Major U.S. companies need more Americans to 'don tool belts'

Photo by David Cain, Unsplash

Beginning in the 1980s all the way through the early 2000s, Americans who chose to work in the skilled trades were portrayed as individuals who weren't suited for a college education and would agree to end up in a lesser paying and less-respected profession. That's no longer the case.

"Big employers such as Ford and philanthropies are ramping up programs to persuade more Americans to don tool belts," reports Te-Ping Chen of The Wall Street Journal. "New efforts announced just this year already total around $400 million."

Bloomberg Philanthropies recently announced a $90 million campaign aimed at recruiting graduating high school seniors to seek a career in the trades. Chen writes, "The effort includes a partnership with Ford in Detroit, where Bloomberg and the automaker are kicking in $2.5 million each, partly to fund new auto-repair bays for high-schoolers."

Part of the push for younger workers is the aging of Americas trade workers, which has some employers up at night wondering how they are going to refill their skilled worker pipeline. The CEO of Ford, Jim Farley, told the Journal, "Most of our technicians are older — it is a real dilemma. This year alone, the automaker says it is spending $300 million on efforts aimed at filling vital jobs."

Gen Z has consistently shown interest in "blue-collar jobs," Chen explains, "to the point where districts are revitalizing shop classes in some areas, and there is a rising tide of philanthropic spending aimed at aggressively accelerating that trend."

Some U.S. companies are also working to shift the national perception that success in America depends on earning a college degree. Lowe’s Foundation is "spending money on a three-part TV series to highlight stories of workers pursuing careers in the skilled trades, as well as those of their mentors," Chen adds.

Small towns use simple fix that starts with private funds to keep high schoolers out of dead-end jobs

rootED advisors help rural students navigate educational
and employment complexities. (rootED photo)

A new program launched by billionaire investment banker Byron Trott is helping students at small-town high schools develop and execute after-high-school plans that tap into their interests and keep them out of "dead-end jobs," reports Lauren Weber of The Wall Street Journal. 

Called rootEd Alliance, Trott's program "has placed advisers in schools across seven states to fill a gaping void: 17- and 18-year-olds are expected to navigate an astoundingly complex labor market, often with little or no explicit guidance," Weber explains. 

The majority of the 280 schools that rootEd partners with "already have guidance counselors," Weber writes. But many are "overstretched with basics like sorting students’ schedules and managing the life emergencies that hit students all too often."

The program partners with more than 1,500 national
and local businesses. (rootED photo) 

By planting an advisor dedicated to providing career guidance and opportunities, students and their post-high school plans get more attention. According to Weber, that kind of focused planning is particularly important for rural students who are traditionally exposed to fewer career options and role models. Root advisers also help employers connect with potential employees to fill skilled-labor shortages. 

Through its advisors, rootED also aims to help students avoid poverty by training for careers with solid pay and promotion possibilities. Weber reports, "Once a school is staffed with a rootEd adviser, students are 54% less likely to wind up in low-skill, low-paying jobs than before." 

At schools where a rootEd advisor is working, students are more likely to pursue higher education. Weber adds, But advisors are "agnostic on whether students choose college, military service, employment or trade school," Weber reports. "The goal is for each senior to have a Plan A and ideally a Plan B." To help students develop those plans, advisors take students to different trade schools and colleges and promote scholarships.

Quick hits: Mail riders of the past; the future of meat; child care solution; Thoreau's cabin; PFAS-free water

A mail rider makes his way through a creek bed near
Jackson, Ky., in 1940. (Library of Congress photo)

Over hill and dale and on all kinds of trails, horseback postal routes required mail riders to face treacherous paths, wild weather, unpredictable wildlife and inaccurate maps. "Routes they took were originally Native American and traders’ paths and roads carved through the forests, river valleys and mountains," writes Todd Kozak for Lancaster Farming. "Post riders and their horses worked in all weather and on set schedules. . . . A map of post routes published by the post office in 1897 shows a myriad of routes and offices. By the early 1920s, most of them had vanished."

