This Financial Times article offers the following vignette below.
Something does not seem right here. At those salaries he should be covered up with applicants.
Not surprising. Several factors are involved in this particular case, and many others similar cases.
First, there are probably far fewer existing sheet metal set-up jobs now than there were 50 years ago. Those who have relevant experience already are either retiring, or less likely to leave their current job in a market with limited openings.
There may be a limited number of experienced people available in the area who could do the job at all, so for any others the offer has to be attractive enough to manage a relocation. Even with relocation costs paid for, the move is risky, and the job market is tight. There may not be second chances available in the Baltimore area for someone considering a move like that.
Training people who have lower level jobs already might be unlikely to work because the people who are working at those lower wages are unable to perform jobs requiring higher skill levels. This manufacturer may be paying at the bottom wage scale, and have no choice but to do so based on current economic conditions. People with ambition may not be doing these jobs in the first place.
<OldManRant outrage=1 grumble=2>
Young folk today don’t know how to work. They want to be told how to do everything, and it shouldn’t be too difficult. They don’t consider the concept of working their way up the ladder. They expect to be paid more and more simply for showing up most of the time and sometimes getting their work done. It doesn’t matter how much education or ambition they have, they want it all spoon fed to them.
</OldManRant>
I don’t know about sheet metal jobs, but in general I think the argument tends to be BS. Either the pay is too low or the working conditions are bad – both of which can be fixed if the corporation wants to. And if they still cannot find someone then they should train someone.
These companies just want to hire people as if they were plug-and-play robots.
Why train for a skilled job when you know the employer is unwilling to make a permanent commitment to you? I think the real problem is that people knowing that there is no such thing as a permanent job any more are unwilling to invest in a highly skilled profession.
I disagree. If we were talking about “plug and play” line work, then yes, your argument stands.
Skilled labor is just the opposite of that. Skilled. That takes two things: experience, and a particular personality/motivation to be able to be trained into a skill if you don’t have the experience. If you can’t find the right applicants, then it doesn’t matter if you’re willing to train people - they’re not trainable.
Since this is IMHO, I’ll give my two anecdata:
My stepfather is 91 years old, and was a professional welder all his working life. Just last year, the company he worked for (the Savannah River Nuclear Site) contacted him and asked if he would consider hiring on as a contract employee and train their batches of incoming welders because they couldn’t find enough applicants with experience to hire, and they needed all of their existing skilled welders to continue their actual work - not take lots of time to train new people. He’s 91. Don’t you think they might have asked/looked for other people before contacting him? I do.
My father-in-law runs a small glass-bending and framing company. He has been in the market for a stainless-steel worker since before I married his son about 4 years ago. Pay is good, working hours are not long, and he’s even offering an extra stipend as coverage for insurance. (very small company - he doesn’t have to offer insurance, and can’t afford to offer a company policy, but he offers the equivalent money intended for personal coverage on top of the actual pay to sweeten the deal)
He has interviewed and “work-tested” literally hundreds of applicants, and none of them have the skills necessary, or have shown the care and “give a shit” to hope that they could be trained successfully - i.e. learn and use the skills necessary. Now, he isn’t offering enough to entice someone to move across the country, but it is enough (especially in this economy) to tempt lots of people within a few states. Still, nobody qualifies.
These jobs aren’t entry-level highway “lean on a shovel” jobs - for the welding, spots have to be precise, clean, and quick. All three, all the time. For the steel-working, measurements, corners, and cuts all have to be correct within single millimeters to work properly in industrial and marine glasswork. It takes a special kind of person to be *able *to be that precise, and to take pride in what a lot of people still consider menial labor.
In the past few decades, skilled labor has been really denigrated in this country. I think that we’re just now starting to see the turn-around, where all of the white-collar people realize that the fancy buildings they’re designing and all of the nifty stuff they want to “buy American” needs skilled Americans to build, and we don’t have many now.
There’s an interesting book “Shop Class as Soulcraft” that really urges communities to put effort into building skilled labor again. I tend to agree with the author - there’s no reason that working precisely with your hands and body should be considered worse than doing the same thing with your mind, especially if you have an aptitude and a liking for it anyway.
tl:dr - Anecdotally, I have seen the same lack, and the overall trend makes sense considering that physical labor has been looked down on for decades now. I think it’s a shame.
No wonder he’s having problems: journalists do not make good sheet metal workers.
I do think that kids capable of becoming highly skilled workers tend to be steered toward college instead of the trades. In this country there is a strong class bias away from the trades: everyone agrees that “some people aren’t cut out for college” and should go the vo-tech route, but they never mean their own kids, because when they say “aren’t cut out” they mean “are too stupid”. But, frankly, college isn’t that hard and a lot of the skilled trades do require quite a bit of intelligence and work ethic. Most people who could be a skilled metal worker could do well in college, and no one steers a bright, capable kid away from college–even if he or she hates it. No one tells a kid that could handle a EE major to go be an electrician instead, even if the kid’s temperament is better suited for it. We say we need more vocational education in this country, but deep down inside we don’t really respect it–the idea that it is for “slow kids” is too deeply ingrained: we think it’s fine for the bottom 25%, but the bottom 25% aren’t going to become skilled workers–they will work for skilled workers.
I’m seeing the same thing in my company in Wyoming. We to work for the oil/gas industry. Granted, it’s a small labor pool and when oil prices are up the available workers get sucked up fast, but still…
Here’s what I see:
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No mechanical skills. See here:http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/08/25/why-your-teenager-cant-use-a-hammer/ I wasn’t aware that shop classes aren’t taught in high school anymore. My younger coworkers confirmed it, blaming it on insurance/liability reasons.
