Arkansas HVACR NewsMagazine January 2022

HVACR NewsMagazine January 2022

warm, cool, and refrigerated. It is a combination of needs and desires. You can’t have a food supply without refrigeration, you can’t have medical services without air conditioning and specialty medical equipment cooling, you can’t have copy machines working without the proper temperature and humidity, you can’t have … OK, enough — you get the point and now the world does as well. I recently heard a northern reporter say that we southerners will have to get accustomed to less air conditioning at which point a southerner replied , “ Perhaps, and you northerners need to get accustomed to less heat. ” Ha! It is all a matter of perspective as to what is important and what another needs to adjust. Bottom line, I don’t see thermostats being adjusted dramatically.

Well, it has been a year. I thought 2020 was a strange anomaly in American history but 2021 was perhaps even more so. The pandemic is still with us, politicians are bent on keeping us in lockdowns, inflation hit a 39 year high, crime is up all around America--yet life goes on. It may not be the life we wanted for our families but life goes on. I will not spend the rest of this article bemoaning our strange and regretful situation medically, financially, or politically. It did seem necessary to acknowledge it but it is not our purpose to swim in this pool of negativism.

Back to “T hings are looking good in Arkans as.” Let’s look at a few statistics .

Declining Arkansas Unemployment Rate

The point we want to spent time visiting is that the Arkansas HVACR has done quite well during the last couple of years. When many occupations were being locked down, the HVACR industry was designated as essential. We have always said that we don’t have to

ARKANAS UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

10

8.5 7.8

7.1 6.5

5.9 5.6 5.3

4.9 4.6 4.5 4.4 4.4 4.4 4.4 4.3 4.2

4 3.7

3.4

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we are back to historic lows of April & May 2019. They also project the labor force to be at 56.9% or 1,354,102. That is down from April 2019. Now let’s become Polly Anna and see the glass ½ full. We have 25,469 fewer Arkansans in the labor force. These are people that will

worry about outsourcing our career. Somebody has to design, install, and service HVACR comfort and refrigeration systems. It is not like what we do is optional. This pandemic and the amazing growth of many companies has proven that when others are having problems, people and businesses still want to be