Human diets of the future might not be about going vegan, quitting bacon or eschewing beef. Instead, Bruce Friedrich, author of Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food and Our Future, presents "alternative meat" as the planet's best answer. "And to be clear, he’s not talking about gardenburgers or tofurkey," writes Sarah Isgur of The Dispatch. "We now have the ability to take real meat cells from an animal and replicate them. The product is actually meat, but it’s not from a dead animal. . . . Alternative meat can’t compete by being better for the environment or nicer for animals. For most people, he acknowledges, food is not an ethical decision. It has to taste as good and be as cheap. . . ."

At Little Break, parents can be on-site with their 
children and still get their work done. (Little Break photo)

For parents struggling to find affordable child care, a new model being used in Michigan offers a solution that combines parental work spaces with a child care center. "Users say its prices are a fraction of what other daycare centers charge," reports Anna Patton of Reasons to be Cheerful. "Little Break" is a nonprofit, non-licensed child care facility where "parents must remain on-site, and take care of feeding and diaper changes. Otherwise, they get on with work in an adjoining room, while paid staff. . . watch the children." An added perk of the model is that parents can be there to witness childhood milestones they would otherwise miss.

Tired of their current work lives, some mid-career professionals have left their jobs and trained in a trade. "At 27, Lauren O’Connor was living paycheck to paycheck as a Montessori teacher, making $29 an hour with no benefits," report Allison Pohle and Te-Ping Chen of The Wall Street Journal. "Today, the 33-year-old earns $45 an hour — brazing, welding and soldering pipes for a local contractor. Though she sees more women on job sites these days, it wasn’t that way at first. Proving herself to the guys was stressful, she says." Other trades career-changers took up were airline pilot, electrical apprentice and cardiovascular sonographer.

 Original title page of Walden featuring a 
picture drawn by Thoreau's sister Sophia.

Among more modern fans of Henry David Thoreau's 1854 book, Walden or Life in the Woods, a group is building "full-scale replicas" of the late transcendentalist's cabin, reports Dorie Chevlen of The New York Times. Thoreau's book, which centers on simple life and self-reliance, recounts how he built his little cabin all on his own, except when neighbors helped him raise the frame. Two brothers, Jasper and Satchel Sieniewicz, who worked together to build a replica, "can’t believe it was a one man job. . . . Even using a sawmill and power tools, it took them three summers of labor ... Thoreau was living in his cabin in under three months." Read how other Thoreau fans fared with their Walden cabins here. 

In the small community of Rothschild, Wis., the water is healthier because it's nearly PFAS free. PFAS, also known as "forever chemicals," can cause devastating health issues for humans. The village used settlement dollars to build a new water treatment facility. "This facility is actively working to decrease the levels of PFAS in the community's drinking water," reports Dylan Eckhart of WAOW. The Rothschild plant "utilizes a granular activated carbon filtration system to remove PFAS. . . .PFAS contamination became a concern for Rothschild residents in 2022 when it was detected in a sample from village wells."

Opinion: Rural kids need more than trade school training to lift themselves out of hopeless circumstances

Working-class rural kids need more than trade school training to help pull themselves out of unhealthy living situations, including abject poverty, writes Jessica Grose in her opinion for The New York Times.

Grose cites the new book by Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, as a source for insight and solutions on how the U.S. education system could help more rural youth recover from trauma and set their lives on a different track.

"Macy, a former newspaper reporter and the author of 'Dopesick,' the 2018 best seller about how the opioid crisis ravaged Appalachia, returned to her hometown, Urbana, Ohio, for the new book," Grose explains. "She is trying to figure out how a working-class girl like her got to college and the middle class from Urbana 40 years ago, while that journey is much more arduous for today’s rural working class."

"How do young people, especially those without supportive parents, make a future for themselves? . . . While learning a trade is excellent advice for many students, it is not the cure-all for inequality that our commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, hopes it might be when he says he wants Harvard to build vocational schools,'" Grose explains.

