Yet Theres A Welder Shortage - Road to the Middle Class

EVERYBODY knows that the industrial sector is shrinking leaving behind a creaking Rust Belt. The “good jobs with good wages” that sustained New York, Ohio, and Michigan are gone for good.

Then how come there is a shortage of welders? Bill Steigerwald asked Joel Kotkin about that. It’s a myth, Kotkin says. Certainly the old industrial belt is in trouble. But there are plenty of manufacturing jobs. In fact there’s a skills shortage.

[I]f you ask business people what is it that would really help them, they say “skills.” Machinists. Welders. It’s not like there’s a Ph. D. shortage, generally speaking. But there is a welder shortage, there’s a plumber shortage, there’s a machinist shortage. But nobody wants to talk about this.

What’s the problem? We’re Americans aren’t we, a can-do people in a can-do country? Says Kotkin:

Cities that have lost their industrial base don’t want to talk about it, and many cities that still have it are almost ashamed of it. In one of the great historical ironies, the places where they are not ashamed of manufacturing are places like Houston and Charleston and Charlotte. But the places with the great industrial traditions, it’s almost as if they are ashamed of their lineage.

And it’s not as if the manufacturing jobs aren’t helping people move up.

One of the women I interviewed in Charleston had been working in retail making under $10 an hour. Now she’s working in manufacturing and she’s gone up to $15 or $16 an hour. She’s got some health care benefits. She’s got a skill. She feels she’s got a future.

Now there’s a concept. And it’s not rocket science. If you want a thriving city you need infrastructure and training so that $10 clerks can move up to $15.

You need roads that go in and out. You need modern industrial space. You need reliable electricity. You need shipping facilities. You need workers who are relatively skilled, trainable and reliable.

But Democrats aren’t interested in that any more. They don’t like polluting jobs—call it a kind of “gentry liberalism” if you like. And that extends to the politicians and the media. Here we are, building fancy stadiums and light rail. And we are looking after big headline companies. But what about the little guy,

somebody who’s got 15 people working for him in a shop somewhere in the suburbs and would like to get to 30? What are his issues? Are they tax issues? Are they training issues? Are they regulatory issues? You’ve got to go ask! I don’t see anyone interested in that anymore.

That’s because in today’s cities the pols only need to keep the public employees happy—and the rich contributors, and the young and hip. They don’t want to descend to the building of buses and tollways that can move people and trucks.

Instead we want to build a cute little light-rail line, so that maybe we can convince a couple yuppies to take the train to work for a couple weeks.

The real crime is that Republicans have failed to exploit this opportunity. You’d think that they—we—could earn the votes of the would-be welders and manufacturing workers by working for highways, infrastructure, and good jobs.

Hmm, that’s odd. That’s just what Republicans have been working for.

A fat lot of good it does us.

But the opportunity is still open. The Democratic Party is the party of public employees, government benefits, and gentry liberals. The Republican Party is the party of the rest of us.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Comments:

Posted by: Nancy Coppock on 09/04/07 2:09pm

It is odd that Labor has thrown its power to back presidential candidate John Edwards. The thought of iron and steel workers voting for The Breck Girl is completely bizarre.