Here is my take on a recent article I came across, “Desperately seeking Americans for factory jobs.”
Machinists make about $60,000 a year. With overtime that income can get close to $100,000 a year. Thousands of these jobs are available right now. Tens of thousands of machinist jobs will become available over the next decade as many older workers retire.
But yet, American manufacturing companies can’t find people qualified to fill these jobs. The small manufacturing companies I work with every day have told me for years that finding qualified, trained, conscientious skilled workers is one of their top challenges.
Sadly, we don’t promote manufacturing jobs in this country. Politicians grand-stand on this issue, but they don’t back it up with anything. Our educational system ignores manufacturing. High schools almost never talk about any kind of “blue collar” labor as an option for young adults. Few community colleges have programs in manufacturing skills.
I’ve contacted high school guidance counselors and principals in my community to see if they would help recruit students for factory tours on Manufacturing Day, a day to promote manufacturing in October every year. Dozens of manufacturing companies in my area, from large to small, open up their doors to tours every year, and this would be a great opportunity for high school kids to be exposed to career opportunities in manufacturing. But my attempts have been consistently ignored, because the educational world looks down their nose at jobs where workers might get their hands dirty. But this also shows how little educators or politicians even know about modern manufacturing, because many of the jobs are highly technical, operating complex and expensive automated machinery.
On the political side, it seems to me that if manufacturers are willing to hire and train workers to become skilled in manufacturing technologies, then perhaps government should help encourage this. If manufacturing is truly important to the economic well-being of our country and to our national defense, then the government should get involved because it seems like the other option is to continue doing nothing and continuing to lose our manufacturing base.
Well, enough of my pontificating… be sure to check out this article!
“Desperately seeking Americans for factory jobs.”
Well said Kerry! Lack of skilled workers has been a complaint I've heard for 10 years! I think most of the educational and political establishment are just completely clueless that we still have companies out there fabricating metal, molding plastic and doing many other industrial tasks. And they're clueless that manufacturing is a high tech endeavor that needs high tech training! Thanks for your comment 🙂
This is sad but true! Almost every manufacturing / repair company I work with says one of the greatest threats to their company's growth is lack of a skilled workforce. Blue collar jobs in America are simply . . . not cool. We need more education in the school system so that young people's perceptions about this type of work change.