A Shortage of Vital Skills

By Alexander L. Taylor III

America is running out of people who can do essential work

It is like stepping into an earlier age. The scene is the shop floor of the A & A Tool Co. in southern Connecticut, and the spectacle is of American precision craftsmanship tooling up for the 1980s. The vision is not an encouraging one. Jammed between noisy lathes and oily drill presses stand a dozen men, some far into middle age. Like acolytes of a dying devotion, they practice the art of machinemaking, using skills and techniques that have not changed much in 100 years.

A & A Tool Co., a precision machining shop with 23 employees and a twelve-month backlog of customer orders in the aircraft and defense industries, is typical of a crisis that is quietly brewing on the shop floors of the nation's plants and factories. From the tiny machine shops of New England to the aerospace hangar sheds of the West Coast, American industry is being squeezed and constricted by a shortage of skilled labor.

In the U.S. today, the face of blue-collar skill is aging. Small tool shops cannot replace craftsmen as they retire. Larger machinery manufacturers cannot find willing younger men to train in order to expand production and grow. West Coast aerospace giants like Boeing and Lockheed constantly raid each other's work forces in the hunt for skilled people. At a tune when one in 13 U.S. workers is unemployed, jobs by the hundreds of thousands in many of the economy's most vital sectors are going begging for the lack of trained people.

With the Reagan Administration about to launch the biggest peacetime defense buildup in U.S. history, the skilled labor shortage threatens to create crippling and inflationary production bottlenecks. Without experienced workers, there is no way to shape and mold the thousands of metal parts that go into fighter planes and new tanks, into cruise missiles and Trident submarines. Northrop Corp., which co-produces the F/A-18 Hornet fighter, is already short of such specialized tradespeople as jig-and-fixture experts and plaster patternmakers. Says Donald Smith, director of the University of Michigan's industrial development division: "A recovering economy and a boom in defense orders could create the biggest industrial-demand crunch we've seen since 1941." Though the skills squeeze is hitting just about every sector of industry, the most worrisome shortages are looming in the machine-tool trades. Nearly all big manufacturing firms employ skilled people who work with metal. But, more and more, large firms have come to rely on specialty firms as subcontractors for their metalworking needs.

In the process, the nation's 3,500 machine-tool companies have become the tiny base upon which all of American industry now sits like an inverted pyramid. The firms range from garage-size shops with one or two workers to giant manufacturing companies with employees numbering in the thousands. Large or small, the businesses all have one thing in common: they make the tools, drills, lathes, presses and other industrial machines without which no manufacturer can operate.

Long the world leader in machine-tool production, the U.S. has seen its share of the world market shrink from 21% in 1964 to a mere 7% now. More and more companies have begun turning to imported machine tools, especially from West Germany and Japan. Imports now serve fully 25% of the domestic market. "This type of situation is not just a problem," says Seymour Melman, professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University. "It is an unmitigated disaster."

Periodic shortages of trained artisans are nothing new to the U.S. economy. As long ago as 1901, employers were warning that changing immigration patterns had begun to bring in more unskilled workers from Southern Europe and fewer from the industrial nations north of the Alps. Now, however, the problem is much more acute and threatening. Observes Machinists Union President William W. Winpisinger bluntly: "The most highly industrialized nation on earth is in danger of becoming a nation of industrial illiterates who do not know how to stop a running toilet, replace a burned-out fuse or identify anything on a car more complicated than the gas-tank cap."

The skilled labor force is eroding on two fronts. Young people going to work are choosing, or being steered into, white-collar jobs outside of factories. At the same time, experienced journeymen, many of whom learned their trades during World War II, are retiring at a rapid rate. The U.S. Labor Department estimates that there will be an average of 31,000 new skilled labor openings for machinists and machine operators annually until 1990. But only 2,300 new workers qualify for such jobs each year.

For some companies the squeeze is already serious. Condec Corp. of Old Greenwich, Conn. (1980 sales: $275 million), is a leading supplier of parts for the U.S. Army's 155-mm Howitzer field gun, makes components for the cruise missile, and is the world's leading producer of industrial robots. In the past eight months, a lack of skilled labor has ballooned Condec's order backlog by 37% to $288 million. Says Condec Chairman Norman I. Schafler: "It has become virtually impossible to get any tool-and diemakers. Industry has consumed its pool of skills like a diminishing oil well."

