Don't Blame a 'Skills Gap' for Lack of Hiring in Manufacturing
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
I've seen this in action. A company hires someone, that person bounces around the company picking up various skills, roles and responsibilities.
Time passes, that person leaves the company, and the company looks for a replacement, completely ignoring the fact that the role and the employee who filled it grew organically together over the years, making it impossible to find a drop-in replacement.
They then complain that there's a skills shortage because none of the electrical engineers applying for the position are proficient with both graphic design in Corel Draw, and operating the shop's CNC lathe.
They basically require plant specific on the job training, which for whatever reason companies aren't providing.
It's similar to the tech industry where jobs ask for 10 years of node.js experience, 15 years of Coffeescript and advanced linux kernel knowledge....If you need that person, your going to have to train him.
(Like community colleges and so on)
It felt like it was a breaking of a social contract: that a company would use their coffers rather than payroll cuts to ride out bad times, and you stuck around for at least 5 to 10 years, maybe your whole career. Then it became clear that they were more than happy to lay you off if it gained the company even a small temporary advantage.
Fast forward to now, when it's understood that if you stay somewhere more than 2 years, you're harming your earning potential. And at the same time companies complain that by the time they train someone up, they're out the door.
Well, you reap what you sow. I clearly remember that employers were the first ones to drop their side of the deal.
Funnily enough, I think this trend might actually help bump the real value of wages, at least for some people. Those who are willing to be mobile will do pretty well.
My only disagreement with you is that I'm happy for a bad business to exist as long as it can manage it. I just don't think we should save them from being destroyed by their dysfunction.
What we have right now is moderate unemployment, static wages, and an industry insisting they can't find employees. If we accept the article's premise that it's not about irreducible skill shortages (i.e. skills are available, or on-job training is an option) then something is badly wrong with that gap.
There's a known pattern where an industry yells about how they can't find employees until some external force solves the problem for them: usually rising unemployment or government-funded training initiatives and subsidies. This is especially rewarding if people get educated/trained into your industry specifically, and therefore can't easily change careers and get value from their labor. Basically you keep wages low and beat your breast until someone hands you a captive labor force.
So one possible explanation for this 'gap' is that employers are keeping wages sticky in the hope that someone else will come and save them from raising wages.
You can also blame the Government. The reason manufacturing wages are so low is because the few manufacturing companies left in the US can't compete with foreign manufacturing. It's hard to compete against companies that do manufacturing in countries with few to no labor laws. Tariffs on raw materials coming into the country are surprisingly high while tariffs on completed goods are low. That situation needs to be reversed if we ever want to increase the wages of factory workers.
Do we have new and more efficient ways to handle industrial waste?
Have we improved our transportation infrastructure so that raw materials can move more cheaply than in past decades?
Has government found less expensive and more fair ways to manage worker injuries and grievances (aside from lawsuits)? Has government reformed health care so that workers can take these manufacturing jobs without fear of being financially overwhelmed by medical bills should they be injured?
Are there tax or other incentives to create clusters of related manufacturing businesses in close proximity to one another?
Are their cleverly designed policies/regulations that US governments can use to legally (as far as the WTO is concerned) favor local industry?
I don't see this sort of reform happening in any significant way (except maybe Obamacare, which requires a lot of government subsidies in the form tax credits).
Where is the actual industrial policy innovation and reform in this country?
That's true for all companies. They don't want to spend the money to train, since employees can (and often do) leave after just a few years (if not months), but are also unwilling to make the workplace a more desirable one.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported in September 2014 that U.S. real (inflation adjusted) median household income was $51,939.
Making $50k a year is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY better than being on welfare.
That's also very likely two paychecks.
Raising a family, not so much.
People wouldn't switch jobs that much if they actually saw a path forward inside the company. Just give them a some raises and actually reward seniority. From my managers I sometimes get the sense that anybody who has worked under them for a few years is spoiled goods and needs to be replaced with fresh outside blood.
Today, unless I had 5 years experience programming device drivers and could traverse a binary tree on a whiteboard, I wouldn't have the slightest chance at such an entry level programming job.
