Thousands of manufacturing jobs across the U.S. are going unfilled, according to Anna Louie Sussman in The Wall Street Journal. “Openings for manufacturing jobs this year have averaged 353,000 a month, up from 311,000 in 2015 and 122,000 in 2009,” she writes.
The general consensus is that previously laid-off workers don’t have the skills needed to do today’s manufacturing jobs. “Eight in 10 manufacturing executives said the expanding skills gap will affect their ability to keep up with customer demand, according to a 2015 survey by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute, an industry-backed nonprofit,” she writes.
However, writes Ben Casselman at FiveThirtyEight, the skills gap “…is based on scant evidence. Individual companies may be struggling to fill specific jobs, but the data shows little sign of an industrywide shortage of skilled workers.”
Even today, he writes, manufacturing jobs don’t often require certification or education beyond high school, with 80% of manufacturing workers lacking an associate or bachelor’s degree.
Further, he adds, a lack of skilled workers should cause rising wages, increase overtime, and encourage companies to poach workers from one another. None of these seem to be happening.
Casselman suggests that companies “got spoiled” during the recession. In addition, it’s become easy for a company to post an “opening” on the Internet that it has no urgency to fill. And finally, some companies are looking for “….hyperspecific skills that few outside workers could be expected to have,” and companies are failing to establish in-house training programs.
Casselman concludes, “Ultimately, the slow pace of job growth in manufacturing isn’t companies’ fault any more than it is workers’. The cause is more fundamental than that: Due mostly to automation, U.S. factories now produce more than ever with fewer workers. That’s a trend no job-training program will reverse.”
