Posted on 11/05/2004 3:10:37 PM PST by Ahriman
There is a good reason for this that is never brought up. Finding people to fill those jobs is a major pain. We hire seasonal help in the spring, they come in with the understanding that if they work out they likely will become permanent employees in the fall. The pay is decent (beats the industry average for the area), the work is physical and benefits are offered after 30 day. You will work at least 40 hours a week.
Requirements for an interview are, be able to do physical labor, not a felon, literate, able to communicate in English.
Now we have a fairly high unemployment rate (more then a point over the national average) so you would think that workers would be easy to find. You would be wrong.
80% of applicants will not meet the basic requirements for an interview. Of those that do at least half will blow the interview. (Note:Hitting on the HR Director will not get you hired.) Some will split after being told that, yes we do do a background check. Others will fail the simple language and math test we give.
We were filling 30 slots so that means we needed 300 applicants. But wait, it gets better.
Of those 30 one in ten will not show up for the first day. Another four of ten will be leaving involuntarily by the end of sixty days. The reasons range from chronic lateness, to absenteeism to taking a swing at a co-worker to attempted time clock fraud. Of the remaining five, three will leave voluntarily having only wanted the job for a little extra cash.
So out of 300 applicants we end up with maybe six who make it through. With a few rare exceptions they will be older guys who were laid off elsewhere.
My question is, What are we going to do when we run out of the old guys?
This is not even going into the challenges of the permanent employees. I will not even bring up that a whopping 25% of the plant employees have FMLA paper work which means that 60 days (12 weeks) of the year they can call in "FMLA" and get the day off with no penalty. And we have to keep their benefits going.
The question is not "why are manufacturing jobs leaving?"
But "why are there any left?"
In twenty years there won't be. There is no way we can replace our retiring workers with the labor pool being the way it is. Kids with smarts and ambition are going to college and starting their own businesses. We are left with mostly the dregs as the job is neither glamorous or exciting.
Summer is well over and of the 15 permanent slots that we needed to fill five are still open. We can't even maintain, how are we going to grow?
Please understand that I do not mean to whine but it is bad out there and getting worse. 10 years ago we could have filled those slots by April. Now it is November and we are still hiring.
Exactly. It is also hard to outsource salesmen, auto techs, carpenters, equipment operators and hundreds of other jobs that pay very well.
We have had a large number of auto manufacturing plants open in the last few years and many more will open in the near future. For instance, Toyota will open a new assembly plant for Toyota Tundra trucks in San Antonio in 2005.
By DAREN FONDA
For a forward-minded executive, Jim Davis is an old-fashioned guy. Sitting in a conference room at New Balance headquarters in Boston, he jokes that he still employs a third of the work force he inherited when he bought the company in 1972. O.K., so it consisted of six folks back then, stitching 30 pairs of running shoes a day in the back of a store. In the U.S. sneaker wars, the company took the bronze in 2003 with 11% of the market, just behind Reebok (and miles behind Nike in first).
Worldwide, Davis projects sales growth of 10% to 12% over 2003, to more than $1.4 billion this year.
Perhaps the riskiest bet he's making, however, is on domestic manufacturing. New Balance is the only major U.S. sneaker brand still manufacturing in America; most others have fled to China, Indonesia and Vietnam. Roughly 25% of New Balance shoes are assembled at five factories in New England and one in California owned by a foreign supplier. Over the past two years Davis has spent $14 million to upgrade a high-tech shoe plant down the road from his Boston office, and in 2001 he expanded his distribution center in the old mill town of Lawrence, Mass. Davis figures he can overcome the higher labor costs in the U.S. and turn his plants into strategic assets — shipping directly to retailers from the factory and saving a bundle on inventory costs. His goal: to make New Balance more like Toyota, a model of lean manufacturing in his own backyard.
Is he on a runner's high? Davis pays his U.S. factory workers an average wage of $12 an hour, plus benefits, compared with 40¢ an hour for a worker in mainland China, where 76% of U.S. athletic footwear originates. The tax breaks Congress just passed for U.S. companies to keep manufacturing jobs at home amount to chump change given that gap. Overall, the U.S. footwear industry has shed nearly 200,000 jobs since the early 1970s, leaving fewer than 21,000.
