Automation, downsizing fuel change in manufacturing - Military Careers, Second Careers - Navy Times

Automation, downsizing fuel change in manufacturing

INDIANAPOLIS — A sea change under way in U.S. manufacturing has plants looking for workers with computer skills and abandoned factory towns looking overseas for new employers.

The number of American manufacturing jobs has dropped sharply over the last decade, from 17.4 million in 1997, to 14.2 million in 2006.

While big automobile plants are fading as an economic driver, smaller high-tech factories have kept running. The key difference: Their computers perform many assembly and fabricating jobs that workers once counted on to sustain middle-class incomes.

Many of today’s factory workers, however, lack the educational degrees and computer skills needed on the automated production lines.

“The domestic auto industry is downsizing, but manufacturing isn’t dead or dying,” said Indianapolis manufacturing specialist Lisa Laughner. “It’s getting more and more sophisticated. You don’t see hardly any manual assembly anymore.”

The uncertainty created by the shift toward high-tech manufacturing worries some longtime factory workers.

“I wish I had gone to college when I had the opportunity. But they promised me a career, and now they’ve taken it away from me,” said Todd Jordan, an industrial janitor at auto parts maker Delphi Corp. in Kokomo, Ind.

For generations, Delphi was Kokomo’s economic mainstay. Then nonunion Japanese rivals won huge market gains. To compete, General Motors Corp. spun off Delphi in 1999 in search of lower-cost auto parts.

Six years later, Delphi put its U.S. operations in bankruptcy. The United Auto Workers union recently accepted wage concessions to help Delphi out of bankruptcy. Jordan’s pay will drop almost in half to $14.50 an hour.

“Is this globalization?” Jordan asked. “Or is it corporate greed? I say it’s greed. My family is going to suffer.”

Laughner said the answer is education. A longtime mechanical engineer at Indianapolis jet-engine maker Rolls-Royce, Laughner is now executive vice president of Conexus Indiana, a new statewide advanced-manufacturing initiative. It is charged with ensuring schools prepare students for jobs in high-tech plants.

For example, many factories want line workers able to swiftly debug assembly lines by restoring garbled code in the plant’s operating software.

“There’s a need for a newer high-tech worker on the manufacturing floor, but we don’t have enough of those kind of people,” Laughner said.

Some Indiana factory towns, such as Marion, are trying to erase that skills gap.

The city of 30,500 was rocked in 2004 when the 3,000-employee Thomson television picture-tube plant closed, moving work to Mexico. Since then, Wal-Mart and Dollar General have opened distribution centers nearby that will employ about 1,500 in total. But even those jobs require computer skills.

“It really is a knowledge-based economy,” Marion Mayor Wayne Seybold said. ”Something like 75 percent of the new jobs in the logistics centers will require high school degrees or better.”

Marion leaders have redoubled mentor and scholarship programs to ease the dropout rate among teenage students from families accustomed to abundant factory jobs.

“In our society we’re telling kids constantly they need to go to college,” Seybold said. ” But a lot of kids get to high school, and they realize they are not going to be able to afford a house to live in, let alone afford to go to college. No one in their family has ever gone to college.”

Many cities also are looking abroad now for employers — even former GM bastion Anderson. Home to about 25,000 GM autoworkers two decades ago, Anderson has lost all those jobs except 340 at auto parts supplier Remy International.

Since 2005, Anderson leaders have gone on trade missions to China and Japan and even called on Toyota in hopes of landing new plants in the city of 57,000.

“For years we believed Anderson could be competitive on its own,” Mayor Kevin Smith said. ”Now we think globally.”