Yesterday, local employer Charles River Labs announced that it plans to cease operations in Shrewsbury due to a slowdown in the biopharmaceutical industry, laying off approximately 300 employees in the process. This is the latest of a series of job reductions announced by Massachusetts employers in recent months. For my district, it’s especially bad news because it hits home.
Our state can’t afford to keep seeing bad headlines like this in the papers. Massachusetts residents need jobs. The strength of our economy depends on jobs, as does the strength of every household across the commonwealth. Whenever we hear of an employer like Charles River Labs cutting back its operations, it’s evidence that we still have a lot to do to fix our economy and to put Massachusetts back to work again.
On the surface, this decision and others like it are business judgments being made by companies across Massachusetts. It’s perfectly understandable that private sector employers would make difficult decisions to trim their budgets at a time like this, much like I’ve been urging the public sector to do. But it’s also safe to assume that the unfriendly business climate we have created for ourselves in Massachusetts is playing into such decisions, if only indirectly. Public policies like high tax rates translate into added costs for struggling businesses, and when these inescapable costs are factored in to the bottom line, they sometimes lead to other unfortunate results like job loss and factory closures.
There’s only so much we can do to help fix the global economy, and there’s no doubt that the best remedy for our job market here in Massachusetts would be a general economic turnaround. That will come, in time. But there is a lot that we can do to make Massachusetts a friendlier place for businesses to operate, like keeping taxes and fees low, maintaining a robust education system to train workers, and creating affordable housing to keep residents’ cost of living low. We’re not doing enough on that front, and if we want to avoid seeing more stories like the one involving Charles River Labs, we need to start acting now.
You can read more about Charles River Labs in this story in the Boston Business Journal. What do you think? Are you being affected by the Charles River Labs decision? What do you think the state should do to prevent stories like this in the future? Please post your thoughts below.