Davis, who played football at Middlebury College, concedes that he could probably make more money by shipping all his production overseas. He has increased his domestic payroll by 65% since 1995, adding some 500 blue collar jobs, but the percentage of New Balance shoes assembled in the U.S. has fallen by half as Davis has ramped up production in Asia and at a plant in England to keep up with sales.
At the same time, New Balance has proved that it's possible to manufacture in the U.S. and compete. The company's plant in Brighton, Mass., for instance, features robotics and a high-tech molding process that can produce an outsole in 12 seconds — allowing New Balance to make a sneaker from scratch and fill orders rapidly as they come in. Another advantage Davis sees: better relationships with retailers. New Balance's domestic factories play a key role in filling special orders for hard-to-find sizes and widths and give the company more flexibility to help out independent retailers — a lucrative niche. The firm has a reputation "as the easiest company to do business with," according to the trade publication Sporting Goods Investor. As for the wage gap, Davis says it's overblown. All his U.S. plants are highly automated, with bar-coded parts and computerized stitching and embroidery machines, resulting in about 25 minutes of manual labor to produce a pair of shoes versus more than four hours in a less automated Asian plant.
From Time Magazine (excerpted)
Some interesting stats in the actual labor report:
Numbers are in 000's and represent the number of net new jobs created this month.
Professional and business
services....................... 97
Professional and technical
services(1)................... 28.7
Legal services............... -.2
Accounting and bookkeeping
services.................... 6.5
Architectural and engineering
services.................... 8.2
Computer systems design and
related services............ 6.9
Management and technical
consulting services......... 2.7
Management of companies and
enterprises................... .7
Hasn’t GNP from manufacturing remained steady?
Well said. It will take a strategic decision to invest in new technology instead of spending our money on agricultural subsidies, free drugs for seniors and bonehead 'no child left behind' federal jokes. If they keep tossing the money at these useless investments we won't have the money to secure our troops in the war on terror and we won't have the money to give the seniors all their entitlements. The middle class entitlements are what will bankrupt the country.
Bravo! Best of luck as a self employed entrepreneur...what product/service do you deal in?
There are less people working now than there was 4 years ago.
Bravo! Best of luck as a self employed entrepreneur...what product/service do you deal in?
Thanks!
Monument inscription, in the NY-metro area. Winter will be make or break for me.
The salary gap will close much more quickly than that.
Your response is simple-minded, but predictable.
WHICH "new technology" should non-college grads "learn?" Computer programming for a nice position in India? Brain surgery? Bond underwriting?
At this time, some large health-insurance firms are studying the possibility of having heart surgeries performed in India because even after 1st-class airfare, the costs are about 50% of US procedures.
Maybe the "new technology" one should learn is how to toss luggage into airplane cargo holds, eh?
That's more to the fact that Reagan put the quota on assembled cars. But even assembly means many more jobs and also provides for the growth of related and supportive business. Any thing is good, and the short run, so far, has lasted 20+ years.
This isn't the buggy maker's workers walking across the street to work at Ford, this is Ford et all moving their factories out of town and the only thing left is the burger joint, not much of an improvement for the 98% not making big cash off of this: so what's to replace the Ford that 1. contributes as much to the nation and 2. pays as well?
Japan's problem is quite different and has nothing to do with protectionism: it is 1.the banking system is in bed with industry and because of honor can not divest of failing companies and 2. the Japanese were convinced to save and have a savings rate of around 50%, in other words, they don't buy anything.
You compete by making individual trade treaties on and equal basis. Simple fact, we are the only idjits playing free trade, just like Spain, later Britian and France were the only idjits playing free trade in their days: look at their great empires today.
All of which will bring us the next great technological and investment age..not! Those are 2nd world career fields, nations do not stay great in service; science and industry make nations great, unless you're Switzerland.
Hmm, but wouldn't a booming economy produce more manufacturies, which in turn would absorb some of the displaced workers, but yet manufacturing is on a constant decline, which goes against the concept of a recovery. Blaming all this on technology is rediculous. Where were the mass displacements in the 80s, during which period much manufacturing was being automated?
Besides, if you don't think that some Indian or Chinese (all of whose education is paid for by their home countries. No student loans) isn't learning .NET to take that very job away, you are kidding yourself.
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