Newman Katherine S. - Reskilling America: learning to labor in the twenty-first century

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For Jennifer Kalikapersaud
Small-business wizard and master trainer of her coworkers

You know whats crazy? I got more than 400 people in vocational programs here. I got people training as auto mechanics, in horticulture. This is a bigger vocational school than what we have on the outside. Why do we as a society wait until a guy ends up here before we give him a decent vocational education?

Burl Cain,
warden of Louisianas notorious Angola Penitentiary

After decades of off-shoring, downsizing, shuttered factories, and stranded blue-collar workers, the United States is in the midst of something of a manufacturing rebound. General Electric is now producing some appliances and water heaters domestically that were once manufactured overseas because, as their CEO Jeff Immelt explains, The U.S., on a relative basis, has never been more competitive. GE is sensitive to the new requirements laid down by the retail giant Walmart, which announced that it would begin buying an additional $250 billion in US-made products over the decade that began in 2013. Apple Inc. has promised to invest $100 million to build a Mac product line, also to be assembled in Texas, using components made in Illinois and Florida and equipment built in Kentucky and Michigan.

Energid Technologies Corporation, which moved its manufacturing facilities to India back in 2008, recently repatriated all of its production to Massachusetts after losing patience with tariffs on parts and an unpredictable Indian bureaucracy. Energids sales are rising and it needs to increase its production, but it is no longer searching overseas. Burlington, Vermont, looks much better.

We can really do it from New England, said David Askey, one of the owners. The thinking has flipped from being You must manufacture in China to You have the right infrastructure in place here [at home].

Foreign auto companies, from high-end luxury manufacturers like BMW and Mercedes to firms such as Volkswagen and Honda, which produce cars for the rest of us, have set up shop in the Sun Belt states of South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee. The old textile companies of the rural South have been replaced by high-tech, or advanced, manufacturing firms that are attracted to the low-energy, real estate, and labor costs they can find in Americas right to work states. Indeed, after decades of cheap labor in China replacing American workers, the Chinese advantageChinas labor-cost advantage over low-cost states in the United Stateshas shrunk to 39 percent, making it more cost effective to shorten the supply chain and produce manufactured goods close to the markets where they will be consumed.

Although the number of manufacturing jobs has declined in the United States by about 35 percent since 1980, the expense involved in off-shoring has led to something of an about-face. Production is coming back to US soil, where manufacturing is now number six in rank of growth industries. It has added nearly half a million jobs since 2010. We will probably never see all the jobs we lost to cheaper, overseas labor return to our shores. Nonetheless, the manufacturing jobs that are growingwhich include those for machinists, industrial machinery mechanics, electricians, and computer-controlled machine tool operatorsdemand more skill and, as a result, command higher pay.

So far, though, these positions have proven hard to fill, even when unemployment is high and millions are searching for work. Drew Greenblatt, a small-businessman interviewed by the New York Times in 2012, struggled to find the people he needed to keep his manufacturing business on a growth curve: Over the past couple of years, we invested in robots to help us win back jobs from China, Greenblatt said. His company, Marlin Steel Wire Products, is based in Baltimore, where it manufactures high-quality sheet metal products for customers like Pfizer, Caterpillar, and Toyota. Our big problem is that we dont have enough talent to run those machines at off hours, he notes, which means they sit dormant 70 hours a week when they could be working.

Greenblatt explains that he has five openings for machine operators, positions that dont require college degrees but pay, on average, about $60,000 annually. What candidates do need are skills, like the ability to operate a computer, read a blueprint, and use a caliper.

Other sectors of the US economy are gaining ground as well, many of them growing because our population is aging and the looming health care needs that follow are generating new labor demands. Indeed, according to projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, personal care and home health aides top the list of jobs with the fastest projected growth, expected to increase by 70 percent between 2010 and 2020. Also on that list are the skilled trades, such as for carpenters, brick masons, block masons, stonemasons, tile and marble setters (and their helpers), as well as for the pipe layers, plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters, who will all be needed when the current generation heads into retirement.

Between now and 2018, the fastest-growing occupations will be jobs of this kind, which are considered middle skill becausein the American context at leastthey require education or training beyond high school but not a four-year degree. Dental hygienists, construction managers, police officers, paralegals, and electricians are all required to have associates degrees or occupational certificates but not a four-year college education. And from a wage standpoint, many of these jobs are far from second best. In fact, they can launch people into the middle class: According to a report of the Harvard Graduate School of Education entitled Pathways to Prosperity , 27 percent of workers with occupational licenses earn more than the average recipient of a bachelors degree.

To be sure, when it comes to the growth in manufacturing jobs, its not your fathers assembly line. What once required a strong work ethic and the willingness to withstand the heat of the furnace is now a highly mechanized, automated production process. Looking out over the vast expanse of a modern steel mill, there are hardly any people on the shop floor at all. Automation has replaced human workers with preprogrammed machines that can operate twenty-four hours a day without getting tired, at levels of precision that are far superior to what line workers once produced.

As a consequence, the re-shoring of manufacturing is not likely to produce millions of jobs. Ninety-four thousand people working in the steel industry in 2012 produced 14 percent more steel than nearly four hundred thousand workers did in 1980. And as manufacturing comes back to the Rust Belt states, the employees it does need will be different from the ones it turfed out in the off-shoring era.

The workers who are finding their way back to Americas car factories and steel mills spend their work hours in front of a computer screen. Some need to know how to do simple kinds of computer programming, while others must command aspects of electrical engineering and know how to spot a fault caused by a malfunctioning chip. Robotics is in demand, mechatronics is needed, and the focus on quality control is high on the list of talents that manufacturers are looking for.