Meh.
I have paid for plenty of training that walked out the door into a new job 6 months later. Life goes on.
I look for high intelligence people, and then train them in house. High intelligence people can get trained in a fraction of the time, and not every high intelligence person went to college to become a programmer. I think the skills gap could be more about the draining of intelligent people from blue collar jobs. I went to high school in the 80's and there was a very strong push for "college/computers good, working with hands bad" message from the guidance counselors.
I have a person who just graduated from University with good grades in Psychology and English. She applied for 87 jobs from March to July with no luck; now she is one of the robot operators. She says she makes more money doing this than any job she could get with her degree. Perhaps some of the skills challenge is too many white collar path people, not wanting to go to manufacturing for any reason. (my good worker is heading to grad school in a few months though, sad for me).
I'm not saying it was heaven on earth or anything, but it offered a certain satisfying simplicity, and made self-actualization easier outside of work. Nowadays, I get home and struggle to find mental energy for side projects or writing. The work is better, and I'm wealthier, but I'm not sure that my life is richer.
My friend's dad always told me it was hard to find people to hire, but he also said to hire someone he'd need to be able to make 3x what they cost to keep around.
I think that people who aren't employers can lose sight of the fact that some people are actually worth negative money per hour. Some people, even at $8.05 per hour, are not worth even that. Others, like the mythical 10x programmer, are worth 10x the high wage you pay them (or more). A huge variation.
Example. Joe makes $8.05 sweeping the floor. Joe is not very diligent with his work, and sweeps some aluminum dust and debris into a pile of iron dust and debris, accidentally creates thermite and sets the corner of the factory on fire. This now costs in one day what Joe would have made in a year (this actually happened to me, last month. Thanks Bryan for putting it out).
Example 2 (another true story! a good friend's company) Roy is drilling holes in a hydraulic press, actually in a dozen hydraulic presses that are all sold and need to ship. He breaks the 1" drill bit he is using, and undaunted and unwilling to tell anyone, he replaces the 1" bit with a smaller 15/16" bit and continues drilling. The presses ship out, all 12 of them, very heavy and with high shipping costs ($800 for the press and $200 for the shipping), and they get delivered to the customers. Yay! A hard busy week, but it all went out! Yay! bonuses for everyone! Then next week the phone starts ringing and it is discovered that all 12 presses are not unusable - the hole is too small to fit the piece that goes into it. All 12 presses come back, shipping borne both ways by manufacturer, and the presses are scrapped and replaced. Roy caused over $10,000 in losses for a very small company in exchange for the $300 dollars in pay. Roy was worth -$250 per hour that week. Negative $250 per hour.
Of course we want twice the skills for half the pay. I would settle for twice the skills for twice the pay though. It is just so hard to find the "twice the skills" part. I would be delighted to find 1x the skills, even that is hard. When you find the person with 10x the skills, I recommend making it so they never want to leave. Equity in the company (or a cage of some kind in the basement, LOL)
In Joe's case, any aluminium dust may stick on the broom - solution, two seperate 20$ brooms, problem solved. Nevermind aluminum and iron shaving take a significant heat source to trigger, at what part of the factory was this corner cut?
In Roy's case, it is a problem with the process, not with the worker. 1" drill bits get dulled, and are very hard to actually break. Was the jig properly set up? Was Roy involved in setting the process up and understand tolerances and bolt holes (including adding a go/nogo tool if required). These are the questions that need answering before passing the blame onto the minimum wage employee.
You shipped out $10,000 worth of deliverables without even so much as testing that they were usable? You have a manufacturing process that doesn't do basic acceptance testing of each unit as it comes off the line? And you really think this is a personnel problem?
B) isn't really relevant to the topic of discussion, which the possibility of someone being worth negative money/hr
C) could have been kinder :)
That means that there is bad management and the board which represents shareholders should dump the current management and find management that is focused on doing what it takes legally to improve shareholder value.
Paying for training is usually a crappy deal, because someone else can use the same money to raise wages and steal your trained workers. You can address this with things like repayment-required contracts, but that's ugly and difficult for most jobs. Plus, you've got a better option: get it for free!
