If City Hall wants to bring down the Big Apple’s 8.5 percent unemployment rate, it’s going to have to convince small-business owners like Alan Bain the new jobs he wants to create won’t cost him money.
Bain owns World-Wide Business Centres in Midtown and would like to hire two full-time employees — an entry-level worker and a high-level marketer — but feels the added payroll could result in lower profits because of costs.
“If the question is, would I like to hire, the answer is yes,” Bain told The Post. “But am I going to hire? That’s a different matter.”
The small-business owner with a payroll of 20 said his utility bills are up roughly 20 percent in the past five years and that real-estate taxes have shot up by as much as 30 percent in the same period.
“Employers are very gun-shy about taking on fixed obligations,” he said. “That is why temporary employment has taken off. Employers don’t have to make the same commitments to part-time employees.”
His company provides office suites and facilities to small businesses.
Bain said he’s busy today but he has decided to work his current staff harder instead of adding jobs.
The executive is not alone. A recent Capital One survey of small-business owners in Gotham found only 27 percent had plans to hire within six months. That’s just a tad better than 12 months earlier, and worse than in 2011, when nearly one in three said they had plans to hire.
While there are signs of some improvement in the local and national economies (US unemployment has fallen to 7 percent and the markets hit record highs last year), small businesses like Bain’s 46-year-old firm still stop shy of pulling the trigger when it comes to hiring.
It might help explain why New York City’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stood at 8.5 percent in November. That’s down from nearly 9 percent a year ago, but still a lot higher than the US rate.
Philip Noftsinger, president of CBIZ Payroll, a nationwide provider of payroll services, said his small-business clients in New York complain about local red tape and the high cost of doing business.
Lorenzo Vascotto, managing partner at VVA Project Managers and Consultants, a 30-person real-estate consulting business with offices in New York, said his customers are looking for more advice and more professional time — but these same customers don’t want to pay more for it.
This is hurting the company’s profit margins, he said, and keeps him from hiring.
“Before, if we had to carry a few people it didn’t matter — now it does,” Bain added. “We are making investments into the future by opening new offices, but we are being cautious about this.”