The Transformation of American Factory Jobs

This articles from NPR speaks of the changes in one company’s factory – the changes and the education that is now needed to get and hopefully keep jobs.

The Transformation Of American Factory Jobs, In One Company

By Adam Davidson
NPR – Planet Money

This is the second in a two-part series. Part one is HERE. For more see Adam Davidson’s cover story in this month’s issue of The Atlantic HERE .

Larry Sills is the CEO of Standard Motor Products, like his dad and his grandfather before him. The company makes replacement parts for car engines. Larry grew up with the company, and he has seen the workforce change over the years. A few decades ago, a lot of his workers had no high school degree. Some couldn’t read.

“We had a plant in Connecticut where we didn’t realize it, but they were illiterate,” he says. “And then when we switched to the next generation, we had to be able to read the instructions. To our astonishment, they couldn’t do it.”

But in today’s factory, workers don’t just have to know how to read.

“We have a microscope, a hot stand, snap gauges, ID gauges,” Standard employee Ralph Young says. “We use bore mics, go-no-go plugs.”

Young is the perfect model of the new factory worker. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of metals and microscopes, gauges and plugs. He works on the team that makes fuel injectors, which require precision engineering. At the heart of the assembly process is an automated machine run by a computer process known as CNC.

“When I came here 20 years ago, we didn’t have CNC equipment,” he says. “It was more of the hammer and screwdriver fix, to where now it’s all finesse.”

“Now it’s all finesse” could be the motto of American manufacturing today. In factories around the country, manufacturing is becoming a high-tech, high-precision business. And not everyone has the finesse to run a CNC machine.

I can read, I’ve had some computer classes, and I have a Bachelor of Arts degree. But when I asked Ralph’s boss, Tony Scalzitti, if he would hire me and train me on the job, his answer surprised me.

“No,” he said. “The risk of having you being able to come up to speed with training would be a risk I wouldn’t be willing to take.”

To become like Ralph, I’d have to learn the machine’s computer language. I’d have to learn the strengths of various metals and their resistance to various blades. And then there’s something I don’t believe I’d ever be able to achieve: the ability to picture dozens of moving parts in my head. Half the people Tony has trained over the years just never were able to get that skill.

Read the complete article and more from NPR – HERE