four or five million of them in the country across the country they employ typically 510 people when those companies go out of business it has a big impact on the middle income because those are middle income earners and if you look at the decline in the middle class from the late 70s to now it pretty much tracks the decline in the number of new business startups over that time period and so we've got to do more to encourage people taking that first step to start businesses and we've got to make it easier for them to do that in terms of regulation the availability of capital and those types of things so that's my passion and I want to talk more about it tonight sure perfect I think your perspective is a little bit different from sort of the business side of things that we're starting off here maybe you can share a little bit about your background and your focus and kind of what you see in your part of the world actually I represent another enormous economic sector in Minnesota the non-profit social service sector which has always been a large part of our economy here in the state I've been saying a lot recently that I think over the last 20 to 30 years the baby boomers have been affluent enough in Minnesota to buy paid professional services for their neighbors and in the next 10 to 20 years we're going to be hard pressed as a state to keep buying all of these professional services for people especially as we care for the aging baby boom not to mention everyone else and so one thing that we're looking for at Lutheran social service are great neighbors we have to go back and remember how our grandparents generation cared for their neighbors and do as much as we can as neighbors with each other and save our paid professional services for people who are really going to need intense or professional care and so we're going to the place we always look for those kinds of things Lutheran churches and others to find people who are willing to be host homes for people with disabilities, host homes for homeless youth, adoptive families foster care families and that sort of thing and I think we're going to need to use what the social service industry calls natural supports to the full extent that we can again save our taxpayer professional services for people who really really need them this year the Lutheran services in America conference came to Minnesota it's the association that LSS is part of it's all the other LSS's in the country and they all wanted to know what we were doing in Minnesota because they looked to Minnesota as a leader in caring for neighbors in our state and so we're very proud of the fact that Minnesota is a very leading state in terms of being willing to accept refugees from other countries we've always been one of the number one states in the country for international adoption and in caring for each other by paying for plenty of services for people who need support from neighbors at the same time we have to say that the data is now quite clear that Minnesota is one of the lowest states in the nation in terms of fixing racial disparities and so we're very work we are now committing this year to spend much more of our time examining and doing what we can as part of the fabric of the dominant culture to help figure out how to change the equation for people of color in Minnesota so we're spending a lot more of our time on that as I think about economics and the disappearing middle class I'm particularly concerned about some of our employees 60% of our work are services for people with developmental disabilities in Minnesota we run 124 person group homes across the state and we're having trouble continuing to pay for those there's a workforce shortage among frontline employees which I'm sure many people have heard about last year we asked the legislature for help in supporting our group operations even as people are wanting to live in different settings in the community we still have a lot of people in group homes to support and it would have cost the state $90 million to give us a 5% increase which would allow us to improve the frontline employees wages from $12 to $1250 and so we're having trouble making those economics work anymore and we're looking for alternatives like host homes in the community for people with disabilities people living in their own apartments with some support as much as they can so we're changing our services but particularly concerned about a lot of our employees I'm discovering we have a growing sector of our economy in the state which are people working two and three part time jobs with no health care benefits trying to support families a couple years ago I was in a big room with all of the supervisors in our disability services and I asked them to think about the people working for them and I said given these kinds of jobs that are part time $1250 you know it's not a minimum wage but it's not a livable wage either how many of our employees were using those as second jobs which is really what they ought to be given the nature of the job and how many of them are using them to try to support a family and their general estimate was two thirds of them are using these jobs plus two or other jobs patching together two to three jobs to support a family and only about a third of them were using them as they were probably designed in the first place to be second income jobs in their household so I'm certainly concerned about that and then over dinner I just started asking people well why are folks taking these jobs for heaven's sake because that's not really designed to be a livable wage and discovered that in a lot of places across Minnesota these are the best jobs in town as we've lost some of the factory jobs and some of the other kinds of jobs so my employees are on my mind these days too well it's a reality and one of the things at our table that came up is workforce shortage and I think we often think about it in certain segments that hadn't occurred to me necessarily but you know we look at the other side of it and then you think of basic supply and demand and how come some of that