Help Wanted on Factory Floor
Friday, May 06, 2011
By: James R. Hagerty, Wall Street Journal
U.S. manufacturing companies, long known for layoffs and
shipping jobs overseas, now find themselves in a very different
position: scrambling for scarce talent at home.
Large and small manufacturers of everything from machine tools
to chemicals are scouring for potential hires in high schools,
community colleges and the military. They are poaching from one
another, retraining people who used to have white-collar jobs, and
in some cases even hiring former prisoners who learned machinist
skills behind bars.
Even with unemployment near 9%, manufacturers are struggling to
find enough skilled workers because of a confluence of three
trends.
First, after falling for more than a decade, the number of U.S.
manufacturing jobs is growing modestly, with manufacturers adding
25,000 workers in April, the seventh straight month of gains,
according to payroll firm Automatic Data Processing Inc. and
consultancy Macroeconomic Advisers. The Labor Department's jobs
report on Friday is expected to show moderate employment growth in
the overall economy.
Second, baby-boomer retirements are starting to sap factories of
their most experienced workers. An estimated 2.7 million U.S.
manufacturing employees, or nearly a quarter of the total, are 55
or older.
Third, the U.S. education system isn't turning out enough people
with the math and science skills needed to operate and repair
sophisticated computer-controlled factory equipment, jobs that
often pay $50,000 to $80,000 a year, plus benefits. Manufacturers
say parents and guidance counselors discourage bright kids from
even considering careers in manufacturing.
"We get people coming in here all the time who say, 'I can
weld,'" says Denis Gimbel, human-resources manager at Lehigh Heavy
Forge Corp., of Bethlehem, Pa., whose products include parts for
ships. "Well, my grandmother could weld." He needs people who
understand the intricacies of $1 million lathes and other
metal-shaping equipment.
Manufacturers have anticipated for years that baby-boomer
retirements would create difficulties. Among those who have tried
to get ahead of the demographic curve-with mixed success-is Jeff
Kelly, chief executive of Hamill Manufacturing Co., a family-owned
company near Pittsburgh that cuts metal into parts for ships and
machinery.
Hamill doesn't have any button-pushing work. The 127-employee
company is constantly resetting its mills and lathes to produce
small numbers of parts to meet precise and ever-changing
specifications. There are no long, routine production runs.
One morning in late April, Trent Thompson, a 20-year-old Hamill
apprentice wearing shredded jeans and a black baseball cap, was
assigned to drill three holes in a piece of carbon steel about the
size and shape of a hockey puck. To make sure he was spacing the
holes exactly right, he scrawled a triangle and some trigonometric
calculations on a notepad. Even a tiny error would mean wasting
about $400 of metal.
In another corner of the factory, Bill Schaltenbrand, 59, was
cutting bigger, more complicated parts. A computer had worked out
where he should drill and cut, but Mr. Schaltenbrand, a 40-year
veteran at Hamill, does his own math to double-check the plans.
Computers, he says, sometimes "punch out stupid stuff." Part of Mr.
Schaltenbrand's skill is reading blueprints with myriad numbers and
symbols that would baffle most people.
In its search for talent, Hamill works with nearby vocational
schools-serving on advisory boards, donating equipment and
providing guest lecturers. Mr. Kelly helps organize a program
called BotsIQ in which high-school students learn to build fighting
robots. On a recent Saturday evening, he handed out trophies after
a robot dubbed Grim Reaper 3, resembling a bathroom scale with
spinning metal blades, flipped a rival called Black Mamba and left
it in a smoking heap.
Through its ties to area high schools, Hamill met Walter Gasper
about five years ago. Mr. Gasper, whose father is a mechanic, had
good grades in high school and took college-prep courses. He says a
counselor tried to discourage him from vocational courses, but he
took them anyway because he liked working with machinery. Hamill
signed him as an apprentice when he was 17 and let him work part
time while finishing high school.
Last June, Mr. Kelly beamed as he posed for a picture with Mr.
Gasper and the first-prize trophy he won in a national competition
in which apprentices displayed metal-working skills.
Three months later, Mr. Gasper bolted for a new job with a
Cheswick, Pa., unit of Curtiss-Wright Corp., a much larger maker of
pumps and generators that buys parts from Hamill. Curtiss-Wright
offered him about 40% more pay than he was getting at Hamill. "I
was just looking to further my career a little," says Mr. Gasper,
now 21. Though he has no college degree, his annual pay tops
$55,000. Unlike many young adults, he has no college debt.
Hamill's Mr. Kelly says he has raised wages 18% to 25% over the
past two years or so, but still has lost about 10 workers in that
period to Curtiss-Wright.
Greg Hempfling, a senior vice president at Curtiss-Wright, says
he isn't poaching but merely posting job offers. The pool of
skilled manufacturing labor has been "decimated" in the Pittsburgh
area, he says, and that has forced Curtiss-Wright to advertise for
help as far away as Detroit and Buffalo, N.Y.
Even some global giants are stretched to find enough qualified
workers. At a U.S. division of Bayer AG that makes plastics and
polyurethane, the average age of employees is about 52, says
Gregory Babe, chief executive of the German company's U.S.
business. The skill shortage "is a real issue, and it's going to
get much worse," he says.
