M. H. West & Co., Inc.’s Chair and CEO, Marilyn West, her husband Edward West and WEST associates Tom Wilkinson, Radcliffe Chambers, Nanci Kapoor, Meaghan West, Julian House, Erica Cage and Joe Armstrong attended the 144th Greater Richmond Chamber annual dinner on November 30th. M. H. West & Co., Inc. was happy to be a corporate table sponsor for this premier event. The highlight of the evening was the IMPACT Award, which honored a handful of emerging businesses from the region. The award recognizes local businesses that have made an impact on the Richmond region’s economy, the community, their employees and their industry through innovation.

A Petersburg-based solid-waste-disposal company, Container First Services won the 2011 Impact Award. Container First Services was among five finalists for the award. The company is working on several projects to make landfills more environmentally sustainable.

The other 2011 Impact finalists were:

• Dominion Digital Inc.
• Health Diagnostic Laboratory Inc.
• Dominion Packaging Inc.
• LeClair Ryan

Previous winners of the Impact Award include The Pediatric Connection, Uppy’s Convenience Stores, American Family Fitness, SnagAJob.com, Intercept Youth Services and HeloAir Inc.Other awards presented during the dinner included the Young Professional Workplace Award, which recognizes the region’s best workplaces for younger professionals.

The Martin Agency won the Young Professional Workplace Award in the large-business category. In the Small-Business Category, the award went to Madison + Main.

Four companies received Business Council awards recognizing outstanding companies in Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico counties and Richmond. The award winners were:

• Chesterfield Business Council Award Winner — Progressive Design
• Hanover Business Council Award Winner — Kings Dominion
• Henrico Business Council Award Winner — Elephant Insurance Services LLC
• Richmond Business Council Award Winner — Health Diagnostic Laboratory Inc.

Many members of the WEST staff commented on how much they enjoyed the food served at the event. Marilyn West thought the food was delicious, but catching up with old acquaintances was her favorite part of the evening.

Bon Secours Richmond Health System CEO Peter J. Bernard, Candice Streett, executive director of Virginia Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LINC), and others, joined SEED award winners this week during a Supporting East End Entrepreneurship Development (SEED) award ceremony at Richmond Community Hospital, where Bon Secours Richmond announced the six winners of the SEED business plan competition.
The Church Hill entrepreneurs have been awarded grants to support the growth of their businesses, some of which include trash service, hair care products and a pie shop. Bon Secours is awarding a total of $50,000 in blocks of $10,000 or less along with mentoring and additional support for these urban businesses.

The SEED program is designed to foster and engage the community around job and business creation by funding and mentoring a new generation of business people. The program, according to the Catholic health system, is part of its ministry and its commitment to the revitalization of Church Hill and the 25th Street and Nine Mile Road corridor in Richmond’s East End.

“I am pleased NCSHA recognized Virginia’s work in developing a statewide housing policy framework beginning with the work of the Virginia Housing Commission to build broad bipartisan consensus on our Housing Guiding Principles,” said Governor McDonnell. “My administration has put together a broad group of housing professionals, including for-profit, non-profit and governmental representatives, to expand these principles into the state’s first housing policy framework so that my cabinet secretaries and their agencies can better address Virginia’s critical housing needs.”

The NCSHA award recognizes agencies demonstrating the most efficient, effective, and creative use of resources to achieve state policy objectives. Virginia’s housing policy initiative won for showing that state policymaking can effectively link the executive and legislative branches of government with stakeholder groups to reach consensus on desired housing outcomes, while forging strong coalitions to address Virginia’s housing needs well into the future.

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NDEAM’s roots go back to 1945, when Congress enacted a law declaring the first week in October each year “National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week.” In 1962, the word “physically” was removed to acknowledge the employment needs and contributions of individuals with all types of disabilities. In 1988, Congress expanded the week to a month and changed the name to “National Disability Employment Awareness Month.” Upon the agency’s establishment in 2001, ODEP assumed responsibility for NDEAM and has worked to expand its reach and scope ever since.