Many big manufacturing firms have been counting on so-called cad/cam systems (computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing) to ease the skills squeeze. These computer-controlled machines do everything from preparing a three-dimensional blueprint to selecting the proper drill bit to bore a metal part. Unfortunately, the nation lacks enough skilled workers to boost cad/cam output to a level anywhere nearly high enough to satisfy the surge in demand.

The shortage of skilled workers has gradually been building. Even the least academically inclined high school graduates now set their sights on college rather than on a technical education. Says Karl Sjogren, 60, a Finnish immigrant who owns a one-man tool-and-die shop in Redford Township, Mich.: "My son is not interested in this at all. He is an auditor for a big company."

Guidance counsellors themselves are often largely unaware of careers in the skilled trades. The result is a shocking lack of knowledge about such basic tasks as making metal-stamping dies. Says Don Fifer, the director of skilled training for General Motors: "Incredible as it may seem, we get apprenticeship applicants who say they want to go into diemaking because they are interested in working with colors."

Today there is little status to be found in carrying a lunch box to a factory job. Technical schools now train more beauticians and fashion designers than machinists. Notes Walter E. Andrus, vice president of Gleason Works in Rochester, N.Y.: "Working in the machine industry just does not have that much sex appeal to kids in high school."

It is easy to see why. Standing next to a hot, vibrating, metalworking machine eight hours a day is demanding and physically taxing, but it is also boring and often dangerous. Blue-collar workers are seldom depicted as heroic in popular American culture; indeed, like the television characters Archie Bunker and Laverne and Shirley, they are frequently ridiculed.

Yet such jobs require more schooling than many white-collar professions. To become a journeyman diemaker, an apprentice must complete 8,000 hours, or four years, of shop work, practicing on-the-job skills for an average of just $4 an hour. In addition, the apprentice must also finish 600 hours of course work in a vocational school or an in-house training program. As skills improve, earnings pull ahead. In many shops a full-fledged diemaker can make as much as $40,000 yearly, with overtime. Such jobs in the U.S. rank seventh in lifetime earnings, behind insurance and real estate salespeople.

American industry must bear much of the blame for failing to hire and train enough skilled workers. Some big companies have found it easier to hire away journeymen from other firms rather than develop their own. Other firms have simply been shortsighted. During downturns in the auto industry, apprentices have been laid off to enable companies to keep their fully trained men at work.

Some companies do operate effective in-house training and apprenticeship programs, but the cost is high. At Jenkins Bros, in Bridgeport, Conn., it takes an estimated $20,000 and up to four years of on-the-job training to develop a journeyman machinist. Cincinnati Milacron, the nation's largest machine toolmaker (1980 sales: $816 million), cranks out no more than ten journeymen machinists a year from its own apprenticeship program.

The Reagan Administration, which is already eliminating existing job-training programs like the much maligned Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), is not likely to help fill the void with yet another federally financed jobs effort. Nor does Congress seem disposed to help. Says Indiana Republican Dan Quayle, chairman of a Senate subcommittee on employment and productivity: "The more that Government gets involved in training, the worse the problem gets."

If they want their companies to prosper in the 1980s, business leaders are thus going to have to devise their own plans for filling the empty workbenches of American industry. Companies have not tried hard enough to educate high school students about promising career opportunities in industry, particularly in the skilled blue-collar trades that offer security and a good income throughout the 1980s and beyond.

One way for business to give its message some immediate appeal would be to start improving entry-level pay scales for apprentices, which are often barely higher than the minimum wage. The dungeon-like gloom of many a shop floor's work environment is also a deterrent to attracting promising new blue-collar talent. Most of all, of course, the nation needs to be reminded of the dignity and importance of skilled blue-collar work itself. That is the basic message that the U.S. business community needs to start hammering home.

--By Alexander L. Taylor III.

Reported by Frederick Ungeheuer and Robert L Grieves/New York, with other U.S. bureaus.

With reporting by Frederick Ungeheuer and Robert L Grieves

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