stuff doesn't balance itself out and maybe we'll tip into that a little bit. Thanks Jody. You team you give us a different perspective as well coming from education and so maybe tell us a little bit about what your role is in the St. Peter school district and sort of what you see kind of on your daily basis with your students and their families and maybe even employees at the school. Sure, so my role in St. Peter schools is special programs administrator and that encompasses a lot of things in a district our size so I'm the early childhood administrator I'm the title one administrator and for the last two years I've been food service director and so and a few other things and so it's a great experience I get to know a lot of families and I'm really honored to be here tonight to share some of the stories of the families that we serve in St. Peter schools so I'm really coming from the local districts and what this is right here where you are today in the community of St. Peter and the families that we're serving. First of all I'd like to tell you a little bit about the demographics of the student population in our district. We currently have an enrollment of about 2100 students. There are 18 different languages spoken in the homes of students who attend school in our district with English, Spanish and Somali being the primary languages and that surprises some folks in this area that we have 18 different languages spoken. Approximately 40% of our student population qualifies for the free and reduced meal program. When I did read the article by Neil Gabler one of the things that he spoke about was the shame and in my work with families over the years in our school I often see that in conversations with them and not wanting to admit or being embarrassed to admit where they are and that they do need help. The families that I work with don't even fall into that middle class range. They face poverty every day and that rough patch that is their life. He quotes he talks about going through a rough patch but the rough patch is their life. We know that in order for children to be engaged in school and to learn at high levels their basic needs to be met. Their basic needs need to be met so hungry kids, kids are worried about things that are happening at home, making ends meet, their lunch account balance, they're not ready to learn and so it's our job to help them get to a place where when they come to school each day they are ready. One of the things people are often surprised about is that in St. Peter Public Schools last year we had 21 students that fit the category of being homeless. When you drive through St. Peter you don't think homeless is my guess. We had families living in campgrounds we had families sharing homes. We had young people on their own and they call that couch hopping, living with friends. We had family with three children living in a car and this year we have four students in a shelter. When you drive through St. Peter you don't see that. As I mentioned earlier 40% of the student population in our school district qualifies for free and reduced and we know that we're not reaching all of those families. We know that there are families out there who are too proud to ask for help. In fact this year when I sent out the applications for free and reduced I included a questionnaire and the questionnaire would give me permission to provide additional information to them on different programs we have available. It might be food vouchers during holiday time. It might be a backpack program and 25% of those that were returned declined that service. Now do I think they could have benefited from that? Absolutely. Do I think that there's that stigma attached? Absolutely. And that may be the reason why they chose to decline those services. In St. Peter we've got lots of programming in place to help like I said we want kids ready to learn and they need those basic needs met. For the last eight years we've held a free summer food program. It's called the read and feed. We provide free lunches for children ages one to 18. You don't have to qualify economically you can just come and eat lunch. We have learning activities there. Eight years ago the first year of that program throughout the summer we served 3,000 meals. Now we've been consistently over 11,000 meals each summer. Now again you don't have to qualify for those programs but that brings all kids in and it eliminates that stigma that we often think about when we think about needing a free meal during the summer. So we're excited about that. We know that in order to make that program successful we need to provide transportation. We need to eliminate that transportation barrier. So we've partnered with the City of St. Peter to provide transit stops within the city at strategic locations to bring kids to the read and feed and take them home again at no cost and so that's been a we've seen lots of success with that. So we're feeding kids during the school year we're feeding them during the summer. We know that the school calendar brings lots of vacations and breaks and weekends and so we need to think about how are we feeding kids on the weekends. And about six years ago a group started it was an offshoot of our local food shelf. It's the Children's Weekend Food Program and it's volunteer committee and we pack meals to send home with those students over the weekend. They're kid friendly meals they sign up for the program. There's also a teen pantry so some of those older kids who don't want to take the backpack full of food home have some resources because we do have hunger in St. Peter. Once families qualify for that program or participate in that program they're linked up with the food shelf and other resources to help them sustain so they're not part of that program ongoing. I mentioned we talked a little bit here about the hunger. We also know that when kids come to school in the fall they need tools. They need tools to be ready to learn. You guys all know the feeling of coming to school with a brand new notebook or opening that new box of crayons. We have families in