This momentum is expected to continue in the months ahead. Chrysler plans a $240 million expansion of its Detroit plants; Ford will invest $773 million to expand hiring at six factories across the state; and GM plans to expand its Lansing facility.
That is pushing employment at several auto suppliers, including Detroit Manufacturing Systems, which opened an auto parts plant in Detroit and will supply Ford with instrument panels. Brose North America opened a new facility in New Boston; auto parts maker Faurecia opened a new plant in Fraser; and Magna E-Car Systems established a new assembly plant in Grand Blanc Township.
“Michigan’s industrial climate continues to improve,” said Tom Dubin, president of the Evanston, IL-based publishing company, which has been surveying industry since 1912. “ The state’s efforts to reduce business costs have resulted in many companies reinvesting in its manufacturing sector.”
Grand Rapids is the number-one city for manufacturing employment in Michigan.
Manufacturers News Incorporated reported April 22, 2013, that 41,715 people were working in manufacturing jobs in Grand Rapids in 2012, an increase of 5.8 percent over 2011.
Detroit was in second place with 31,772 manufacturing jobs, no significant change from the previous year.
While Grand Rapids has the most manufacturing employment by city in the MNI survey, Southeast Michigan still leads the state on a regional basis, with 378,278 people bringing home paychecks from manufacturing businesses.
Southwest Michigan, a region that includes Grand Rapids, had manufacturing employment of 204,651 in 2012.
This is good news of course. But it also presented a challenge in 2012 for many manufacturers, who struggled to fill open positions in their factories and engineering labs.
Here’s an excerpt from Where Are The Workers? the second installment in a five-part ebook essay series, Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance.
Manufacturing is on its way back led by the automotive industry. However, the case is also being made that manufacturing isn’t ready for the revival, especially the suppliers who are chained up to the OEMs.
Are enough new warriors being recruited to this fight? Here’s the story of a real warrior, a man who saw actual combat. Now he is facing a new and in some ways more difficult challenge.
Bryan Heath survived Marine Corps boot camp and three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, but never realized how tough it would be to find a job in the civilian world.
After knocking his head against the employment wall with job after job that went nowhere, Heath was doing his internship on the shop floor at Commercial Tool & Die Inc. (CTD) when I met him near Grand Rapids, Mich., while he continued taking classes across the street at Expert Tech LLC, a sister company of CTD, part of the Commercial Tool Group family of companies. Expert Tech was set up to find that missing generation who for one reason or another has decided that factory life is not for them.
“Learning this trade is something I will be able to use for the rest of my life,” Heath said. “This was the perfect opportunity to step in and say ‘this is who I am.’”
Kind of like what he did in boot camp? Bryan looked me in the eye and said, “Yes sir.”
Commercial Tool & Die opened Expert Tech, to help itself and its competitors, as well as people like Bryan Heath. It’s an effort to deal with an industrial crisis born of the rebirth of manufacturing in West Michigan. Business is booming. The demand is there after a decade that was lost to the industrial sector. Now the problem is finding people trained in the skill sets that are needed.
“The community colleges have pulled back, the voc-tech schools are not as prevalent as they used to be. There just isn’t the infrastructure there used to be support skill and knowledge development in our trade,” Commercial Tool and Die President Todd Finley said.
Quite simply, the talent pool is nearly drained and could become a barely damp puddle.
“We have really gutted our educational pipeline for skilled manufacturing,” Expert Tech President Ryan Pohl explained. “There is no feeder pipeline for people coming in with basic skills.”
Filling that pool company by company could be an insurmountable challenge because although it is something every shop should be doing, let’s be honest; some are so small that they are running as fast as they can just to stay in place. There’s no money and no time to put together anything close to an in-house training program
That is why CDT formed Expert Tech. “Give me someone who will show up every day and work hard,” said Pohl, “and we will train them for a company or I will train someone for free, betting I can find work for them.”
~ LCP ~
No comments:
Post a Comment