“We are always short 10 to 20 people,” said Jack Marshall, manager of PPG’s plant in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
The company makes coatings, paint and specialty materials for customers such as Harley-Davidson, the Wisconsin-based motorcycle manufacturer. His factory employs 550 people, many of whom must work overtime. It is hard to fill jobs, he explained, because many still think that factory work involves repetitive assembly-line tasks, as in the candy factory on the old sitcom I Love Lucy (1951-1957).
The notion that this economic sector is fading arises from a big drop in manufacturing employment during the past two decades. Some places were hit especially hard. From 1980 to 2005, for example, the number of factory jobs fell by some 45 percent in Rochester, New York, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Many people, including President Donald Trump, reckon that global trade, especially with China, is largely to blame. This summer, when Taiwan’s Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer, which employs more than 1 million people in China, said that it would build a factory in Wisconsin employing as many as 13,000 people in return for $3 billion in various tax breaks and subsidies from the state, Trump called a press conference to celebrate.
However, studies suggest that the majority of past factory-job losses were the result of investments in automation, which continue to pay off.
America’s most technologically advanced manufacturers are now expanding confidently. Take, for example, factories in Connecticut, which long ago led the country but which have suffered badly in recent decades: Between 1980 and 2005 manufacturing employment in Hartford, the state’s capital, collapsed by half. In the 1800s local manufacturers including Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin and perfected the use of interchangeable parts. Those grimy workshops made muskets and machine tools. Today the state’s manufacturers make the high-tech products of their age.
In September General Dynamics Electric Boat, a local defense contractor, won a $5.1-billion contract to develop a new class of nuclear-powered submarines. It expects to hire between 15,000 and 20,000 workers by 2030. Pratt & Whitney, a division of United Technologies Corporation that makes jet engines, plans to hire some 8,000 workers in Connecticut—and 25,000 worldwide—during the next decade.
A huge problem is that factories are struggling to find enough skilled workers. The Manufacturing Institute, an industry body, and Deloitte calculate that there will be nearly 3.5 million manufacturing-job openings in America in the decade to 2025, but that 2 million may go unfilled. Scott Peterson, chief human-resources officer at Schwan’s, a privately owned food-manufacturing company based in Minnesota, said he is struggling to find workers. The state is short of around 200,000 employees, he estimated.
Much is being done to address a national shortage of skills. In 2014 a coalition of research institutes, manufacturers and federal agencies launched the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation. This public-private partnership aims to speed the development and adoption of such advanced techniques as 3D-printing and digital manufacturing, and to help train workers in these areas.
Policy-makers, educators and companies in several states are trying to promote innovative local training schemes. J.P. Morgan Chase, a bank, recently announced a three-year investment worth $40 million in Chicago’s struggling South and West Sides. It also is helping to revitalize Detroit. Some money in Chicago will go to a robotics-technology training program for jobs in advanced manufacturing.
In Connecticut, too, schools as well as factories are being upgraded. Mary Moran, principal of Eli Whitney Technical High School near New Haven, said that only five years ago its facilities looked like something out of the 1950s. Now its workshops are equipped with computerized lathes and precision-measurement machines. At Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, students earn qualifications in metalworking, factory safety and Six Sigma, a statistical method for quality control, and gain experience with local manufacturers.
It will take more than a few enterprising colleges, and a few local partnerships with companies, to tackle America’s yawning skills gap, but these are a start. By encouraging many such initiatives, policy-makers and manufacturers can judge what works best and copy successes elsewhere and on a larger scale.
Continued technological progress will keep manufacturing employment from returning to past heights. If companies can find enough skilled workers to guide the machines, though, the sector’s output could really take off.
© 2017 Economist Newspaper Ltd., London (October 14). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Image credits: Doug Mills/The New York Times