Michael Ohmann (Enterprise photo — Peter Crowley)

I’ve heard a fair bit of positive response to the Enterprise’s Labor Gap series on a widespread worker shortage, but only one person has told me he thought we were off the mark.

He was very civil and thoughtful about it, and his perspective is important to hear.

Back in March, after reading the first Labor Gap installment, Michael Ohmann walked into the Enterprise office to place an ad for an employee. Despite his own need for a worker, he doubted that the newspaper’s Labor Gap series had it right. He said he had seen an opposite trend: skilled professionals unable to find work — or rather, work that pays them what they’re worth.

“I have a lot of friends who are looking for work right now, and it seems like it’s hard to come by, and no one wants to pay over $15 an hour to paint their house or something like that,” he said.

Ohmann, 30, grew up in Saranac Lake, graduated from high school here in 2006 and still lives here. He said he was earning $16 an hour right out of high school, and now that he owns his own business, he can’t afford to work for such a low wage, what with a house mortgage and a high-mileage truck that he’ll need to replace at some point.

He studied in BOCES’s natural resource conservation program in high school and then worked for a tree service and a sawmill before striking out on his own. His business, Adirondack Arborist, specializes in residential tree work, but that’s not all he does.

“I do a lot of landscaping work, lawn care, spring cleanup, odd jobs, painting — pretty much anything I can do to stay busy,” he said.

“For me in particular, there’s not any forestry jobs, there’s not any surveying jobs, there’s not any logging jobs, there’s not the jobs that my friends and I like to do, landscaping, no one really is hiring for that kind of work right now.

“As a business owner, it’s feast or famine. Wintertime is very long; that’s almost six months.”

Overall, he said he’s never had a hard time finding decent work, but some of his friends are settling for less.

“They’re taking anything that they can, I think,” he said. “I have five or six friends that are asking for work right now, and I wish I could provide them work, but if I had to pay workman’s comp on all them, it’s crazy — it’s very expensive.”

What about all the business owners who have told the Enterprise they struggle to fill positions? Opening the Enterprise to the classified ads, Ohmann said, “If you look, what are they advertising for jobs right now? They got the Subway, Will Rogers, ‘skilled carpenter’ … High Peaks Distribution, Lake Placid Lodge, but that’s — I don’t want to say any business’s name, but $12 an hour is really hard to live on, as you know — and then getting taxed.”

From his point of view, if employers are having trouble finding employees, maybe they need to pay higher wages.

“I think a lot of it is they want to keep the profit and make the money themselves rather than distribute the wealth,” he said.

Another reason employers have trouble finding help, he said, may be the fault of the younger workforce.

“All my friends, they work very hard,” he said, “but it seems like the younger generation, they don’t really have the work ethic that we had 10 years ago. … I’ve noticed it with people I’ve worked with. The younger kids, they don’t really want to get out there and sweat for eight hours a day.

“When I was 18 years old, we’d work 12-hour days and then work weekends, seven days a week.”

Ohmann said he had hired one guy right out of high school for $17 an hour, but “within two weeks he quit because he didn’t like the manual labor.

“I wasn’t really working him that hard,” Ohmann added. “My dad had me splitting firewood at age 13. That’s how I got my allowance money.”

On the other hand, he said, he knows a man who has laid tile for 30 years and is a super-hard worker but has trouble finding jobs because “no one wants to pay him what it’s worth.”

My take on this is, first, that Ohmann makes a good point. People who know how to work and have skills are worth more than those who don’t, but they don’t always get more. Sometimes, as he said, it’s because employers don’t want to share their wealth, but I would add that many really can’t afford to pay workers their full value. Trust me; I work for a newspaper.

Ohmann’s admission that he can’t afford to hire his friends, either, shows many employers’ side of the story. Benefits such as health insurance and worker’s compensation keep going up in cost. I’ve said this before, but a universal health insurance plan such as Medicare for all would help every employer in America hire more people.

But it’s not just benefits; the ground is shifting under employers on pay, too. After many years of working-class wages being stagnant while top executives got richer, states and cities are hiking minimum wages toward a goal of $15 an hour. The federal minimum still stands at $7.25 an hour, but in many places it’s notably higher. In upstate New York it’s currently $10.40 and going up 70 cents a year until at least 2020. It’s higher in New York City, Long Island and Westchester County. All are on track to reach $15.

That certainly makes it tougher for businesses, especially small ones. It’s great for workers at lower pay levels, but it also scrunches together the people who used to make less with those who made more. Skilled workers such as Ohmann and his friends now feel like they’ve been lumped in with people who make sandwiches.

But as someone who has hired plenty of people to do work on my house, I know how hard it is for me financially. My house still has lots of work to be done, but right now we can’t afford to hire anyone.

Will pushing up the minimum wage have a ripple effect that eventually boosts the pay of people like Michael Ohmann (and me)? Goods and services would have to get more expensive for that to happen. What would that inflation look like?

We may find out.