St. Peter who wouldn't be able to afford those things and so we have a committee called the Friends of Learning who over the last few years has provided backpacks on a regular basis full of the supplies kids need to be successful. When they come to school and our numbers keep climbing in this year we provided 500 backpacks. Keeping in mind our school population is about 2,000. That's a lot of backpacks. It's a lot of kids coming to school ready to learn so we're excited about that. These are just a few examples of some ways that the educational system is going beyond educating kids. It's lightening the economic stress put on families. We work daily with children and families to help them overcome life obstacles and I wanted to share a story that I just heard today from a social worker. I called her and said I'm going to be on a panel tonight. Do you have any stories that you can share with me about real life? Real life in St. Peter. She said I do and it just happened today. She said we've had a family in our district for over five years and last week I learned that they've been living in a basement apartment with no beds. Kids were sleeping on cement floors with no bedding. They shared one towel. They had no dishes and now this week they're connected with a new apartment and resources. For over five years that family was in our school district they're connected to school. They have teachers who care about them. They have social workers who are working with them and they just made it work. And my guess is it was that pride and just making it work. So that's just a little bit of a snippet of what's happening in St. Peter schools. We have lots of great things going on. We hope to support our families in any way we can and are working hard to eliminate that economic burden. We do hear from families that affordable childcare and affordable housing continue to be a big part of our struggles and our district leaders and our city leaders are working together to try to find solutions to that. Thanks, Teeve. Good story. Good examples and some of the things that I don't, you know, you just don't think about sort of go on just like you're driving to town and it's this picturesque little community and all the trees are growing back since I left in 98 and all that stuff. But there's all this going on behind the scenes and it just is what we talked about in that pride. So kudos to you for everything that you do on that. Last but not least and I guess I'll let you just kind of add what you've, anything that's sort of come across the panel that relates to your world and things or just kind of give us your perspective. It's nice to be last and have so many things to react to but it's hard to figure out which ones to really focus on. The joint, just to get an understanding of my work, the joint religious legislative coalition is a group made up of the Minnesota Council of Churches, the Minnesota Catholic Conference, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and the Islamic Center of Minnesota. And we have members throughout the state and we lobby at the Capitol on social justice issues that are supported by all four of those faith traditions. And one of the things that really has come through here are obviously poverty, caring for the widow, the orphan, the refugee, the human dignity that play in all of this are a big part of what we do. So I'm just going to kind of comment on everything as I think of that. I think the first two comments really spoke to the fact that there are far fewer well-paying jobs than there used to be that if there are jobs available they're often low-paying jobs, they are not often full-time jobs. And so when you talked about people piecing things together, there's a real challenge for families and there's a legislative commission a while back it was called the Legislative Commission to End Poverty in Minnesota by 2020 and maybe that was a lofty goal, but a great one. We made some great progress in that, raising the minimum wage, banning the box and employment so people who are coming out of prison actually get to have an interview before people decided to do it, a number of other recommendations. But I pulled a couple of figures. In Nicolette County 1.7% of children live in poverty. And just to give you a sense of poverty, the guidelines for that, our family of three that would mean their income would be $20,160. That's slightly lower than the statewide average but when we look at free and reduced lunch that you just talked about Nicolette County has a higher percentage of students than the statewide average of students on free and reduced lunch, almost 38%. So we've made progress on some things but the number of families that are living in poverty has worsened. The number of children and adults living in households where they no longer have stable employment has worsened, has risen. And so the economic boom, whatever you're talking about, has left quite a number of people behind. And the faith community, I'll just speak for all of those faith communities, is doing a pretty heavy lift on that and it's much like the district is doing. They have Dr. Faith communities, they have food shelves, they have health clinics, they have Dress for Success programs and diaper drives and it's not enough to close the gap. And so one of the real hard things I think is to look at the reality of what our communities look like. I'm not surprised that I can see here that there are homeless people in St. Peter but it doesn't surprise me that other folks are. People are surprised that there's homeless people in Brainerd because there are beautiful cabins there in those places. And one of the real challenges is to say which of these pieces are we going to work on? Are we going to work on housing? Are we going to work on basic cash assistance? Are we going to work on transportation? Because especially when you're not in the metro area with a bus system, if I don't have a car, is that there's a real problem. And the reality is that having a wage allows me to get by. Okay, that's what I can use to pay my bills. Hopefully it's enough