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Shortage of skilled workers a bane for region’s employers

10 min read
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It’s been a good year at Accutrex Products, the Southpointe-based metal fabrication company that performs work for companies in a variety of industries.

Business is so good that “we can barely get the orders out the door,” said Ron Davis, senior account executive at the company, which has about 150 employees at its Cecil Township headquarters and another facility in Arden.

But Accutrex has been having trouble hiring welders, a necessary skilled position for much of the work it does.

While it did hire a few this summer, it’s still short of its goal.

“It’s a typical thing we’re seeing in manufacturing,” said Davis, who also is president of the Washington County Manufacturers Association.

“We have 15 full-time welders, but we’d be happy if we got up to 20 welders.”

The common problem of finding skilled workers in the region is already enough to give some companies a case of the blue-collar blues as Labor Day approaches, and it could be a long-lasting bout.

In the next decade, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development estimates the region will need to fill nearly 7,000 skilled trade positions per year because of baby boomers retiring from the workforce.

In areas like welding and machinery, there already are more jobs available than there are workers for the positions, although indications from area employers and those involved in training say the trend is spreading across all types of skilled work.

And despite unemployment being at its lowest point in decades – the current U.S. rate is 4.4 percent, and the Pittsburgh region rate is 4.9 percent – it doesn’t accurately tell the full story when it comes to demand for skilled labor: an abundance of jobs and not enough people to fill them.

The ACCD study found that in 2015, more than 1,000 skilled positions opened in the region, but only 472 were filled.

But that was before Shell green-lighted its massive $6 billion ethane cracker plant project in Beaver County in mid-2016, which it has said will create more than 6,000 construction jobs during the next few years, creating even more demand for workers in the skilled trades.

When Jim Broadbent, business manager for Steamfitters Local 449, announced an open house last month at the union’s new state-of-the-art training facility in Harmony for men and women considering careers in welding, he noted that about 450 welders will be needed to build the cracker plant.

But welders and their availability may be just the tip of a shortage of skilled trade workers in the coming years.

The new Steamfitters training center also hosted a second open house Aug. 26 for all heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration students and service technicians considering an apprenticeship with the local.

Earlier this year, when Penn Commercial Business and Technical School announced a partnership with Lennox for a new HVAC training area at the South Strabane Township school, local dealers attending the ceremonies said the HVAC industry also is feeling the effects of the retirements of baby boomers.

Frank McLaren, Pittsburgh area district manager for Lennox, said there are about 50,000 openings in HVAC positions nationally, and the average age of an HVAC technician is 56.

Other HVAC employers who attended the opening said they are constantly interviewing and adding technicians just to keep up with local demand.

Jeff Nobers, executive director for the Builders Guild of Western Pennsylvania, which represents 16 different trade unions working in the construction industry in the region, including the Steamfitters, said the guild is seeing unprecedented demand for its members in all of its skill areas.

Despite the fact that the guild has a collective membership of 41,000 people, it realizes that within the next seven to 10 years, about half of its membership will retire.

That explains the push behind the apprentice recruitment programs, which the guild has estimated will require 20,000 apprentices over the next decade.

The drive comes down to construction spending in the region. According to Nobers, there will be between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in new commercial projects next year, an amount that could double by 2019 when the Shell project goes to full construction mode.

“Right now, every single trade is at what they consider to be full employment,” he said, noting that the Operating Engineers union, which trains people to operate the bulldozers, excavators and graders at construction sites, “has called retired guys to come back to work. They’ve added 40 apprentices, the largest they’ve ever had in their history.”

The recruitment effort by the guild, as well as expanding programs by technical schools, are encouraging but fall short of fulfilling immediate needs, such as those at Accutrex.

Nobers believes that it would be helpful if people stopped referring to the skilled trades as “blue collar” jobs, noting that learning to be a machinist or steamfitter today includes a level of technical training that didn’t exist in an earlier time.

“It’s really not white collar versus blue collar, and it’s really not management versus labor anymore,” he said, adding that the divide now comes down to skilled versus nonskilled, as well as a continued preference for four years of college, despite the risks of high debts for loans and, for many, no guarantee of an immediate return on their investment.

He said labels like blue collar tend to mask the underlying economic value of what many skilled trade jobs can provide.

He noted that a person working in their first year of an apprenticeship in the Operating Engineers program is making between $60,000 and $70,000 per year, plus full benefits and a pension.

