The Shortage in Skills

THE U.S. is faced with a new kind of labor shortage that threatens to check its industrial growth. It is not a shortage of workers but of skills. In Washington the U.S. Labor Department disclosed that unfilled demands for skilled workers have jumped 17% over last year, against 9% for other workers. The Cleveland employment office reported it is getting 1,000 applications each month for skilled metal workers and is unable to fill them. Said F. E. James, Dallas director of the Texas Employment Commission: "Companies around here still scream at us for every available skilled man. But they are becoming more sensible now when we can't supply them, for most companies on their own have hunted the U.S. over and couldn't find the people they wanted."

Many factors caused the shortage of skilled manpower. Because of the low birth rate in the '30s, the proportion of men in their 20s (the training age) has dropped drastically, while the total work force has rapidly increased. Unions are also at fault. Some, still thinking in Depression terms, limit the number of apprentices they will accept for training. More important, the emphasis of industrial unions on raising the pay of the unskilled has discouraged workers from learning a trade, especially since apprentice wages are far less than unskilled pay. The skilled worker's pay advantage over the unskilled dropped from 80% in 1932 to about 40% in 1957. During the same period the social feeling against "blue-collar" work has increased. Says B. Gordon Funk, industrial arts supervisor for the Los Angeles Board of Education: "Boys and their parents are made to believe in the social necessity of a university education, even though we know that an IQ of no is necessary to succeed in college, and many of those who have it would be happier, and often earn more, in a trade or a technical job."

Perhaps the biggest reason for the shortage is that U.S. industry has not faced up to the fact that the tremendous expansion of the economy, plus automation and the increasing complexity of machines, has created a tremendous new demand for skilled workers. Chrysler Corp., for example, needed only six skilled workers out of every 100 in 1938; now it needs ten. Nevertheless U.S. industry is training only one apprentice for every 50 skilled workers, far less than even the replacement rate.

To meet the shortage, the Ford Mo tor Co. fortnight ago dropped age limits for its on-the-job training classes, opened them to all employees who meet the aptitude requirements. Other industries in many areas are making a direct attack on the idea that only the backward go into vocational training. In Cleveland the big machine-tool makers rush the high-school graduating classes for candidates for their training programs with all the fervor used for seniors in engineering colleges. In Fort Worth Convair hires high-school graduates to work half a day and spend the other half, with pay, attending college-level technical and engineering classes to get credit toward college degrees.

Whole communities are getting into the act. In Bridgeport, Conn. 311 industrial plants are cooperating in studying present and future personnel needs, while at Waterville, Me., a town survey turned up worker shortages in 47 classifications, led to 600 adults enrolling in job-training courses conducted by Colby College and local schools.

Unions are also working harder to attract trainees. San Francisco plumbers are assessing themselves a penny an hour to finance apprentice training programs. The West Coast United Steelworkers are giving $6,000 to the University of California at Los Angeles for a pilot program for upgrading workers' skills. The most important union move to make the skilled trades more attractive was made by U.A.W.; it decided at its convention a month ago to permit skilled and technical workers to bargain separately for higher pay, a move that many employers welcome since it will permit them to give the bigger pay raises they think the skilled workers deserve. Despite this progress, employers are still unable to tap extensively one huge pool of potential skills--the Negro worker --traditionally barred by many craft unions.

The chief responsibility for obtaining skilled workers and constantly upgrading their skills rests on industry itself. Today most employers realize that they are in an emergency, that they can no longer get their skilled workers by pirating them from other companies, and that the shortage will get worse unless industry assumes leadership in overcoming it. Labor Secretary James Mitchell estimates that to the 9,000,000 skilled workers in the U.S. must be added another 5,000,000 more skilled or semiskilled workers by 1965; otherwise the economy will fall short of the $560 billion gross national product expected in that year.

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