to pay my bills, my rent, buy food, supplies if I'm not lucky enough to have an opportunity to get them somewhere else. But unless I can build assets somehow, I can never get ahead. I can never get ahead. And so you talked about the entrepreneurs. If I want to start a business, I have a great idea. I need capital. That $400 that we've learned almost half of Americans cannot come up with. If that's all I need to start a business, that means I can't do that. We have all kinds of immigrants that came to Minnesota that were entrepreneurs in their previous work. They don't have the capital to do that. They don't have the money to do that. So you need assets in order to start a business, in order to save up and move to an apartment in a safer neighborhood, in order to actually buy a car instead of figuring out how to walk through miles to work so that I can maybe get a different job from somewhere that's farther away. And that's a place we've really left folks behind in that. So looking back at this, when we work on those issues, we look at those figures and then we kind of take a step back and look at how much worse the figures are for Minnesotans of color. And I was pretty shocked. This is a 2014 statistic, so it may be different. But the only states that had a higher poverty rate for African Americans than Minnesota were Louisiana and Alabama. That's really striking when you look at that gap between Minnesotans and Minnesotans of color. And a lot of that is really hard to figure out what are the root causes of that, how are you going to address that. But we know that there are families and children living in poverty. We know that it hurts children, it hurts families, it hurts whole communities. And a lot of our work is really to say, how can we address that? How can we get more cash assistance to those poorest Minnesotans? How can we help those people who are the working poor have more money in their pockets? Because we know that if they get $100, they're going to spend it because they have to. So I want to close up a little bit different kind of a story. The Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless did a study last year when they were one of the our big legislative objectives. This is really to get an increase for those poorest Minnesotans who have not gotten the cash increase since 1986. But they went to a number of parents and said, if you had $100 and extra $100, what would you do with it? You had an extra $100 a month, what would you do with it? And there are a whole range of responses, but almost all of them were things like my new socks and underwear for my children. My daughter would be able to have winter boots. I'd be able to say something for cough medicine. The most, and I don't think this is luxurious at all, so I don't mean to say that it is, but the most luxurious or indulgent one, if you have the ones that I saw, where well maybe I'd be able to pay the fee at school and my son could play football. So we know that those children going up in those situations are the Minnesota of tomorrow. And we really have an obligation to figure out what we can do to help them. Part of that is to create the business opportunities. The comments about small business being where most of the jobs are going to be created and where they're going to grow is absolutely right on target. But we can't create those unless there's a way for people out of the capital to get those. So maybe that's too much at once. Not at all. I mean you had a lot of points right on and you know I'm taking some notes here and I'm thinking there's so many things resonate. One thing that keeps occurring to me is in my interaction with businesses is worker shortage. Worker shortage, worker shortage. Yet we have these individuals who would love the opportunity to be employed in some of these opportunities. I'm not sure who to start with, but Margaret with you, how do we connect those dots? How do we make them move from the individuals that have the need, the desire to getting them in position so they can learn the skills so they can get the jobs that they... So I think there's a few things. So the seeds of what I was talking about earlier are partly the answer. And there are some new things coming online. The legislature did fund a pilot of an analytic tool that's going to be previewed here soon that has been tried in Michigan. It's called Work Fountain. Doesn't mean much here today. But what it does do is that it helps connect the worker very quickly to the employment opportunity. It also is the most successful tool ever tried that takes away and strips away for racial bias. So that's why it's being tried. It's going to be tried through something that I sit on that's called real-time talent. We actually have been set up to use data to really show Minnesotans and Minnesota employers what the job openings are right now. So we take away hearsay about what the job openings are. And actually we publish on our website on the MHTA.org website every single month the science, technology, engineering, and math based statistics about the job openings. So you can go out and get this for free on our website. But we do this for our employers as a member service. And this Work Fountain tool has real promise. And we're going to pilot it soon to really cut down the time to match employers and employees. And we're going to do it in some specific sectors in certain parts of the state. I think that's a real promising tool. It's been tried in Michigan and had really great success. So this is the use of data analytics to really help make that match. The match is much better than just going out and sending in your application. And like I said, the other benefit is it takes away gender bias, it takes away racial bias. It really is promising in that way. The other part that I would say that still is probably the most important thing that we can do for people in Minnesota going forward. We are going to have a work shortage, worker shortage. We have it already, it's predicted into the future, into some of our most important sectors. May not always feel that way