Where Are The Workers?
Finding the Lost Generation
By Rod Kackley
The survivors are picking up the pieces, bandaging their wounds, helping each other as warriors do for other warriors. While they move forward, the combatants who are as weary as any of the fighters who came before them are sneaking peeks over their shoulders, hoping they will see platoons of reinforcements who are ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in battles that never end.
But they aren’t there. The reinforcements have yet to arrive, at least not in the numbers needed.
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 (original equipment manufacturers).
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. He was continuing to take 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.”
Finding these hardworking, show-up-everyday-people is not a problem. There are plenty of college graduates, with four-year degrees, $35-thousand a year jobs and five-or-six figure student loans to pay back.
“The college bubble is real,” said Pohl. “People are realizing they can’t pay off their student loans and they are waking up to the reality that there is potential in this industry.”
For the rest of this story, including how Bryan Heath is doing today, please click here for an immediate download of Where Are The Workers?
The entire Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance series is available through Amazon,Barnes & Noble, iTunes and Vook.com.
Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the story of how the people of Grand Rapids, Michigan have changed the way the world sees their community and the way their community sees the world.
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