Grose points out that "learning a trade" isn't easy and that trade work requires "the same kinds of executive functioning, people skills and intelligence that a college education requires, just applied differently."

Giving working-class youth the help they need through rural schools is one of the best solutions, according to Macy. "Rural schools need better access to wraparound services, providing students with necessities like food, but also health care in the form of school nurses and counselors on site," Grose adds.

But providing those types of services in rural areas is a tall order. Grose writes, "Most school systems run on economies of scale and a per-student funding model; it poses a great challenge to provide wraparound services to districts with fewer students who have a lot of needs and who are also spread out."

"My dark prediction is that kids with more stable families and better developed life skills will occupy the trade jobs that used to be a reliable route to the middle class," Grose asserts. "We need to support working-class kids before the 21st century abandons them completely."

Opinion: U.S. educational mismatch leaves American manufacturers unable to fill 'millions of critical jobs'

A shortage of trained mechanics means auto owners 
will pay more for repairs. (Ford photo)

Moving the manufacturing of any product back to the U.S. is an expensive and iffy gamble that can take years to bring into fruition. For many companies, the idea of reshoring labor-intensive industries isn't even on the table because the nation doesn't have enough skilled trade workers to staff factory floors.

Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley "pointed out on a podcast last week that he can’t find enough skilled mechanics to run his auto plants. Specifically, Ford can’t fill 5,000 mechanic jobs that pay $120,000 a year," writes The Wall Street Journal editorial board.

“We are in trouble in our country. We are not talking about this enough,” Farley told Monica Langley of the "Office Hours" podcast. "We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.”

For decades, American youth have been influenced to attend college rather than trade schools through government-sponsored financial support and cultural influences that push college degrees as a prerequisite for success, even when a trade profession might be a better fit. "This has created a skills mismatch in the labor market," the board adds. "Unemployment among young college grads is increasing, while employers struggle to hire skilled manufacturing workers, technicians and contractors."

When graduate numbers are compared, the extreme shortage of skilled workers becomes clear. "Only 114,000 Americans in their 20s completed vocational programs during the first 10 months of last year, compared to 1.24 million who graduated from four-year colleges and 405,000 who received advanced degrees," the board writes.

A lack of skilled workers eventually costs consumers more money. "An American whose F-150 truck breaks down will still have to pay more at the repair shop owing to the mechanic shortage," the board explains. "Steering every high school student toward college is doing tangible harm to the labor market — and the young."

AI isn't coming for 'blue-collar' jobs. The skilled trades sector boasts 'high-tech, 21st-century, rewarding, well-paying jobs.'

Human work may change as AI enters
new markets. (Unsplash graphic)

Artificial intelligence may upend parts of the U.S. labor market, but "blue-collar" jobs are growing and expected to be less vulnerable to AI intrusion. "AI is supposed to displace millions of workers in the coming years — but when your toilet won't flush at 2 a.m., you're not going to call ChatGPT," reports Ben Berkowitz of Axios. "Companies are already boasting of saving hundreds of millions of dollars a year by using AI instead of humans."

AI might be able to regurgitate its "white-collar work" programming with razor-like precision, but putting on a new roof or installing electrical wiring won't be its domain. "The 40 most-vulnerable jobs (translators, historians, sales reps, etc.), basically all of them office work," Berkowitz writes. "The 40 least-vulnerable jobs (dredge operators, roofers, etc.), just about all of them manual labor."

Reinvigorating American labor and manufacturing has "become a key Trump administration economic talking point: Blue-collar wages are rising faster now than at the start of any other administration going back to Nixon," Berkowitz reports.

Even before the AI mega-data center expansions, there was a skilled trade worker shortage. "AI will, ironically, only make [the shortage] worse," Berkowitz explains. "Factories alone are short about 450,000 people a month, per the National Association of Manufacturers."