because we do have people that don't have the right match skills is training and education. The clearest way forward for higher incomes is still training and education. Whether it's a certificate, a two-year degree, or a four-year degree. Now the key is getting people trained in the right areas of the openings that we need. And I think that is also these key analytic tools going forward. And one of the things we're working on in that project that I work on is really getting, maybe, building more of a predictive model for Minnesota. What is our predictor going to be of these work shortages? And then the other part I would say we were talking about at dinner is how do we account for the most valuable jobs in society that are not necessarily going to pay the most, but are of high value to society, what Jody was talking about. But yet we need highly trained, highly skilled people in them. And yet they maybe have to pay for their education still. How do we account for that and pay for that and make sure that's not carried on the burden of the back of the worker for the rest of their life? So teachers, nurses, doctors in rural areas, social workers, frontline nursing home workers. I mean we have to figure this out. This is an obligation that society has and we haven't figured that out yet. I want to take one second before we continue. Anyone in the audience if you have questions or comments or things that you would like us to address, we wouldn't mind that at all. Raise your hand and someone will come across and pick those up from you. So we appreciate that. Can I just make a comment I just want to kind of follow up on what you talked about is transportation especially when you get out of someplace where they have a good bus system is a huge problem as well. And it's a problem in a number of ways. First that if I have no extra cash and my car breaks down or I have a flat tire and I can't fix it I can't get to work and then I lose my job and then I lose my apartment and I end up homeless even though I've been struggling and trying to dig out of this. So one of the things that I think employers could really benefit from looking at is where are the people that could do these jobs how can I get them to where I am. And if there is some way to make that connection it would be really helpful. We should learn something from Sweden. I will tell you that Sweden has the most interesting distributed transportation system with little networks of the pickup spots being church lots all across Sweden where you would go. I don't know why we don't do this in rural Minnesota and the buses can go and you know it's a little more expensive to ride the bus but it was the greatest thing to ride the bus in Sweden and pick up the bus at the church lot. Smart. Another possibility is we have our senior companions in Minnesota who in the prior years were volunteers who receive a small stipend to call on other older adults in their homes for companionship. But in recent years we've been given permission to bill for transportation so our 400 senior companions mostly in northern and western Minnesota million miles on their cars last year driving people to the doctor the dentist the grocery store. Doctors are getting further apart in rural Minnesota and dentists and so that's one. With a small stipend the senior companion is often able to use that small stipend to make their car payment or replace their tires. It gives them something to do that's purposeful and meaningful and we have this army of volunteers coming our way as baby boomers and full-time work and are looking for something meaningful to do in the community so I think there's some possibility in that. We have a few questions. Do we want to sort of just address these or did you want to add Bobby look like you might want? I was just going to say something about this unavailability of people to work certain types of jobs and we have an imbalance there and I think that one of the things I'm most concerned about too is the fact that our public education system is very inconsistent. I mean if you live in an affluent suburb you're going to have a good public school system. If you live in an inner city school system you might not be as lucky probably not and I think that the graduation rate within some high schools statewide as well as nationally are not that high so you have a large number of people that are not getting a high school degree that potentially has a lot of talent but it hasn't been developed and so I think there's a huge opportunity to have a government and private sector solution where training, remedial education and specific job training is provided to this sector of the workforce and it would solve a lot of problems in a big way and you look at especially machining jobs, industrial jobs there's a huge demand there, a computer manufacturing, injection molding equipment is a great job it pays close to $100,000 a year so companies out there can't fill the darn position. I recently read a story about a manufacturing company I think in northern Minnesota and they ended up acquiring another company simply for the workforce they're so much about the ultra property or the customer base or anything they have employees, we'll buy the company and we can have those employees that help us. One of the questions that came in actually related to manufacturing so maybe we'll segue to that. I'll just ask the question and whomever feels inspired to add to it please jump in what do we know about the growth and establishment of manufacturing in the seven that's their best guess in their Minnesota counties so I think just not to put words in their mouth but what are the opportunities in that space? It's growing, it's healthy Alexandria is the manufacturing, packaging manufacturing capital of Minnesota they can't find enough workers we actually work with folks in Alexandria a lot on high tech manufacturing and one of the ways we do that is we have a paid internship program for college students, Gustave's students have participated in this and they have been placed in these high tech manufacturers they do a