From the NY Times:
Many Americans aren’t interested in factory jobs because they often do not pay enough to lure workers away from service jobs that may have more flexible schedules or more comfortable working environments.
For some companies, remaining globally competitive involves the use of sophisticated equipment that requires employees to have extensive training and familiarity with software. And employers cannot simply hire people right out of high school without providing specialized training programs to bring them up to speed. That wasn’t the case in the heyday of American manufacturing.
Attracting motivated young people to manufacturing careers is also a challenge when high school guidance counselors are still judged by how many students go on to college.
College graduates, on the other hand, often do not have the right skills to be successful on a factory floor.
The country is flooded with college graduates who can’t find jobs that match their education, Mr. Hetrick said, and there are not enough skilled blue-collar workers to fill the positions that currently exist, let alone the jobs that will be created if more factories are built in the United States.
The Business Roundtable, a lobbying group whose members are chief executives of companies, has started an initiative in which executives collaborate on strategies to attract and train a new generation of workers in skilled trades. At an event last week in Washington, executives commiserated about how hard it was to find qualified people and swapped tips onstage for overcoming the gap.
Their ideas included combing through existing company job descriptions to prioritize relevant experience over college degrees and recruiting high school students as young as sophomores for experiences that could draw their interest in manufacturing careers.
“For every 20 job postings that we have, there is one qualified applicant right now,” said David Gitlin, the chairman and chief executive of Carrier Global, which produces air-conditioners and furnaces and services heating and cooling equipment.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, Mr. Gitlin said, demand has exploded for technicians to service data centers, which are built with cooling systems called chillers. He estimated that each data center would require four technicians to maintain a single chiller.
“We have 425,000 technicians today,” he said, referring to the heating and air-conditioning industry as a whole. “We are going to need to hire another four to five hundred thousand over the next 10 years.” But the number of young people going to vocational schools and community colleges, he added, is dropping, not growing.
At 4% unemployment nationally these jobs will remain difficult to fill.
We had to have a plumber out yesterday evening because some numbnuts in an apartment above us has been washing grease down the kitchen sink drain. He told us he’s busy as all get out because they can’t hire enough people.
According to Google AI, the wages for a plumber’s apprentice in Chicago run about $26/hr. Of course, that jumps a fair bit once you’ve passed the apprenticeship, but $26 to deal with some of the stuff plumbers have to deal with isn’t going to turn anyone’s head.
Neither are prevailing wages in construction or agricultural work. But those workforces are being run down – literally – to feed Stephen Miller’s ego.
So let me see if I’m following here. The supply is low for workers, but the demand is high for workers.
Feels like…there’s something we know here about how that works, what that causes? Like, recently, we had the same situation with eggs, the supply was low because of bird flu, but the demand was the same, and something happening, I can’t remember what…
…oh, yeah, prices went up.
Have they considered paying the higher prices to get workers? Or, I guess, the term is wages?
Oh, the problem is training? Yeah, I can see how that would be a problem, most of those jobs require training in microgravity environments that can only accessed by a limited number of space flights…wait, no, I’m being told I just made that up, and in fact they could train those workers themselves instead of asking the workers to go to vocational college, which *checks notes* I think we already covered under the higher wages thing.
You’re going to have to _pay them_ while training them, higher wages than they can get now. Because, frankly, people in this day and age absolutely do not trust literally any corporation to actually keep their word and keep them around and increase their pay later.
It really is amazing how people are so much more flexible than corporations. People change their behavior immediately, because if they don’t do that they die, corporations just flounder around for a decade wondering ‘But how do I do this? Waaa, I’m baby and things are different, someone make laws to fix this.’
Corporations, I promise you, you can pay people to do basically anything. You just have to pay them _enough_.
You’re not giving advice to American Corporations, they operate on a 6 month timeframe. You’re giving advice to American Privately Owned Companies, who have the time-horizon to actually consider training people.
I can’t speak to manufacturing jobs, but I can speak about power plants, which are similar environments, where people are expected to wear overalls, get their hands dirty, and work shifts.
There’s barely no job in a power plant (except perhaps landscaping) that doesn’t require handling delicate, complicate, potentially dangerous, and extremely expensive equipment. And therefore there’s barely no job in a power plant (except perhaps landscaping) that is not performed by a college graduate.
