Jobs Follow Workers

Increasingly, businesses are developing jobs where the workers are, especially where the highly trained workers live. That is the message in a recent BizSites article, which says: "If you build it, they may not come. Until the 1990s, workers adhered to the tenet of “follow the jobs,” willingly moving wherever employment opportunities existed. But that mantra has now been reversed. According to experts, business today must “follow the workers” to the places they live, which is the suburbs—and beyond."

Take the example of MasterCard. In 1998, MasterCard International chose WingHaven over 42 other locales to build a 580,000-square-foot global operations center housing 2,500 IT professionals with an average salary of $70,000. The final competition was between St. Charles and Las Colinas, Texas. MasterCard had a major presence in both locations, but the majority of their employees lived in St. Charles, so they moved closer to their people and farther away from their CEO’s home.

For many companies, their location choice is a suburban one--not the inner city--because that is where the largest supply of their workers reside. Two examples in the Cleveland area illustrate this point. The first is Progressive Insurance, which is based in my tiny village, Mayfield, which has only 3,200 residents but over 6,000 Progressive workers because the village is located near the crossroads of two major interstates that provide easy access to the location for workers throughout the region.

A similar example comes from MBNA, a leading financial services company, which is located in Beachwood, a suburban office center, with great interstate access and within reach of a high percentage of the region's knowledge workforce. While past efforts were made to lure both Progressive and MBNA to downtown Cleveland, the fact remains that these suburban locations offer them a greater competitive advantage than they would receive by being downtown.

Article link.