Adam Davidson makes a brilliant point in today's New York Times Magazine, e.g., that the decision to not invest in acquiring skills makes sense for the individual but is harmful for the larger society. That is what we will call the "Skills Falllacy". First, notice that the skills required to fill all those empty jobs are acquired in community colleges, and that is one of the places we have cut funding most deeply.
Secondly, learning welding inside a factory for a production line is one thing, learning welding outside on pipelines, building structures, etc. is quite a different thing. I once spent a short time as working welder and it is damn hard work that takes a lot of training.
And thirdly, as Goldenberg and his cohort retire, where will the people with the necessary skills to teach manufacturing skills and other production skills come from? That is not a faucet that can be turned off and on in a year or two.
Fourthly, this is more evidence that our government, primarily Congress, is actively destroying the entire country!! We have to find some way to STOP re-electing 95% of Congress year after year! The evidence is overwhelming that individual members are more interested in enriching themselves than in the future of the country.
Skills Don’t Pay the Bills
By ADAM DAVIDSON
Earlier this month, hoping to understand the future of the moribund
manufacturing job market, I visited the engineering technology program
at Queensborough Community College in New York City. I knew that
advanced manufacturing had become reliant on computers, yet the
classroom I visited had nothing but computers. As the
instructor Joseph Goldenberg explained, today’s skilled factory worker
is really a hybrid of an old-school machinist and a computer programmer.
Goldenberg’s intro class starts with the basics of how to use cutting
tools to shape a raw piece of metal. Then the real work begins: students
learn to write the computer code that tells a machine how to do it much
faster.
Nearly six million factory jobs, almost a third of the entire
manufacturing industry, have disappeared since 2000. And while many of
these jobs were lost to competition with low-wage countries, even more
vanished because of computer-driven machinery that can do the work of
10, or in some cases, 100 workers. Those jobs are not coming back, but
many believe that the industry’s future (and, to some extent, the future
of the American economy) lies in training a new generation for highly
skilled manufacturing jobs — the ones that require people who know how
to run the computer that runs the machine.
This is partly because advanced manufacturing is really complicated.
Running these machines requires a basic understanding of metallurgy,
physics, chemistry, pneumatics, electrical wiring and computer code. It
also requires a worker with the ability to figure out what’s going on
when the machine isn’t working properly. And aspiring workers often need
to spend a considerable amount of time and money taking classes like
Goldenberg’s to even be considered. Every one of Goldenberg’s students,
he says, will probably have a job for as long as he or she wants one.
And yet, even as classes like Goldenberg’s are filled to capacity all
over America, hundreds of thousands of U.S. factories are starving for
skilled workers. Throughout the campaign, President Obama lamented the
so-called skills gap and referenced a study claiming that nearly 80
percent of manufacturers have jobs they can’t fill. Mitt Romney made
similar claims. The National Association of Manufacturers estimates that
there are roughly 600,000 jobs available for whoever has the right set
of advanced skills.
Eric Isbister, the C.E.O. of GenMet, a metal-fabricating manufacturer
outside Milwaukee, told me that he would hire as many skilled workers as
show up at his door. Last year, he received 1,051 applications and
found only 25 people who were qualified. He hired all of them, but soon
had to fire 15. Part of Isbister’s pickiness, he says, comes from an
avoidance of workers with experience in a “union-type job.” Isbister,
after all, doesn’t abide by strict work rules and $30-an-hour salaries.
At GenMet, the starting pay is $10 an hour. Those with an associate
degree can make $15, which can rise to $18 an hour after several years
of good performance. From what I understand, a new shift manager at a
nearby McDonald’s can earn around $14 an hour.
The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I
spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they
had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s
hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at
the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining
about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage,
there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After
all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable
skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their
wages.
In a recent study, the Boston Consulting Group noted that, outside a few
small cities that rely on the oil industry, there weren’t many places
where manufacturing wages were going up and employers still couldn’t
find enough workers. “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom
rates,” the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.” The
study’s conclusion, however, was scarier. Many skilled workers have
simply chosen to apply their skills elsewhere rather than work for less,
and few young people choose to invest in training for jobs that pay
fast-food wages. As a result, the United States may soon have a hard
time competing in the global economy. The average age of a highly
skilled factory worker in the U.S. is now 56. “That’s average,” says Hal
Sirkin, the lead author of the study. “That means there’s a lot who are
in their 60s. They’re going to retire soon.” And there are not enough
trainees in the pipeline, he said, to replace them.
One result, Sirkin suggests, is that the fake skills gap is threatening
to create a real skills gap. Goldenberg, who has taught for more than 20
years, is already seeing it up close. Few of his top students want to
work in factories for current wages.
Isbister is seeing the other side of this decision making. He was deeply
frustrated when his company participated in a recent high-school career
fair. Any time a student expressed interest in manufacturing, he said,
“the parents came over and asked: ‘Are you going to outsource? Move the
jobs to China?’ ” While Isbister says he thinks that his industry
suffers from a reputation problem, he also admitted that his answer to a
nervous parent’s question is not reassuring. The industry is inevitably
going to move some of these jobs to China, or it’s going to replace
them with machines. If it doesn’t, it can’t compete on a global level.
It’s easy to understand every perspective in this drama. Manufacturers,
who face increasing competition from low-wage countries, feel they can’t
afford to pay higher wages. Potential workers choose more promising
career paths. “It’s individually rational,” says Howard Wial, an
economist at the Brookings Institution who specializes in manufacturing
employment. “But it’s not socially optimal.” In earlier decades, Wial
says, manufacturing workers could expect decent-paying jobs that would
last a long time, and it was easy to match worker supply and demand.
Since then, with the confluence of computers, increased trade and
weakened unions, the social contract has collapsed, and worker-employer
matches have become harder to make. Now workers and manufacturers “need
to recreate a system” — a new social contract — in which their
incentives are aligned.
In retrospect, the post-World War II industrial model did a remarkably
good job of supporting a system in which an 18-year-old had access to
on-the-job training that was nearly certain to pay off over a long
career. That system had its flaws — especially a shared complacency that
left manufacturers and laborers unprepared for global trade and
technological change. Manufacturers, of course, have responded over the
past 20 years by dismantling it. Yet Isbister’s complaint suggests some
hope — that there’s a lack of skilled workers; that factory layoffs
overshot, and now need a reversal. As we talked, it became clear that
Isbister’s problem is part of a larger one. Isbister told me that he’s
ready to offer training to high-school graduates, some of whom, he says,
will eventually make good money. The problem, he finds, is that far too
few graduate high school with the basic math and science skills that
his company needs to compete. As he spoke, I realized that this isn’t a
narrow problem facing the manufacturing industry. The so-called skills
gap is really a gap in education, and that affects all of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment