Down River 7/8
By John Lipez
Pay Hikes at the Prison/Com Center:
Let’s start off with a Down River quiz. Who said?
“To attract and retain top talent, we know we need to continue to invest in our employees. That investment includes more than just competitive wages. We provide career growth opportunities and a clear path to promotion so life,,,can be not just a job, but a career.”
(A) Clinton County Commissioner Jeff Snyder
(B) Mike Frank, Publisher, The Record
(C) Travis Sheetz, President/COO of Sheetz
(D) Musician/entrepreneur/philanthropist Stephen P. Poorman
The correct answer is C, Travis Sheetz. That was a quote from him in a Sheetz release in May in which the Altoona-based convenience store chain announced all 18,000 employees in its over 600 Mid-Atlantic stores would receive a $2 an hour pay hike. And that was in addition to another $1 hourly hike for what Sheetz said was an extra summer stimulus offering for employees from May 21 to September 23.
But county commissioner Snyder said something similar at the commissioners’ meeting last week when he lamented the county’s difficulty in maintaining a full complement of correctional officers at the county’s correctional facility.
The county is not now ponying up a Sheetz-like $3 an hour as part of an employee retention/recruitment effort at the prison and its com center but it might have to up the ante and make its temporary hike announced last week a permanent one.
It’s a sellers’ market for employees right now. There are myriad opportunities out there for those looking for work, for those looking to improve themselves, for those looking at higher-paying opportunities.
It’s that market with which the commissioners are dealing as they work to keep the prison and the com center fully staffed. The positions at stake here are the text book definition of “essential” jobs. Community public safety is on the line and the commissioners must keep the staffing at appropriate levels.
You saw how the commissioners framed the hikes at the correctional facility: “temporary retention incentives.” But a temporary hike? Six pay periods at the prison and the com center? A six-pay tease to hang on to existing employees and/or entice new ones? Not likely enough. If it takes a permanent $1.50 an hour increase to fully staff these critical county operations, we can only hope that will be sufficient.
The county has been dealing with a high turnover at the correctional facility for more than a few years and with business after business, industry after industry all but begging to fill job vacancies, employers such as the county are going to have to offer appropriate pay to stay competitive.
The relative good news for the county, and by extension its taxpayers, is the county coffers are brimming with dollars dropped from on high, the federal government. Surely county administrators can figure out how to shift a portion of this unanticipated bounty to cover the funding needed to sufficiently beef up the staffing levels at these vital county services.
$1.50 is a not insignificant pay jump. But when you see Sheetz putting up $3 an hour through the summer, you wonder if a buck-50 is close to enough.
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Pay Hikes for Amateur Athletes:
And did you catch the recent story on the US Supreme Court decision to allow NCAA athletes to be financially compensated for their name?
Somewhere the late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno has to be grimacing. The late Nittany Lion coach was “old school” in his approach to big-time football. He was one of the last to allow freshmen athletes to play varsity ball (Lock Haven High standout Steve Geise can attest to that, sitting for a year).
Given JoePa’s reluctance to change, we can only imagine his reaction to word that college athletes can make money for the use of their names and images. That NCAA decision came shortly after the nation’s highest court ruled, in effect, to remove the limits on compensation to college athletes.
Who knows where this will end up? True amateurism is all but gone so, I guess, why not let a running back at Alabama make a few bucks before he leaves school early for the NFL? Academics are all too often a sham for these “5-star” football and basketball players who do little more than meander through schools from bandit operations to top-tier educational institutions, part of a couple year trip to the NFL or NBA.
And the cashing in has already started. A Penn State-related sports story said even participants in low revenue programs such as wrestling are all in. Defending NCAA wrestling champion Roman Bravo-Young is among the first, announcing last week he’d be raffling off his sneakers. Want RBY’s shoes? $10 a ticket, the winner to have been announced on July 4.
No truth to the rumor, as far as can be determined, that Record sportscaster/wrestling guru extraordinaire Tom Elling is raffling off the Central State Normal School singlet the undersized Elling wore in pushing East Stroudsburg’s much larger Roy Miller to the limit in a dual meet in 1965.
Call me old fashioned (and I love sports as much as anybody), but athletics in the United States at the alleged amateur level is all but gone; I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