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The Clovis Unified School District (CA) first considered creating a full-time online school about four years ago. Clovis Unified is known as a high-performing district, but it was losing 200 to 400 students a year. In a district with a total enrollment of nearly 38,000, those numbers don’t seem so bad, but officials realized only about half of those students were dropouts; the rest were opt-outs.

“What we saw in those statistics was that our students have real alternatives to what our traditional schools have to offer,” says Rob Darrow, principal of the district’s two-year-old virtual charter school. “Most K-12 school districts know that they’re losing kids who are going to other programs to get their needs met, and they know that they’re going to have to offer some kind of online program to meet those needs if they’re going to survive.”

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My teenage summer jobs were typical: lousy and formative. One summer, I scooped ice cream by a dock for $5 an hour plus tips. The next, I bagged groceries, with an August promotion to check-out and the privilege of moistening the leafy vegetables with a spray bottle. These jobs were monotonous and ill-paid but also instructive for my obnoxious, eye-rolling, teenage self. Codes need to be memorized. Uniforms need to be worn. Bosses need to be heeded. I learned those lessons, and I remember them today.

But fewer and fewer American teenagers are having such early working experiences. From the 1950s through the 1990s, between 45 and 60 percent of teenagers had summer jobs, with the numbers ebbing and flowing with the business cycle. Today, just one in four American teens has a summer job. Indeed, over the past decade, summer employment among people ages 16 to 19 has plummeted to the lowest level since the government started keeping tabs after World War II. Why? And what are today’s teens doing instead?

One piece of good news is that they are not merely sitting at home or goofing off with their friends. According to a 2010 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the proportion of “idle” teens has actually fallen over the same time period. Nor does the recession explain the drop either. The youth unemployment rate has climbed precipitously, but young Americans started opting out of the labor market long before the economy soured in 2007.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board fingered one possible answer this weekend: recent hikes to the minimum wage. “One of the first acts of the gone-but-not-forgotten Nancy Pelosi ascendancy was to raise the minimum wage in stages to $7.25 an hour in 2009 from $5.15 in 2007,” the conservative-leaning board says. “Even liberals ought to understand that raising the cost of hiring the young and unskilled while employers are slashing payrolls is loopy economics.”

But it is also loopy to think that the minimum wage hikes explain what is going on with America’s teens. For one, businesses can pay workers under the age of 20 less than the minimum wage as long as they work for fewer than 90 days. More importantly, the phenomenon of teens electing not to join the labor force started long before the minimum-wage hikes, and previous minimum-wage hikes did not squeeze the young out of the labor market. Surely the minimum wage increase has some effect. But it is hardly a complete explanation.

So what is going on? There are two main answers. First, more teenagers are staying in school or choosing to do prep programs over the summer, at their own behest or by order of their helicopter parents. Second, young workers vying for menial jobs have faced increased competition from older workers and immigrants.

Indeed, a lot more teenagers are enrolling in summer school, and it goes a long way to explaining their dwindling participation in the workforce. In the summer of 1985, about 17 percent of teenagers attended some kind of summer school. Now, more than half do. On top of that, thousands more kids are taking other test-prep, advanced, and remedial classes. Community-service and internship programs have also become more popular, though there are no official statistics to show just how many kids are signing up for them.

The shift seems sociological as much as it is economic. “A number of factors suggest that teenagers are facing greater academic demands and pressures than in the past, which, together with the desire to achieve, may incline them toward placing greater emphasis on academics than on working,” economist Teresa Morisi of the Bureau of Labor Statistics explains. Families are wealthier. College admissions are more competitive. Secondary education has become so expensive that few kids feel it is worth it to save up for it over the summer. Add it all up, and more kids study and fewer kids work during the hot summer months.

Second, teenagers have faced increased competition for those poorly paid summertime jobs in the retail, service, and construction sectors. There are more immigrants, both undocumented and documented, to compete against for low-paying gigs. A model done by the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies found that a 10 percentage-point increase “in the immigrant share of a state’s work force from 1994 to 2007 reduced the labor force participation rate of U.S.-born teenagers by 7.9 percentage points.” Studies by economists at the Federal Reserve and the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University have also found significant employment effects.

