We'll Pass on the Job Training, Just Bring on the Jobs

I spent a great deal of time yesterday with two old friends, one a retired carpenter and the other a retired millwright. Parenthetically, both of them agreed that Indiana's new right to work law was good for everyone except the union leadership whom they regarded as being overpaid, unresponsive, servile and stupid. Eventually the subject turned toward the low enrollment and high drop out rates for the present crop of apprentices. Having spent careers in the construction trades we all knew something that seems to have escaped several popular commentators, bloggers, and politicians. Heavy construction ebbs and flows with the construction of power plants, highways, bridges dams etc. Areas that haven't built a power plant in years don't have many experienced boiler makers or pipe fitters. Areas that have had little road construction don't have many bulldozer operators. The demand for labor creates the supply. People have to earn a living and they don't have much interest in entering a trade that doesn't offer that opportunity. Today we read much blogging and commentary such as; " The ability to make things in America is at risk,” says Jeannine Kunz, director of professional development for the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in Dearborn, Michigan. If the skilled-labor shortage persists, she fears, “hundreds of thousands of jobs will go unfilled by 2021.”

Of course there is a skilled labors shortage in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana in some of the shop crafts. There are two reasons for this. First, even skilled craftsmen don't live forever and second very few people, mostly men in this instance, are going to enter a craft just to pay union dues out of their unemployment checks. Now we are beginning to get an infinitesimal rebirth of manufacturing and lo and behold, there are not enough tool and die makers, machinists, and CNC operators. Should we be surprised? If we ever do have a housing recovery we'll find we have a shortage of framing carpenters and residential electricians and these same pundits will attribute that to a decline in the work ethic and a lack of interest in doing the hard and dirty work. This is all just plain wrong headed. Long term unemployment destroys job skills and the people who possess those skills move on to less preferable and often lower paying sources of employment. There is not a reserve army of highly skilled workers patiently waiting for Obama to get his act together.

Next we can expect to hear politicians of both parties prattle about the need to "equip workers with the skills to match the demand of increasingly skilled, and high tech economy." This is just plain vote chasing bull shit. I would point out that the US, coming out of the Great Depression, was able to tool up and bury the rest of the world in industrial production and almost single handedly win World War Two. I would also point out that the US spent zero dollars on job training before setting out to build the Interstate Highway system or the Depression era TVA dams. The Bakken Shale in North Dakota which will soon be fourth largest oil producing region in the country was and is being developed in virtual isolation, with only on the job training and in migration. Eventually the young men who dropped out of carpenter and millwright apprenticeships in southern Indiana will find their way into shop crafts in northern Indiana and Ohio and and oil field work North Dakota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. At present Senator Jim Coburn has identified 46 job training programs. The country doesn't need 47.