The president has pledged to bring more factory work back to U.S., but many manufacturing jobs are already going unfilled
By Chao Deng and Te-Ping Chen of The WSJ. Excerpts:
"America has nearly half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Nearly half of manufacturing companies say their biggest challenge is recruiting and retaining workers, according to a survey this year by the National Association of Manufacturers.
Manufacturers usually assign workers to shifts with rigid hours and pay 7.8% lower on average than the private sector as a whole, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1980, manufacturing wages were 3.8% higher. A decline in union representation in the sector hasn’t helped.
Factory employers face other headwinds, said Susan N. Houseman, an economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. These include misconceptions that all factory work is dirty and dangerous, or lingering trauma from the wave of manufacturing layoffs in the 1990s and early 2000s as factories moved abroad. “People saw what happened in their communities and may not think it’s stable employment,” Houseman said.
Carolyn Lee, president of the Manufacturing Institute, a nonprofit focused on workforce development for the sector, said the labor shortage makes it challenging to scale up production on a dime. “You can’t just plop a factory down and hope people will miraculously appear,” she said.
Manufacturers will have to add in new inducements to attract workers, she said, including greater levels of scheduling flexibility"
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