Jay Timmons, the CEO of NAM, told Berkowitz, "We're really talking about high-tech, 21st-century, rewarding, well-paying jobs. Manufacturers are really embracing what's coming, and they accept the responsibility."

Efforts to ramp up the number of American trade workers "will require a large-scale, national effort — not just for up-and-coming students, but for mid-career folks forced into a pivot," Berkowitz explains. "Everyone from politicians to CEOs recognizes just how badly they need tradespeople to keep the economy running." 

If Americans are desperate for manufacturing jobs, why are so many factory jobs vacant?

Reshoring American manufacturing could take time
and big money. (Photo by Brice Cooper, Unsplash)

Despite the Trump administration's full press effort to revive American manufacturing, it's unclear if Americans want factory jobs. "American manufacturers say they are struggling to fill the jobs they already have," reports Greg Rosalsky of NPR's Planet Money. "According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are nearly half a million open manufacturing jobs right now."

Although a tight labor market explains some of the labor shortage, it's also a product of economic and educational circumstances. Rosalsky explains, "Manufacturers can't fill these jobs overnight because they require workers to have particular skills. And it's not just skills needed to work on assembly lines. . . . Manufacturers also employ people to do research and development, engineering, design, finance. . ."

Politicians typically tout factory work because it can "provide good jobs and career ladders for people without a college education," Rosalsky writes. "However, many manufacturing jobs these days actually require college degrees. . . That said. . . half of the open manufacturing jobs don't require a bachelor's degree. And manufacturers say they are also struggling to fill those."

A fair question manufacturers may need to revisit: Do they pay enough? Higher wages might "convince workers to invest in acquiring coveted skills and enter the manufacturing workforce," Rosalsky adds. "But the higher pay that Americans demand to work in manufacturing is one of the big reasons that many manufacturers left America in the first place."

Oren Cass, the chief economist and founder of American Compass, a conservative think tank, "believes that tariffs can help even the playing field with foreign competitors," Rosalsky reports. "And he stresses that one of the keys to reshoring manufacturing — while maintaining well-paying manufacturing jobs — is higher productivity."

In late April, Trump "issued an executive order aimed at 'preparing Americans for high-paying skilled trade jobs of the future,'" Rosalsky writes. 

Skilled labor started recruiting from high school shop classes; high school graduates can make over $60,000

Skilled trades can offer training during high school
and a good-paying job upon graduation. (Adobe Stock photo)

Skilled labor training is helping some high schoolers land jobs with big pay before they even graduate. "Companies with shortages of skilled workers look to shop class to recruit future hires," reports Te-Ping Chen of The Wall Street Journal. "Elijah Rios won’t graduate from high school until next year, but he already has a job offer — one that pays $68,000 a year."

While the U.S. shortage of skilled labor has been building over time, baby boomer retirements have pushed trade-based companies that need a pipeline of trained professionals to "turn to creative recruiting strategies," Te-Ping explains. "More businesses are teaming up with high schools to enable students to work part-time, earning money as well as academic credit. More employers are showing up at high school career days." The renewed interest in hiring from the trades has helped revive high school shop programming.

Younger workers generally are more at ease with incorporating technology into their work, which is another reason trade recruiters are stepping up their "shop class" connections. According to the WSJ article, "Employers say that as the skilled trades become more tech-infused, they anticipate doing even more recruitment at an early age, because they need workers who are comfortable programming and running computer diagnostics."

One of the best things employers can do to "get a foot into high schools early on is by offering internships, says Roxanne Amiot, an automotive instructor at Bullard-Havens Technical School in Bridgeport, Conn.," Te-Ping writes. She told the Journal, “I tell them, don’t call me for students when they graduate, grab them now when they’re 16 or 17, or I have nobody to work for you.”

The recruitment opportunities and wages that trade professions offer signal a dramatic shift away from the "college-for-all mindset," according to the article. "[But] it’s important to make sure students are made aware of all their options, says Steve Klein, a researcher who focuses on vocational education. . . . At the same time, as interest in vocational education rises, he worries that sentiment runs the risk of swinging too much in the other direction."