It’s true that most of them are community college or low ranked college graduates, but numeracy, and an understanding of the physics of what’s happening is a must. A STEM degree per seis not a requirement , and I’ve seen some liberal arts graduates that have been very successful as power plant operators, but a familiarity with numbers, equations, measuring things, and some basic science will make your life easier.
Am I saying we couldn’t train a high school graduate to do it? We probably could. It’s not as if the entry level college graduate doesn’t need a ton of on the job training. But I would not hire an 18 year old kid in a power plant. I wouldn’t trust his/her, for lack of a better word, maturity level.
Power plant operators, and I imagine manufacturing operators, are trusted with delicate equipment that work, almost, by themselves. The almost is the key part. The operator is expected to be monitoring all that’s going around -lots of screens with lots of numbers going up and down, and alarms beeping every couple of minutes-, see problems and issues coming, prioritize them, and keep the thing running as much as possible for as long as possible, without anything breaking up (and many things break up all the time) beyond a certain level that we call corrective maintenance, and think no more about it. There’s a lot of brain involved, and very little brawn.
College gives (or should give) adolescents time to become mature(r-ish) adults. Adults that can be trusted to show up on time, keep themselves and their workmates safe, and keep the machines running. And they have to be able to work autonomously. Yes, there’s a shift leader, but there’s no detailed instructions given out beyond “Go see what’s happening why the water temperature is off in the top header”.
Do I think our current college structure is the best way to train power plant operators. Hell, no. But the USA college is, to me, a weird, ridiculously expensive, completely outmoded XIX century educational model that should have been overhauled a long time ago, into something similar to what you see in most of the world.
Would you hire an 18 year old with a healthy and functioning four year old child? (or, upgrade that to a 20 year old with a 6 year old kid?) Having a kid makes girls grow up very quickly.
I don’t know. How’s her numeracy? Did she take some STEM subjects in high school? Is she able to work shifts including night shifts? If all of the above, including maturity, is good, I’d consider giving her a chance. If something is missing, regretfully no. I could consider her for an administrative position to help her out, but those are less pay and less career prospects.
The general point I was trying to make is that manufacturing and similar (like a power plant) jobs have changed a lot in the last 50 years. Automation has turned the job from something physical to looking at screens, and understanding what is coming out in the screens. Manufacturing jobs are now akin to babysitting very expensive equipment, telling the equipment what to do, checking that it does what is told to do, and monitoring the state of the equipment to make sure it doesn’t have problems.
Very few people screw screws on cellphones now a days. Screwing by hand is too slow and too prone to error. Better to use a screwing machine, and hire someone to keep an eye on the machine
This is a big part of the problem actually. The reality of 21st century manufacturing doesn’t match the narrative of 20th century manufacturing, and that older narrative makes politics easier.
As an aside to my previous power plant operators rant, I wanted to add separately that there’s nothing, except cultural cliches, that should keep women away from the control room, or the factory floor.
As I mentioned in my rant, industrial work today is 99% brain, 1% brawn. Though there might be situations where lifting a heavy piece of equipment will be necessary, it’s nothing that a more or less fit person can’t do. Anything heavier than a toddler will be handled with lift equipment of some sort, if for no other reason that everything is expensive and we’d rather you didn’t drop it and break it, so we are going to give you something to move it from here to there.
I’ve personally always pushed for hiring women in our power plants, and for educational programs in local high schools emphasizing that the electrical industry, and STEM generally, is, contrary to what 99% of people might think, a good environment where women can progress and succeed.
Back when I drove a beer truck, I was always on the lookout for women who could physically handle the job. (Several bars had female staff who could manhandle beer kegs.) I thought it would be good publicity for the company. But I never found anyone who was interested.
When I spoke about cultural cliches, in my experience, it’s more women don’t believing they can do, and enjoyed, the job, than men objecting at women coming into the workplace. Those also exist, but they aren’t the big hurdle. Convincing women to even consider it is the challenge.
I know several women in the industry, including in the plant control room. Most, if not all, joined not with excitement but with an attitude of “I don’t know what else to do”. I don’t know of any that, once in, has left, or regretted their decision. Several have been very successful in their jobs.
Because of that I have always insisted that our ESG activities in the community had to include reaching out to girls in the local high schools to interest them in pursuing STEM careers
As a data point there’s a lot of research that says if you want girls
In STEM you have to reach out in middle school. And an FYI to your eduction and outreach folks.