Supply of Skilled Machinists Is Tighter Than Ever

When the mammoth manufacturing trade show Westec ’98 rolls into the Los Angeles Convention Center next week, area companies will get a glimpse of the latest tools of the trade.

Too bad all those high-tech cutters, lathes and CAD/CAM systems won’t come with the skilled operators needed to run them.

In Southern California and across the country, companies are experiencing a shortage of seasoned machinists, tool-and-die makers and other highly trained employees who comprise the nucleus of the country’s manufacturing base. The pinch has become especially painful in California, where manufacturing is booming again after years of recession.

Nationwide, an estimated 24,000 such jobs are going begging, leading observers to fret about America’s long-term ability to produce anything more value-added than a hamburger.

In the short run, owners of local machine shops and precision metalworking firms are scrambling to find good help, going to unprecedented lengths to recruit quality employees.

Take John Morrissey, for example. The president of Superior Jig Inc. in Anaheim is offering wages of $22 an hour for top-flight machinists capable of crafting satellite parts to tolerances of .00005 of an inch.

With overtime, his most experienced workers will easily earn $75,000 this year. Not to mention full benefits, productivity perks and a $1,000 signing bonus for new hires--if they can be found.

Morrissey is running help-wanted ads on the Internet, fishing coast-to-coast to fill a couple of openings. So far he’s gotten one nibble from a guy in Buffalo, N.Y. Morrissey worries that even that candidate will lose interest once the snow melts in upstate New York.

“I’ve never seen it this tough,” Morrissey said of the tight labor market. “Five years ago, we’d run an ad in the local paper and get 50 resumes and people waiting in the lobby. It’s totally different today.”

What’s different is that California’s manufacturing sector has bounced back after years of recession, rebounding to employ more than 1.9 million workers in 1997. While manufacturing jobs nationally remain flat at about 18.5 million, California in the last two years alone has added 100,000 jobs in everything from electronics assembly to apparel making, according to state employment figures.

“Despite conventional wisdom that we’ve become a service economy, California is still quite good at making things,” said Bruce Smith, an economist with the state Department of Finance. “This state has shown tremendous flexibility in attacking new markets.”

Before workers can assemble a toaster or an aircraft carrier, somebody has to fashion the molds, precision parts, specialty tools and machines that are the building blocks of the manufacturing process. It is these machinists, tool-and-die makers and metalworkers--among the most skilled production workers in the economy--that are in tight supply in California and elsewhere.

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An estimated 161,000 of these tradespeople ply their craft in the Los Angeles area today, compared with more than 200,000 in the go-go late ‘80s, according to figures from the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles.

“We’ve kind of taken our eye off manufacturing,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist with the EDC. “We’ve lost a lot of institutional memory in this field. It’s time to start paying attention again.”

Theories abound as to why jobs that can pay six figures without a college degree are going unfilled at a time when U.S. workers are itching for higher pay.

Some local industry watchers say the recession and defense downsizing in the early ‘90s convinced some experienced machinists to retire or relocate, draining a talent pool that is not easily replenished.

Aerospace giant Boeing found out the hard way just how costly that exodus has been. In the midst of booming aircraft orders, the company shocked Wall Street last fall by announcing it would take a $1.6-billion charge against third-quarter 1997 earnings because of production glitches fueled by a lack of skilled help at its Seattle plants and the shops of its suppliers.

“It takes years of work and training to become a skilled machinist,” said Burbank machine shop owner David Goodreau, who also chairs the Small Manufacturers Assn. of California. “‘You can’t just turn on the spigot and replace those people overnight.”

Others point to the decline of vocational education nationwide. Budget cuts and rising insurance premiums have forced many high schools to mothball their shop classes, thus channeling fewer students into the trades.

However, industry leaders worry that image may be their biggest liability. The shop floor simply doesn’t pull young people like it used to in a nation obsessed with white-collar respectability and university credentials.

All the bright lights of Hollywood don’t make marketing the trades any easier in the Southland, particularly in a field in which wages are modest to start and the big payoff takes years of apprenticeship, study and plain old hard work.

“Everybody wants to be an animator at Disney,” said Phil McWilliams, administrator of the National Tooling and Machining Assn.’s two Los Angeles-area training facilities. “Young people these days want glitz and glamour. How can we compete with that?”

The skills shortage has led even small job shops and manufacturers to resort to extraordinary measures to find and keep good help.

Companies are employing headhunters to mine for these blue-collar gems, not only in the United States but in the idled factories of Europe and the Far East. Signing bonuses are common for experienced workers, as are referral fees for employees who can coax another live body onto the shop floor.

At Schober’s Machine & Engineering Inc. in Alhambra, machinists are offered unlimited overtime, flexible hours, cash bonuses and plenty of free sodas and candy bars to keep their blood sugar jumping.

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President Marty Mechsner also teaches manufacturing and mechanical design classes at Cal State Los Angeles, in part because it gives him an edge in spotting and recruiting promising students.

“That’s where I get my employees,” he said.

Delco Machine & Gear of Long Beach is so hungry for new talent that it has hired a couple of workers off welfare. The company recruits students fresh out of vocational programs and pays a local community college to continue their technical training on site.

“We’ve given up trying to hire experienced machinists,” said Phil Jakobi, chief executive of Delco, which manufactures parts for the aerospace industry. “Instead, we’ve decided to train them ourselves.”

Such crisis management has sent the industry scurrying to find long-range solutions to the skills shortage. They include some new programs designed to rekindle youngsters’ interest in manufacturing.

Spearheaded by the San Fernando Valley chapter of the National Tooling and Machining Assn., the Van Nuys High School Machine Tool Partnership steers 11th-graders onto a track to become machinists, tool-and-die makers and other skilled manufacturing workers. Local companies have donated shop equipment and provided students with off-campus work experience at their firms.

Program coordinator Roberto Gutierrez acknowledges that the courses were a tough sell in the beginning, not only to students but also to their parents.

“They think a machine shop is a dark, greasy old sweatshop instead of a modern, state-of-the-art environment,” Gutierrez said. “My biggest hurdle is overcoming that kind of ignorance.”

Industry observers hope he can. U.S. companies for years have gone overseas to fill the talent gap in everything from high-tech computer programming to low-wage assembly jobs, a trend that continues unabated.

Although we have entered the Information Age, McWilliams argued that the United States must continue to manufacture things to retain its economic prowess.

“The service sector is wonderful, but manufacturing is crucial to any country’s economy,” he said. “It would be a shame for America to let any more of its manufacturing base erode.”