Too much of a good thing.

• Position: Employment in North Carolina

In some parts of North Carolina, finding a job isn't the problem. It's getting somebody to fill it.

In October, when the state's unemployment rate dipped below 4% for the third time in '95, a reporter called UNC Chapel Hill economist James Smith for a quote. "I guess the headline to this story will be, 'For North Carolina, the good news keeps rolling along,' "Smith quipped.

That, of course, depends on which economist you talk to and on which side of the boss's desk you're sitting. "It's good news for North Carolina workers because companies will be bidding for their services," says Gary Shoesmith, a Wake Forest University economist. But it may not be such good news if you're writing the paychecks. A tight labor market is definitely pushing up wages in North Carolina. Nationally, from January 1990 through April 1995, manufacturing earnings increased 16.3%, Shoesmith says. In North Carolina, they went up 21.4%.

The tight labor market could also give those outlying counties with a higher rate of unemployment an edge in recruiting industries.

"We've been growing faster than our labor force for a number of years," UNC Greensboro economist Donald Judd says, "and we've absorbed the majority of the underemployed and unemployed. So from here on out, if we're going to continue to grow, we're going to have to offer higher wages to attract people from other areas."

It also means that in certain job sectors, the pickings are getting mighty slim. "There are constant help-wanted signs in about every kind of establishment you can see up here," says Rickey Kirkpatrick, an Appalachian State University economist. "And they don't seem to go away."

"I think employers overall are experiencing more difficulty than at any time prior to the recession that began in July of 1990," says Bob Burns, the Charlotte area labor-market analyst for the Employment Security Commission of North Carolina. There's almost always a tight market for retail clerks, janitors and other low-skilled jobs, but Burns says he's seeing growing demand for light-manufacturing and warehouse jobs. As for those companies that need skilled or highly trained workers, there's a very large pool to choose from. It's just that they're most often working for someone else.

For instance, when asked if he has any trouble finding workers for Freightliner Corp.'s Cleveland, N.C., truck-manufacturing plant, personnel manager Gary Kepley replies without hesitation, "We don't have any difficulty at all." That's in the face of a 6.35% increase statewide in employment in transportation equipment from October '94 to October '95 and an unemployment rate of 3.4% for Rowan County.

Kepley says he gets about 25 applications a day, which he adds to a pile of 6,000 collected by the Salisbury office of the ESC when the Portland, Ore.-based company announced in January 1994 that it would hire 800 additional workers in the state, most in Cleveland. Since 1993, Freightliner has doubled employment at its two Tar Heel plants (the other is in Mount Holly), bringing its total employment in the state to about 4,900.

Most of the workers, of course, already had jobs before they moved to Freightliner. The average annual wage for a worker in transportation equipment in Rowan County in 1993 was $32,845, compared with an average of $22,039 countywide.

"Two or three years from now," Shoesmith says, "we'll wish we could turn back the clock. Worse things could happen to North Carolina than for us to have low unemployment."

Still, some economists fear that escalating wages in manufacturing could be scaring some prospects away from the Piedmont. "As wages rise, there will be some firms that say, 'Well, we'll locate somewhere else,'" Judd predicts.

That somewhere else, Shoesmith says, could be either the eastern or western part of North Carolina. The unemployment rate in October was 2.4% in Wake County, 3.2% in Mecklenburg and 2.9% in Forsyth. You can add two to four points to that rate by driving a few counties east or west. "This is the time for them to make their move because the U.S. economy is...