Where Are The Workers? Chapter One

Where Are The Workers?

By Rod Kackley

Chapter One

The collapse of manufacturing in the last decade of the twentieth century and the slow crawl back up in the twenty-first century have soured many of the Baby Boomers’ children on a career or even a just a job in a factory. 

However, as Richard Florida found out, manufacturing’s image problem goes much deeper than that. When Florida, the author of the Rise of the Creative Class books asked some of his students to choose between a career in a hair salon and a factory, they chose the hair salon. It is not that they were afraid of getting their hands dirty. They just wanted a career that offered them a greater opportunity to be creative.

There is also the problem of money. Manufacturing wages have plummeted. Unions agreed to drastic wage cuts to keep their rank-and-file employed. With the new two-tier wage structures in place at many of America’s largest manufacturers, many of the children of those who built America are not choosing a blue-collar lifestyle.

This talent shortage is a problem manufacturing is dealing with in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Manufacturers were banking on a reinvention of the economic sector as the spring season of  2011 began. The nation’s economy was healing. Would the good times last? Could they be driven forward? The people running Michigan’s factories — surrounded by empty dinosaurs of the industrial past in Detroit, Flint and Saginaw —  were hoping the answer would be “yes” to both questions.

They are breathing easier as these words are being written in 2012. The manufacturing sector grew in 2011 and there was no reason to believe that 2012 would be any different, according to Plante Moran Managing Partner Rich Antonini, who concentrates his practice on that sector.

“They have seen nice growth, there is a good backlog (of orders), and demand is pent up,” he told me in January 2012. “I can’t imagine this not continuing.”

Antonini said that during the worst years following the nation’s economic collapse in 2008, most West Michigan manufacturing companies saw sales fall 40 percent. “They are working on taking care of that capacity,” he said. “We are not back to 2006-2008 levels. But they are working on it.”

Factories were able to get more productive and reduce payrolls because of technology investments. There is no doubt that reinvention and innovation are leading the push but there could be a problem over which manufacturers have little control and the worst-case scenario is it could cripple the revival.

 Now there is some fear that a lack of skilled workers will slow growth. “Part of the problem is the aging of the workforce,” he explained. “There hasn’t been a pipeline to replace workers who are retiring and that is starting to show.”

Where Are The Workers is part of the five-ebook series Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance available wherever ebooks are sold including Amazon.

Where Are the Workers is also available, for a limited time only, with a free download of Rod Kackley's new app through iTunes and Google Play.