High school shop classes are back and in high demand. The training offers students hands-on exploration.

Many high school shop classes now offer
welding. (Photo by J. Thomas, Unsplash)

High schools around the United States are ramping up their shop classes to help students explore professional trade careers. The hands-on shop class offerings can range from wood to metals to machinery and are designed to let high school students learn what manual work has to offer.

The shift has school districts from big cities to small towns finding innovative ways to "revamp high-school shop classes for the 21st century," reports Te-Ping Chen of The Wall Street Journal. "They are betting on the future of manual skills overlooked in the digital age, offering vocational-education classes that school officials say give students a broader view of career prospects with or without college."

For decades, high schools cut classes and staffing for trade-based learning, which left many trade businesses hurting for skilled labor. To address the shortfall, "local governments, school districts, businesses and voters are investing in shop classes," Chen explains. "Ohio and other states offer schools financial incentives for classes that lead to industry certifications in such high-demand jobs as pharmaceutical technician and pipe fitter."

In Sutherlin, Ore., a small town of 8,524, almost half of its high school students are enrolled in Josh Gary’s woodworking class. "When Gary took over the shop class in 2014, he had 30 students and little equipment," Chen reports. "He bought used tools on Craigslist with his own money and raised funds selling picnic tables he made with students."

With the renewed interest in trade professions, Gary's shop classes "feature laser cutters and computer-assisted routers that enable high-level detail work," Chen writes. "Last year, Sutherlin High opened a $750,000 metal shop. A $375,000 state grant paid for new tools, and $50,000 from Harbor Freight Tools for Schools, a program launched by the tool-retailer’s founder, bought a pickup truck for use by the classes."

Expanded shop classes can let students try out a trade without paying for an expensive vocational program. The classes also give students who don't want to attend college a path for career development. Staci Sievert, a teacher at Seymour Community High School in Seymour, Wis., told Chen, "I just felt like we were shortchanging our kids, our community and our families if we weren’t raising the bar in tech ed." More than 20% of jobs around Seymour are in manufacturing.

Many high school graduates are choosing vocational training for trades that pay well and don't require 4-year degrees

Trade education is less expensive and offers good wages.
(Photo by Robert Lambert, Unsplash)

For decades, U.S. high school graduates who wanted to make a decent living went to college, but as skilled labor numbers have dwindled and higher education costs have soared, Generation Z is donning tool belts and embracing the trades, reports Te-Ping Chen of The Wall Street Journal. "Skilled trades are newly appealing to the youngest cohort of American workers. . . Rising pay and new technologies in fields from welding to machine tooling are giving trade professions a face-lift, helping them shed the image of being dirty, low-end work."

The cost of a college degree has made it less appealing to some high school graduates. "Enrollment in vocational training programs is surging as overall enrollment in community colleges and four-year institutions has fallen," Chen writes. "The number of students enrolled in vocational-focused community colleges rose 16% last year to its highest level since the National Student Clearinghouse began tracking such data in 2018."

For some potential students, work that means sitting at a computer all day isn't appealing, but learning a hands-on trade for good pay seems to offer more rewards. "'Not everyone needs a degree, and it takes the value out of a degree if everyone has it,' says George Belcher, 18, a high school senior in Texas. Belcher long assumed he'd go to college, but. . . he grew curious about life in the oil industry," Chen reports. "This fall, he'll enroll in trade school for $14,000 for a two-year degree and plans to work on an offshore oil rig. 'I love the ocean,' he says. He also likes the idea of working for weeks, then resting for weeks, a schedule typical with such roles."

Overall, many trade-oriented employers see their labor pipelines refilling. "At energy service company Lantern Energy, in Glastonbury, Conn., CEO Peter Callan says in the past year, he has seen more people applying for technician jobs who were on a college track and decided it wasn't ultimately for them," Chen adds. "The overall number of applications the company receives has roughly tripled in the past five years."