Teenagers face competition from their grandparents, too. In the late 1990s, the oldest baby boomers started to reach retirement age, but many remained in or rejoined the workforce, often accepting less-taxing, lower-paying, part-time positions—exactly the type of jobs once favored by teenagers. Just as the proportion of teens working has fallen, the proportion of workers older than 55 has climbed.

So while fewer kids are scooping ice cream and bagging groceries for the summer, more are spending their weeks off on schoolwork or unpaid labor. Youth employment might be down, but we hardly need to be wringing our hands about the laziness of the next generation. Still, there is one extremely worrisome trend in the data: the youth unemployment number—the proportion of kids who want jobs but cannot get them. The recession inflated the rate of youth unemployment to levels unseen since modern record-taking started in the 1940s. It currently stands at 24.2 percent, and more than 40 percent for black teens. A substantial body of economic literature shows that bouts of unemployment prove particularly corrosive for young workers, leading to reduced earnings and further joblessness down the road. So forget the kids who don’t want to work. Worry about the kids who do.

Original Article: http://www.slate.com/id/2298442/

CNBC confirms what M. H. West & Co., Inc. has known for 20 years; Virginia is a great place to conduct business and grow a company.

The Old Dominion State returns as America’s Top State for Business in 2011, and we’re starting to detect a pattern here.

Virginia topped our inaugural study in 2007 with Texas at number two. In 2008, they switched positions and Texas took the title. In 2009 , it was Virginia/Texas. In 2010, Texas/Virginia.

This year, Virginia powers back to the top spot with the best overall score in the history of our study — 1,660 out of 2,500 points. Texas slips back to number two with a respectable 1,578 points.

Trust us. We couldn’t have planned it this way, and if we could have, we might have mixed things up a bit.

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From the moment they entered the workforce in the 1960s, baby-boomers began to shape America’s economy and politics. They will do the same as they leave. The first of the estimated 78m Americans born between 1946 and 1964 turn 65 in 2011, the normal age for retirement. As their ranks swell in coming years, the burden of financing their retirement will mount. So will their electoral importance.

Retiring boomers will squeeze the economy from two directions. The number of people enrolled in Medicare (federally funded health care, available from the age of 65) will grow from 47m in 2010 to 80m in two decades’ time. Enrollment in Social Security (federally funded pensions, available from the age of 62-67, depending on your birth year) will grow from 44m to 73m. The cost of the two programs will grow from 8.4% of GDP in 2010 to 11.2% by 2030. Meanwhile, as boomers retire, the workforce will grow more slowly, as will the taxes to finance their benefits. The pensioner-worker imbalance and health-care inflation, which is driving up the bill for Medicare and Medicaid, the federal health benefit for the poor, will send the budget deficit into the stratosphere.

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The Chamber of Commerce honored its outgoing 2010 volunteer leadership and recognized its and incoming 2011 volunteer leaders.  Nelson Adcock (GeoEnvironmental Resources, Inc.), who served as the Chamber’s 2010 Chair, will continue in this role in 2011.  During the luncheon, Adcock presented the Chamber’s 2010 Volunteer of the Year Award to Marino Santarelli (Wachovia, A Wells Fargo Company) for his hard work and dedication.  Santarelli served as Chair of the Chamber’s Sustainable Resources Campaign leading an all volunteer effort which raised 5% more than last year.

M. H. West & Co., Inc.  has recently seen a significant boost in its business operations in Hampton Roads. The Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce’s 26th Annual Meeting of the Membership was confirmation that there are many business opportunities in the region.

1. Indra Nooyi - In her fifth year atop the list, Nooyi completed the purchase of PepsiCo’s two largest bottlers, bringing revenues to a projected $60 billion. Now she’ll have to deliver the $400 million annual cost savings she promised. Investors seem assured: The stock is up 12% since September 2009.

2. Irene Rosenfeld - Rosenfeld’s battle for candy maker Cadbury rankled Kraft’s largest shareholder, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, but analysts say the $19 billion purchase is sweet: It pushes Kraft to $48 billion in revenue and gives the food giant a bigger foothold in emerging markets like India.

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