match system this is a great system because what's happened there is Alexandria technical college feeds that manufacturing base with workers and it has been a great system up there that really has driven a lot of growth but packaging high tech manufacturing in those western counties has continued to grow it's been quite successful and it really is quite a good match between higher education and business. Anyone else probably not quite in that niche? I just know that in our world, in the business community that we translate and talk to and reach out to I think about the associations that we're involved with that focus on manufacturing and there's a golf tournament or some activity and how many out of state folks are sort of out there doing this and they make the drive from Alexandria to the cities two or three times a week because that's where the business is made but their business is run up there so it is interesting another question that came in relates to a little bit of conversation maybe last night in that spectacle but in the election the question is in the election the loss of jobs been blamed on immigrants and what effect has development of technology also impacted the loss of jobs and we talked a little bit about this I don't want to keep calling on Margaret because we talked about it but maybe Bob can sort of speak a little bit to what we were talking about there and you know what happens when technology robotics or whatever it is infiltrates because people this connected to the minimum wage conversation which is another question that's in here but maybe you can speak to that question in terms of is what we hear on the news the immigration issue really was causing the job loss or where do those pieces come together I think technology has had a tremendous impact on jobs there's no question about it either through using technology here locally or outsourcing the job overseas to a technology solution over there so technology has had a huge impact I just heard a report this morning that even truck drivers are not safe and that with the computer aided driving technology that's happening that you know within our maybe not my lifetime the younger people's lifetime in the next 20, 30 years it could be possible that trucks will be driven remotely using technology so nothing is safe and it's having a big impact no question about it don't have the answer to the technical side but the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce has a great presentation on how Minnesota is going to need every immigrant and refugee we can get our hands on in the next 10 years to fill the jobs that we have open and we've probably all noticed that people aren't moving here from Florida and Arizona going the other way and our birth rate is down and we're at the beginning of a workforce shortage and as more and more people retire it's only going to get worse and so we're going to need all the immigrants and refugees we can get to fill positions and can I just broaden people's mind about technology I mean I think it absolutely is the technology you probably think of when you think of technology like computer systems and transfer of bits and bytes but it's also the rise of science and how to increase production of agricultural products and things like that you know as a kid growing up it really my family farm could support 8 people living on it maybe even probably 12 people were living off of that family farm today that's not the case and you know farms can't support today as many people living off of them because of the change in technology and the production cycle so I just think that we have to change our mind technology is a broader word than just the computer aided technology it's a broad word about how our whole economy has changed and I would say the job changes that we've seen over the last 35 years are more about technology than immigrant flow frankly if you look at how few children we're having in this country we need people coming into the country. Another question that popped up that relates a little bit while this all relates to each other but the question is earlier we spoke of real wages in a dignified life in your opinion would you argue a minimum wage increase is necessary in Minnesota or are the potential negative factors extending factors outweigh the benefit I'll take that one. Please. I think if you look at the entire legislative code it's really people who are elected by the citizens of Minnesota coming to the capital with the intent to do its best for all of Minnesota figuring out where the balance should be and when you look at any laws that involve labor and worker whether that's OSHA standards for safety or child safety laws or pay it's really that discussion over the capital with the governor saying what do we want as the bare minimum for how we're going to treat our employees and what we're going to do so anytime you raise a minimum wage you create a negative impact or you know some additional costs for business but at the same time you're really affecting those people who are receiving that wage and I just kind of point out my son at the time this passed was very upset that the new minimum wage legislation did not apply to high school workers. Okay so it's just that hearing all this about the minimum wage how is that not right so you know from the perspective of our group we believe that every person is made in the image and likeness of God and deserves to live in dignity and the minimum wage comes to that just at its very core and if you look at the numbers most people even if they're at a minimum wage job even if they are lucky enough for 40 hours a week that's still not a livable wage they can't necessarily live in the community where they work they can't afford what we would consider to be basic necessities the number of people that we call or use that phrase the working poor is expanding so the people at the top the number of people whose income is at the top is expanding the middle class is shrinking and we have more people at the bottom so really the minimum wage is a recognition by Minnesotans