Bayer has had particular trouble filling positions in such areas
as chemical-process technology at its plastics plant in Baytown,
Texas, near Houston. A decade ago, Mr. Babe says, a job opening
typically would attract 100 applications. "These days I get about
10," he says. After screening, Bayer often finds that only a couple
are qualified. Some jobs have been open six to nine months.
"This place is five acres, and it's three stories tall," says
Donny Simon, 55, who has worked in the plant since 1988. It takes
time to understand how all the pipes, valves, pumps and feedstock
tanks work together and how to avoid explosions or other accidents.
Technicians need basic math and science for such tasks as
calculating the rate at which dyes and stabilizing agents need to
be added for specially ordered batches of plastics.
Because it can't find enough candidates with relevant
experience, Bayer this summer will for the first time hire interns
to learn how to operate machinery at the Baytown plant. It plans to
offer $18 to $23 an hour-unusually good pay for summer jobs-and to
choose among students in "process technology" at local community
colleges. Those who do well are likely to be offered permanent
jobs.
Manufacturers are having trouble now partly because some of them
stinted on recruitment and training when it was easier to find
workers. Woodward Inc., a maker of parts for aircraft and
power-generation equipment based in Fort Collins, Colo., for
decades operated its own academy to train workers, but it closed it
during a late-1990s cost-cutting drive. As a result, says Keith
Korasick, who supervises manufacturing at Woodward's Fort Collins
plant, "we kind of lost our pipeline of skilled machinists and
technicians."
Now Woodward is sponsoring two dozen students at community
colleges in Fort Collins and Rockford, Ill., the company's other
big U.S. manufacturing site. It pays their tuition and other costs
for two-year programs in manufacturing skills. The students also
are paid for 20 hours or so of work per week. To stay in the
program, they need to maintain a grade-point average of at least
3.0.
Once the students finish those two-year degrees, Woodward aims
to hire them for full-time manufacturing jobs starting at $25,000
to $48,000 a year.
As a high-school student in Fort Collins, Zach Wagner met Mr.
Korasick and other guest lecturers from Woodward. Mr. Wagner, now
18, says he was interested in "computer stuff" and hadn't thought
much about manufacturing. Most of his friends were heading for
four-year universities. He considered doing the same, but he
worried about running up debts. So he accepted a community-college
scholarship from Woodward. He aims eventually to get a degree in
engineering while working at Woodward.
Manufacturers say the U.S. education system doesn't produce
enough students strong in math, science and engineering. About 5%
of bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. are in engineering,
compared with an average of about 20% in Asia, according to the
U.S. National Science Foundation. In the most recent comparison of
math and science test scores of 15-year-old students by the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, American
students trailed far behind those from China, Japan, South Korea,
Canada and Germany.
While community colleges and technical schools struggle to keep
up with demand for skilled workers, some prisons are trying to
help. At California's San Quentin prison, the machine shop offers
training to prepare prisoners to pass exams demonstrating skills in
such areas as operating computer-controlled lathes and mills. Some
inmates get classes in calculus and trigonometry to help them work
with machinery.
Swift-Cor Aerospace, a maker of airplane parts, has hired
several former prisoners for its plants near Los Angeles and
Wichita, Kan., and is happy with their work, says Cecilia Mauricio,
human-resources manager.
The impending retirement of boomers isn't a problem for
everyone. Advanced Technology Services Inc. of Peoria, Ill., sees
the trend as a huge opportunity. ATS provides maintenance and
related services for manufacturers. Jeff Owens, president of the
company, says he expects demand for those services to surge as
manufacturers can't find enough qualified employees and need to
outsource more tasks to firms like ATS.
ATS now has about 2,400 employees in the U.S. and aims to reach
2,800 by year-end. Nearly a third of the people ATS hires come from
military backgrounds, often with experience in fixing tanks or
airplanes. Aside from knowing how to fix machines, the military
vets are good at "being on time, being clean-cut," Mr. Owens
says.
ATS also helps pay for 40-week community-college training
programs for some people it hopes to hire, and it funds
scholarships for engineering students at universities. Two ATS
managers spend nearly full time working with high schools,
attending career days, conducting plant tours and meeting with
guidance counselors.
"They're out there selling the idea of working in a
manufacturing plant-and trying to dispel the notion that it's dark
and dirty and unsafe and boring," Mr. Owens says.
Henry Welsch, 36, is one of ATS's converts. For the first 15
years of his adult life, he worked as an insurance agent and claims
adjustor and as a sales manager for a moving company. But he
decided a couple of years ago that he would rather have a job that
was more secure and provided steady pay rather than unpredictable
commission income.
One problem: He had never worked with tools or machinery. "I was
starting from just nothing," he says. He signed up for a nine-month
manufacturing-skills course at Illinois Central College in East
Peoria, Ill., and got a job at ATS in late 2009. That company
assigned him to a Caterpillar Inc. plant, where he repairs
machinery.
It was a rough transition. He had to prove himself to his new
colleagues, some of whom, he says, were "a little rough around the
edges." The job may lack glamour, Mr. Welsch says, but he thinks he
made the right choice. "This is what I do in the daytime, and I go
home and don't have to think about it."