Gov. Kim Reynolds’ Future Ready Iowa Act is well-intentioned but won’t solve Iowa’s workforce problem.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the fact that she wants to spend $20 million over the next two years to boost the job skills of Iowa workers is well-intentioned and should be done regardless of the outcome. 

But I believe it will exacerbate the problem she wants to solve. 

The problem is not new. It’s the same dilemma the state has faced throughout my career — a shortage of skilled workers. 

The answer is simpler than most people want to admit, and it’s already being done by smart employers in the Des Moines metro area. 

The solution is to raise wages because Iowa is a low-wage state.

If all we do is give workers better training without increasing pay, many will simply go where the pay is better. 

Reynolds and too many employers see the problem as a lack of skilled workers. They believe the solution is to teach building-trade skills, train more nurses and create more technicians for advanced manufacturing jobs.   

Officials going back to the 1990s sang the same song. What all refuse to see is that it did not work before, and it won’t work now.

For Iowa baby boomers like me, there’s a déjà vu feel to the whole thing.

We were once part of a similar plan. After World War II, our parents set a goal of producing more college graduates. 

And Iowa did. The state produced tons of college graduates during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, and it still does. 

But things didn’t work out as planned. Too many graduates left Iowa and never returned. Officials called it a “brain drain” and racked their own brains trying to figure out how to stop it.

In my own family, 10 of the 22 members of my generation who were born and educated in Central Iowa left the state after completing school. Only two, my sister and one cousin, later returned to live in Iowa.

People said it was because Iowa had no mountains or oceans. But the bigger factor was Iowa’s low-wage culture.

Pay was certainly a motivator in my family. My siblings and cousins followed the money, which is why eight of them now live across the country from Minneapolis to Dallas and from Richland, Wash., to Columbia, S.C. — no mountains or oceans near any of their homes. 

The fact that Iowa is a low-wage state is painfully clear every time lawmakers vote down an increase in the state’s minimum wage, or do like they did a year ago when they nullified efforts of individual cities to create local minimum wage laws. 

Today, Iowa’s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is lower than four of the six states that share a border with Iowa. Even Nebraska at $9 an hour and South Dakota at $8.65 an hour have higher minimum wage laws.

If Iowa’s rate had been indexed to inflation when it was created in 2008, it would be nearly $8.50 an hour now. Of course, no one can live on $7.50 an hour ($15,600 annually) or even $8.50 ($17,680 annually), but raising the minimum wage would be a start. 

In 2016, the latest year for which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has data, the average pay for all occupations in Iowa was 12 percent below the national average. 

If nothing changes, a good portion of those who are trained by the Future Ready Iowa Act will do what my cousins did four decades ago. They’ll leave Iowa.

But the reverse is also true. 

If you pay well, they will come.