How are the manufacturing trades doing?
 

Ever since the economic meltdown, business sites have been talking about the coming US manufacturing boom and how the biggest problem may be finding skilled workers.

If I were young I'd seriously consider learning some welding at least.

Any news from the front lines? Are there jobs out there?

I'm just curious - I'm ancient enough that no-touch freight is exerting enough for me, thank you. But it sure would be nice to see signs of life in some of these empty factories.

Read an article this am where a machine shop in SW Michigan needs machinists and tool n die makers. Pay is 1k per week and he can't find tradesmen! Skilled trades is where it at and if you can translate that into any sort of a mobile business (eq repair or welding) then your worthjust went through the ceiling.

This from today mgfg - Indiana: Hundreds of manufacturing jobs go unfilled - Yahoo! Finance

Make great money. Sleep in your own bed every night. Get to watch your kids grow up. Man if I was a young guy I tell ya what. I'd be at the local community college learning some machining trades.

what i think is that everything goes full circle. they need trades people to do the work. once thats back up the college people will come back in to run things. i picked up at a glass jar place 2 weeks ago. they said they've never been busier. delivered to a candle company. also said they need to be open and other 3 days a week 24 hours a day to maintain their orders.

what i think happened is that businesses found out that they can get this work done with less people. but the reason why jobs arent filling is easy. LAZY!

all my applications for Cabanna Boy have had no responses, yet.

Sent out another round of applications for Victoria Secrets Catwalk Groomer... got a good feeling on this one though, eh.

I know there isn't a lot of welding jobs around my area. My little brother is looking to possibly go to school for welding once he graduates high school in another 2 years, hopefully there are some local jobs hiring then, if not he will have to move it seems to the Rust Belt area.

Dunno know if any of you have heard of them but Tyco has a large plant 15 miles from me, seems they are never hiring though. Great pay but from what I saw while I was there was that the workers all appear to have some type of college degree even though they are working a floor job. This area is definitely not an area for manufacturing jobs. Go up to Baltimore though and they are willing to hire like crazy but most young'uns these days aren't interested in these type of jobs. They get to basically do their job as if they are at home playing a video game and yet they are still not interested. Hollywood hasn't helped with the notion that these jobs are dirty nasty real work. They USED to be that way but not anymore for a lot of them. Robots do the work, you just run the controls, if kids only knew the truth. One guy in Baltimore was paying his workers right at $100K plus full bennies. He even stated that no physical labor was required and still got zero takers. Had I lived closer than 3 hours I would have so jumped at it.

another issue i have heard of is ppl lose thier job, after being out of the job for so long, they are considered not qualified, now they start all over.

We had the same thing here awhile back, huge machine shop and he's crying for help! Just couldn't find people decent with math that WANTED to apply themselves. I haven't heard any adds from them lately, but I still see trucks in and out of there .

There is a steel fab shop here, when everything melted down they cut their force more than in half. I think they only have a quarter of what they had previously, they are simply not hiring. Of course it is not an easy job, I've done exactly what they do with my company on rainy days, cutting and fabricating steel rebar or welding rebar together. It's very physically demanding back breaking labor and their worker pay isn't that great for something that you may only be able to do for 10 years before your body breaks down completely.

Good post Ford. I didn't know that kind of work could be that hard.

I did some remodeling once for a guy that was at the other end of the spectrum. He had worked for years as a machinist or tool & die maker or something (it's a foreign language to me :) ), and eventually he went off on his own. He had maybe 15 or 20 acres outside of Ann Arbor and built himself a shop and filled it full of strange looking machines. I was there the day that they delivered his 5-figure CNC cutting machine thingy. He and his family were doing very well. He impressed me. He had that air that people that are very happy with how their lives turned out have.