The missing worker? U.S. manufacturing sees shortage of skilled factory workers - The Washington Post

Where are the workers? Where did they go?

Refusal of work? Off-shore? Replaced by machines? Capital can't generate the workers it needs--that's a job for the ISAs and they've been off the job, that is, they've been doing the wrong job, failing to support tech-voc and apprenticeships.

What’s missing are the skilled workers needed to fill them.

A metal-parts factory here has been searching since the fall for a machinist, an assembly team leader and a die-setter. Another plant is offering referral bonuses for a welder. And a company that makes molds for automakers has been trying for seven months to fill four spots on the second shift.

“Our guys have been working 60 to 70 hours a week, and they’re dead. They’re gone,” said Corey Carolla, vice president of operations at Mach Mold, a 40-man shop in Benton Harbor, Mich. “We need more people. The trouble is finding them.”

Through a combination of overseas competition and productivity gains, the United States has lost nearly 4 million manufacturing jobs in the past 10 years. But many manufacturers say the losses have not yielded a surplus of skilled factory workers.

Instead, as automation has transformed factories and altered the skills needed to operate and maintain factory equipment, the laid-off workers, who may be familiar with the old-fashioned presses and lathes, are often unqualified to run the new.

via www.washingtonpost.com

Comments

[Rballen422]

A job for the ISA's indeed...you literally don't know which lie to believe here. I suspect moralism at play again: the bosses hate workers so much, they employ Calvinism, straight is the gate and narrow the way, only a few qualify for the mind numbing industrial work and still remain pure, drug free and obedient-- and the whole "too high tech for the unwashed masses" routine is so banal, so eighties. How long can the same note be played over and over before it becomes a caricature of itself?

[Rballen422]

I suspect if those overworked machinists went on strike, scads of "instant expert" replacement workers would pour in from seemingly nowhere, and do a bang up job!