These days, finding even basic laborers can be a challenge, said Jim Stankiewicz, owner of Charleroi-based Valley Tire, which manufactures Michelin retread tires and operates tire sales and truck repair centers across four states.

“Everybody I talk to is having similar problems,” Stankiewicz said last week, noting that the company has used three different temporary agencies to help it recruit laborers for its tire recapping plant, but with uneven results.

While the agencies provide trainees, many are gone almost immediately.

“They come in before the end of the first day and say, ‘I can’t do this work,'” Stankiewicz said.

Davis said Accutrex has followed the same path using temp agencies to hire basic laborers, with similar results. Many of the incoming just can’t cut it on the production floor, he said, adding that the company does better with providing in-house training for machinists from laborers it has identified as ones who can make the grade.

At the Greene County Career and Technology Center near Waynesburg, it’s the welding program that has caught fire with students. Katie Sleasman, the school’s guidance counselor, said the morning and afternoon welding classes this year are over their maximum capacity, and students are on a waiting list to join.

“It is jam-packed; there are so many jobs in that field,” Sleasman said.

The school’s precision machining and electrical classes, however, have not garnered as much attention from students, even though there is a clear need in the community, she said. Sleasman called those programs the “hidden secrets” of trade jobs.

“You’d think the numbers would be higher,” she said. “The numbers have increased, but the knowledge of these high-priority jobs just isn’t out there.”

The career and technology center, which enrolls students from the five school districts in Greene County, is trying to change that with its cooperative education program that sends juniors and seniors into the trade field after completing a nine-week course. The real-world training pairs the students with employers who can teach them more about the trade and how to work with the public on a job site.

“They can work in the workforce – most of the time getting paid (and) getting experience in the field,” Sleasman said.

Last year, 44 students worked through the program, including five who were hired to work full time with their employers after finishing the program, according to Jennifer Nix, the school’s workforce development coordinator.

The school is now trying to encourage students at an early age to show interest in such trades by giving demonstrations about their importance in elementary schools, Nix said. The growing demand for those jobs has surpassed the supply of trained laborers, Nix noted.

Penn Commercial President Bob Bazant said participation in the school’s welding program rose along with the growth in the area’s oil and gas industry, then leveled out as the boom receded and has remained flat even as the industry has recovered.

But when the school formed its partnership with Lennox with a new 17,000-square-foot teaching area for HVAC students, it saw enrollment in that program ramp up.

“The number has more than doubled,” Bazant said, noting that students earn a two-year associate degree.

But the shortage of HVAC technicians won’t be quickly abated, he added.

“It’s going to be some time before they hit the streets,” he said.

Like others who were interviewed, Bazant said he’s baffled by the failure of more men and women to sign up for skilled trade programs that are two years or less and offer the opportunity to earn highly competitive wages and benefits without the cost of a four-year college degree.

“It’s odd; we’ve got more jobs than we’ve got people” to fill them, he said.

He noted that two students who graduated from Penn Commercial’s 18-month drafting program a couple of months ago took job offers at the same Allegheny County company and will each earn a $53,000 starting salary.

Bazant and Nobers believe that a bias exists, with parents insisting that their children pursue college degrees without any consideration of the trades.

The Builders Guild, along with a number of workforce development and area community colleges, is sponsoring an Apprentice Readiness Program to help people who already may be in the workforce but are underemployed.

Nobers hopes the program will be able to draw some of the coal miners who lost their jobs when area mines closed.

The program will be held at Community College of Allegheny County’s Washington County site at Washington Crown Center. It will run from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Oct. 16 through Nov. 9.

The nationally recognized curriculum includes blueprint reading, safety, remedial math, interaction with the Builders Guild trade unions and visits to two or three union training centers.

Applicants must be at least 18 years old, have a high school diploma or GED, able to perform physical work and pass a drug test and criminal background check.

Nobers said two classes recently were completed in Beaver County, where the average age was mid-20s and older.

“We expect that most of the applicants will have no background in construction,” he said, adding that those who complete the course receive a certificate of completion.

“A lot of this (push) has been because of the demand being caused by the Shell cracker plant,” Nobers said.

But he added that in addition to Shell’s enormous demand for construction workers, the guild must continue to fill demand coming from its other “pipeline” – commercial projects like office buildings that aren’t related to the region’s energy industry.

“There’s so much volume going on,” he said.

Greene County Bureau Chief Mike Jones contributed to this report.

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