So yes, you operate at slightly lower efficiency, but it's not because you're dumb. Instead, you're hoping that someone else (a competitor or ideally the government) will train up some employees you can then hire. Ideally, you get the government to push a career-training program in your desired field, producing a glut of specialized workers who not only don't need training, but keep wages down because they're only skilled in one specialized field.
In which case, the management is perfectly sensible and 'sticky' wages in the face of a hiring gap make total sense.
I think there is a lack of transparency to shareholders that understand their management is lazy/incompetent.
Also, in the article, it would be helpful to have the journalist interview some firms and ask them why they don't train people if they can't find them. Make it explicit.
This is actually a really good explanation for how so much of the technology in the Warhammer 40k universe is unknown and worshipped; nobody was willing to train anyone on how it worked.
Off topic: I'm still new to WH40k (started running a Rogue Trader game), but my impression is that the tech ignorance was a mixture of a psuedo-religious cult seizing control, information lost in the many wars, and the intentional intellectual poverty of the populace that keeps them docile.
Depends. Any mention of a dollar figure must include the region in the US, or it's totally meaningless. A 40K salary could easily be really good, really bad or normal.
Whatever the case, apparently it's not enough since they can't attract people who are willing to work for that wage.
I would argue that it's not specific to manufacturing. This sounds pretty similar to a phenomenon found in software development. Sometimes the principal developer on a project leaves the company and no one can read their code. Even if you match the laundry list of technology buzzwords perfectly, their code could just be unreadable.
Going deeper, maybe the problem is even more general than that. If you have manufacturing equipment that no one in your company knows how to use, is that still considered capital? If so, what is that capital worth?
What about code no one in the company understands? Patents? Excel spreadsheets? Is it still intellectual property? Interesting times are ahead.
That is an interesting theory. Unfortunately, the abstract of the referenced paper doesn't seem like the paper mentions much evidence. Also, my limited experience makes me doubt manufacturing companies are throwing out job openings willy-nilly, trolling for applicants. (In non-blue-collar jobs, sure.)
On the other hand, the current environment would seem to make it easy to overestimate the number of openings.
When Verizon wants a floor-sales clerk, they're likely putting the opening up on Monster, Indeed, and several other sites besides. That's 5-6 "openings posted" for one actual job, and it's made even worse if they aren't quick to take down the postings (why bother? you just route the resumes to spam). 30 years ago, you were posting a single job in specific places, and job boards or newspaper ads would turn over 'naturally' if you didn't keep the posting active.
So I don't know how important it is, but I'm definitely assuming that postings are being multiply counted these days.
But there is also the case that more and more work is subcontracted. So you can find posts that are slightly different but all refer to the same job position: 1 by the company where the job will take place, 4 by different subcontractors, and 3 more because 2 of the subcontractors have themselves subcontracted the job.
I did once realize that I was interviewing for the same job twice, once as a contractor and once as a direct employee. Everyone had been sufficiently close-mouthed about the exact role that I got several phone interviews in before things came to a head.
And I realize this is multiplicative, so it probably means every contractor and the original company are each putting up 2-5 postings for the same job.
Also, machine operating and machine programming are totally separate jobs. Programming is very high skill level, and operating is fairly low - my 9 year old son and his scout troop spent one night operating it to get their robot badge.
Why did the woman enter the work space, and how did she turn off all the safety devices? That would take a fair amount of effort on my machine, to get inside it while it runs. It could be done if you really tried, but it would take some effort.
As for training - nobody, and I mean NOBODY, has had the skill or training to operate that robot in the 9 years I have owned it. The operators were all trained by me, the factory owner. And while I have lots of pressure on me for production, an industrial accident will destroy that. Better safe than shut down by OSHA.
There should be a separate open-casket funeral, and all the factory owners and managers should be required to attend and spend 5 minutes each looking at the body. There was a Russian cosmonaut who demanded this for himself when he was killed: http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2011/03/16/corpse_custom-1a2...
The family members can of course have a separate closed-casket funeral.