through their elected officials that we want to do what we can to help people have that basic level of income and dignity and there are millions of not millions but all kinds of programs that do that we have unemployment insurance for someone who's been working really hard and for no fault of their own their employers business suddenly shuts down on their left without a job and we say we're going to give you a little bit of a safety net we have the head start program for children who are born into families that they don't have the same privileges and benefits that other people have and so the minimum wage like many other pieces of legislation is us saying if we're going to have basic dignity for our people that are working in minnesota this level of wage isn't sufficient we know that the cost of living to kindies go up there's all kinds of statistics about what you really look at when you do in the cost of living when that kind of basket was put together in 1960 the average food cost was 30% of somebody's household budget now food is like a 7th of the household budget because all these other things come in and the bottom line is if we want families children minnesotans to be productive contributing members of society if we want children to grow up in houses where they can really thrive we have all kinds of families that aren't thriving they're barely surviving they're striving to do more and the minimum wage is a key piece that a bipartisan commission came up with and said this is a way to really help these families in poverty I'll just comment on that and I hate to say this because I in theory agree with you but when you raise the cost of an input the entrepreneur the business owner in many cases will take action and they could automate the position and they could outsource it or they could cut the hours and make it a part time position and so I think you have to be careful in that you could hurt the people that you're trying to help unfortunately but that's unfortunately what some business owners will look at. There was a significant debate at the cap about the raising of wage how much should we waste and people on all sides and that's where they ended up in the end I will say this that I do think that if the minimum wage is going to be raised it's far better to do it on a statewide basis and have the debate statewide than what we're seeing start to develop which is really a patchwork debate now and the pressures that are starting to develop which are municipal debates and there's really this quite intense debate whether that's even within the realm of municipalities being able to do is that something municipalities have in their scope I think there's a question about ease of business and really kind of you saw that you're seeing this play out in Minneapolis right now and I think that it's far better to have a statewide debate the last time minimum wage was raised it's a statewide question you can have a more holistic debate I think the last time it was raised there is an inflation adjuster now on the minimum wage which is at least some progress I mean I heard what Jody said if you listen carefully she said that her coalition went and asked for a bit of an increase that would have been 90 million dollars and that was only a 50 cent increase and so I do you know you hear that and I do think and that was from $12 to $12.50 so I think there has to be some real thoughtful discussion statewide about what does it mean I do think there's some other things that we can talk about that can be done that help the entrepreneur help people statewide help people in rural areas particularly as well well one of the things we talk about at dinner a little bit is you go through the political cycle and everything is a one word quip or one sentence quip we'll do this but there's so many you know you just look at all the perspectives and speaking and I'm like yeah let's do it and then Bob's like well but what about that I'm like yeah well that kind of stinks for that guy it's really hard I mean I don't envy the people that have to you know sort of help put this stuff together because there's no easy answer to it we always had a joke at the capital there was no maybe button there was yes and there was no I'd like to make a comment on training I think a lot of people could benefit from getting the technology training to make them more current in the workforce right now let me just throw in one thing that there are 70 federal training programs you know and there's a mishmash of all these different programs and I don't think probably any one of them is probably doing much good because it's not a coordinated thing and I think you know there's a lot of money there being spent that could be done a lot more effectively going right to the point of where it could be used so that's actually a big project the Twin Cities United Way has been working on is all these programs and a project called MSP Win to really look at how do we take this mishmash of these 70 federal and state training programs and get them pointed in the right direction for Minnesotans because frankly I think there's a lot of stuff that's overlapping that's not as effective as it could be and this is I'm going to make a pitch too for something that has become near and dear to my heart and that is here's where market failure is happening in rural Minnesota and that is broadband coverage and if we want to help school kids in rural Minnesota if we want to help adults get better training and up their skills and if we want to help entrepreneurs in rural Minnesota one of the things we need to do is we need to get every single Minnesotan high speed broadband because we have studies that show yes because we know that the average Minnesotan could raise their income at least $2,400 with high speed broadband why because they can file their taxes online and sell something online because they could make something and sell something online I mean the reality is you know you're right it's hard to get capital to start your business but this is what I do know about Minnesotans they are entrepreneurial