All the jobs aren’t at Wal-Mart: America’s labor shortage

A few days ago I wrote about 10,000 people applying for about 300 jobs in a Wal-Mart in Georgia. The average pay was around $10.65 an hour.

I constantly hear people comment in conversations about the economy: “well, if you don’t have an education, those are the only jobs you can get” or “It’s Wal-Mart or nothing now. All the manufacturing jobs have gone away.”

Do you need any skills to take the most basic job at Wal-Mart? I understand there are different positions from butchers and pharmacists (at the Super Wal-Marts) to cashiers. But for the most part, for the average job, you probably don’t need many specialized skills.

Yet, I recently saw this article in Reuters where Hamill Manufacturing, which makes high end parts for military helicopters and nuclear submarines, located east of Pittsburgh, laments that they have 10 job openings for machinists that they can’t fill. They’ve been in business for decades.

A study from 2005 said that 90% of manufacturers are suffering a shortage of workers. And it’s only going to get worse as the baby boom generation starts retiring.

What’s going on here then? Why aren’t some of the 10,000 workers applying to Wal-Mart applying for these jobs?

The money is excellent.

A typical manufacturing job pays about $60,000 a year, according to manufacturing industry figures, a premium of about 25 percent to the service industries.

At Hamill, a general machinist will start at $9 an hour, rising to $14.50 an hour after training, and going up to the mid to high twenties for senior machinists, who can earn nearly $70,000 a year.

Maybe we’ve gone soft.

I hate to say it. But maybe Americans just won’t take the longer path and take the harder job- even if the pay is ultimately higher.

For many of these jobs, you can’t just waltz in and start working. You have to learn the trade first.

Glenn Skena, who runs Hamill’s apprenticeship programs, said it takes years to train workers. On average, the company will invest about $120,000 per apprentice, and often will send workers to college for training to use the computers that design the parts and direct the machines.

“We have a hard time hiring programmers from the outside so we have to train them from within,” said Skena.

Because these highly trained workers are such a commodity, wages are high. “We’re quickly ratcheting up our wage scale,” said Kelly.

But still there are not enough workers.

“We have spindles sitting idle because we don’t have machinists to run them,” said Dalrymple. A “Help Wanted” sign has been a fixture outside the factory for months.

Maybe the young workers just don’t want to work that hard. Wal-Mart seems easier, right?

Other businesses in Southeast Pennsylvania can’t find skilled workers either.

“I can tell you on my desk right now I have over 300 very high-quality job openings that I cannot fill,” said Michael Smeltzer, executive director of the Manufactures Association of South-Central Pennsylvania, who coordinates job openings for that part of the state.

Hamill is making parts for the Iraq war and other customers overseas but they can’t fulfill all the orders because they can’t find enough workers. There is just something wrong with a contractor, in the time of war, not able to make the parts because they can’t find workers to do it.

300 jobs go unfilled in Pennsylvania and yet Wal-Mart was filling about the same number of jobs at that store in Georgia and 10,000 waited in line for applications to apply.

I don’t get it.

America has lost its backbone.