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Cell phones. I see it time and again. Young person shows up for first day of work, and he’s constantly texting/emailing. I tell my guys to leave their phones in their desks/lockers except for lunch and breaks. The concept of being able to text your friends while running a machine is a foreign to me as not be able to seems to them.
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Work ethic: They’re late and they call in sick a few days after they start. I don’t understand it. When I started working, I showed on time every day, and especially when I started a new job. First impressions and all that. And I’d have to be have dead before I ever considered calling in sick. I’d rather go in and get sent home.
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This one’s speculation on my part, based on limited first-hand observations. I think that the proliference of single mothers contributes to the problem of lack of mechanical skills. Hand-on tasks are traditionally the role of the father. Without a dad at home, nobody teaches the young me to change the oil in the car, fix the screen door, build a model rocket, replace the broken light switch, or put up some shelves in the garage. So by the time they get to me, they don’t know the difference between a wrench and a set of pliers.
I don’t think I quite understand what it means to be a skilled laborer. What sort of training is involved? And how transferable is that skill set likely to be? Is there opportunity for career growth if you’re a sheet metal worker or whatever? I ask because to me, and I think even more to people younger than I, that the thought of working in the same type of job for 40+ years is pretty damn horrible. I would encourage my kids to choose educational paths that provide for flexibility in the labor force. You want to be able to move from one type of work to another as the economy evolves, and you want to be able to make your way up the corporate ladder, too. That means I would definitely steer my kids away from training that pigeonholes them in one type of work and doesn’t develop the sorts of soft skills you need for management.
To speak to some of Chicken Legs’s points, we are a two parent family, but neither of us has any skills in fixing stuff around the house. I would encourage my kids to take shop and home ec sorts of classes in school, though - if they were quality classes. And I would have to be in pretty dire financial straits before I took a job where being punctual and being away from my phone were absolutely necessary.
There is a rational reason why young people would not want to put in the effort and years of training to become (say) a truly skilled spot welder.
And it is this: what happens if, say next year, they come out with some handy spot-welding robot?
How many vocational programs are there that adequately train (say) welders? Is there entry level work for a graduate of those programs? And how many years of on-the-job experience is necessary for the most highly skilled positions?
My WAG is that an associates degree in the trades is a start, but years of practical experience beyond that is necessary to be very good. Almost like an apprenticeship.
These aren’t (entirely) rhetorical questions. I wouldn’t be surprised if the entry-level skilled trade jobs are done mostly by robots or people in other countries. Then, when someone legitimately needs someone with a few decades’ experience, because the business depends on that skill, there’s nobody available because not many people have entered the profession in the last few decades.
Is $80K really a “top-notch” salary? I’m not sure exactly what the cost of living is in Baltimore, but I know the East Coast is generally more expensive than it is here in flyover country, yet I’m making more than that in a technical office job, and I’m not at the top tier of my profession, I can still go considerably higher.
So if becoming a skilled sheet-metal worker to their qualifications requires a large amount of drive and ambition, I wonder if someone with those qualities also has the knowledge they those talents can be applied to making more money by sitting in a chair somewhere with little to no risk of losing body parts due to industrial accidents.
My manufacturing clients have been moaning about the loss of skilled trade workers for decades, and BetsQ sums up the problem nicely.
To be a sheet metal worker, tool-and-diemaker, etc. requires both training and apprenticeship that will take as long as a college eduation (although it might cost less.) After you’re done with it, you are qualified for that trade, but, unfortunately, the training doesn’t always translate into other skilled trade jobs.. If the auto plant or the foundry or whatever closes down, you’re a foremerly well paid statistic. If the industry moves offshore, you’ll find yourself competing for those $8/hr. warehouse jobs.
Industry is reaping the unintended consequences of destroying the trade unions. Unionized jobs have higher wages, benefits, retirement and job security, which makes training for such positions worthwhile. What did they think was going to happen? Why should someone spend years training for jobs that are at-will, poor benefits and low wages?
The article talks about why this is the case. It says the following:
I tend to agree with Mr Cappelli. It’s kinda ridiculous to expect someone to complete specific training over several years in preparation for a job that may not exist by the time they are qualified to do it.
The way I read that is: The company is claiming they "could go raise our annual revenues from $5m to $7m,” if they could only fill those 3 slots, which have sat empty for 3 years. Somebody is lazy and it isn’t American workers, it is management in this case.
Definitely not for a skilled trade. I know lots of guys with skilled trades who make more than $80k without working the full year on various Tar Sands projects. Around here it varies widely by industry but an $80k job isn’t going to attract a whole lot of interest from the types of workers these companies are looking for.
Yea, I agree. By those numbers, its cost them 5.25 million dollars not to be able to fill those posts. They could quadruple the offered salary and still make three million. I have trouble believing that there are no where in a metro area of three million people are there not three individuals willing to figure out how to become sheet-metal set-up operators in return for eight times the average American wage.
That’s what I was thinking about, too - how high the salaries are for skilled tradespeople in places like Fort McMurray in the oil sands. Even in Calgary, my husband works for a construction management company and they have recruited workers from around the world, including Mexico and the UK.
I agree that we are seeing some fallout from the idea and mentality that everyone has to have a college degree to start their working life. There are plenty of kids who would be just fine (or do even better) with a one or two year vocational diploma, but we have the idea that it’s beneath us to just go work a trade.
I have read your last sentence several times and I still find it hard to believe that you mean what you said. A job where being punctual and away from your phone is absolutely necessary pretty much describes every job I ever had in my life, ranging from teaching at the college level to accounting to phone sales to retail cashier to automotive service advisor. Every employer I ever had expected me to be on time and work, not chat on the phone. I think you will be exceptionally lucky in your life if you never have to take that sort of job. (I guess you will be lucky if you don’t have to fix things around the house too but that’s another story.)