and they will do stuff and they will make stuff and they will figure it out and they will sell that piece of equipment that they have sitting in their yard they will sell that excess whatever they will make something they will do something they will find something and they will augment their income because that's what people do and their kids will get more caught up because they will be able to keep up with the rest of their classmates because it won't be another barrier and their parents will be able to get a degree and keep their skills up to date we just need to do this we made some progress on it last year but this is one of our biggest barriers we take it for granted in Metro Minnesota that we can turn on our laptop or connect our ipad and we can get going and how do we complain if it slows down the itty-as-bit amount you know but out here you hit the data cap or you don't even have it right yeah we had students who did not have access to internet and one of the living in Minnesota one of the things we did is made up snow days and we wanted to take a little bit different look at that and so we put in a flexible learning day so on a snow day students are actually doing work school work at home interacting with their teachers from homes their teachers online we did have students who didn't have access to internet so it was our job to figure out how to provide that so we were able to get some wireless pucks they would check those out in the event of a snow predicted snow day opened up public library had our school libraries open but yep there is lack of access we have employees in all 87 counties of the state and I can't send an email to all of my employees yeah because they can't pick it up and if we send a video message out a lot of people can't don't have a high speed internet enough to watch it I'd like to add one other piece that's missing and kind of steer us a slightly different direction I'm going to the technical college in Alexandria I wanted to get training for the job that you talk about I can only do that or a lot of people can only do that if they can find quality affordable child care throughout the state metro greater minnesota small town rural whatever it's not just quality child care when you talk about who are we really supporting people that make a significant difference in society it's is it affordable and is there a way that we can really get providers to stay in that because that's an area that we see providers saying it's not worth it for me to do this work anymore not that I don't want to and that I'm not able to but that quality it has to be quality and affordable child care is a huge problem it occurs to me when you talk about the training programs that exist or having some going through the training well if they're working three jobs trying to make ends meet where's that where's the time to do it and then you have the opportunity costs if you say well I'm going to quit one of these part-time jobs well then everyone in the household probably has to sacrifice with the hopes that once the training is completed oh good well then I'll have another opportunity you know it's there's just so many layers of complexity and we're going to be here until like 12 or 1 a.m. to get all this figured out one of the challenges for our families as you mentioned affordable child care is just that we have families making choices whether to send their child to preschool or to kindergarten based on can they afford it based on their day care costs state of Minnesota has put in early childhood scholarships which are available to families to qualify based on income and family size the funding is limited and it's limited for use in what they're called four-star parent-aware programs or daycares within the City of St. Peter we have one child care provider who actually meets that four-star rating our school readiness programs meet that four-star rating we have families who are needing to choose will they put their child in daycare and use that funding for daycare or will they send them to preschool to have that preschool experience prior to kindergarten and so that it's a very real challenge for families in particular if you have an infant infant care is hard to find and there are programs of child care assistance program in Minnesota they help working poor people going to school get child care assistance and it's sliding scale based on your income and currently there are almost 7,000 families who are completely eligible for that benefit that are on a waiting list because there isn't funding so it's clear recognition of need but how are we going to figure out where we put our resources and how do we address those challenges that would put child care services right up there with training as a way to really make an impact one trend I'm beginning to see is some of our employees working four days a week and Friday they do the child care for their grandchildren that's a growing trend as well I don't know how much it'll contribute it's something I don't know if we have a time cap we're sort of at it but I have a sense we can continue let's thank our panel individually after we close it up here we'll do it that way thank you very much I have a book recommendation JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy I think is a great read right now I actually listen to it he is a thoughtful conservative he is by its title his family grew up in Appalachia and he was raised largely by his grandmother it's a very good listen I think in this time of year in the political season you would enjoy it greatly but it talks about the working poor and growing up poor I thought it was illuminating living on $2 a day at America another one about a whole population of folks that would surprise you I'd second that $2 a day perfect well if anyone wants to add anything else let's do it otherwise I think we'll wrap it up today is National Voter Registration Day so if anyone here or watching is not yet registered to vote register this is a really important election there you go no problem thanks to everyone and for the opportunity thank you