New York, NY —
While their numbers have decreased in past decades, more than 500,000 industrial jobs remain in New York City. Small business manufacturers say they have job openings that pay good wages with benefits. But some employers say they can't find skilled employees. Vocational training and other technical schools could play a factor. WNYC's Elaine Rivera has more:
REPORTER: Watermark is a small manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Brooklyn. As office manager Christine McBride explains, the large warehouse factory makes high-end decorative faucets and bath fixings.
McBride: See here remember I just showed you that spout..here's one that's not ready yet so certain finishes are baked on so we have a spray booth....
REPORTER: Jack Abel, the company's vice president, says there are several job openings that pay livable wages - $18 to $40 an hour plus benefits. There's one hitch - he can't find skilled applicants who know how to operate the equipment.
ABEL: People need to know turning machines, lathe machines machining centers and it requires people with not engineering but rather technical capabilities some of it which requires by the way the old-fashioned machining skills that were prevalent and we can't find people who are knowledgeable.
REPORTER: At the other end of the city, in the South Bronx, Felix and Lisa Hendrickson, founders of Hendrickson Custom Cabinetry, encounter the same problem. They, too, have several openings for well-paying jobs but have a tough time filling them. Felix Hendrickson explains why:
FELIX HENDRICKSON: Training. Carpentry and cabinet making in America is not viewed as a career as it is in other parts of the world. Formal apprenticeships where you have state-sponsored apprenticeships in Germany and France and lots of other countries around the world those things just don't exist here in the country for the most part particularly in this region.
There are 22 career and technical schools and over 400 citywide high school programs that train students in an array of technical professions - from plumbing to aviation - but employers contend these students are not finding their way to these small manufacturing jobs. The old-fashioned vocational schools that used to train the city's workforce have changed. The state has raised its standards and changed its philosophy. Now all students must receive a Regent's high school degree in order to graduate.
As a result, career and technical school graduates are aiming higher. Noreen Connell is the executive director of the Educational Priorities Panel, an educational watchdog group.
CONNELL: I think that there are plenty of kids who are now oriented towards four-year college who might be very good candidates for these apprenticeship programs but there seems to be lack of a nexus or recruiting system which would get the higher achieving students into these programs.
REPORTER: Connell also says that traditional highly skilled apprenticeship programs used to be run by unions. They kept a steady stream of skilled workers moving into these small companies. But in order to get the job, many times you needed to know someone which meant that most employees came from almost exclusively male, tightly knit ethnic groups.
Today there are fewer union-run apprenticeships. Increasingly, more trades are becoming non-unionized as companies choose workers from the growing immigrant labor pool which is skilled and willing to work for less.
REPORTER: While he hires many immigrants, Abel's Watermark factory is a union shop. Machinist Michael O-Kun-ev came to the United States from Russia in 1990. He tells his boss about the apprenticeship program that he attended there at the age of 15:
OKUNEV: Young people like me work four days on machine and one day in theory...there you go you learned four days on the machine in an actual setting and then one day like school - theory so it's like an apprenticeship but it's like work study but it's in the factory...
REPORTER: There are many countries that do track students for vocational programs at an early age but the U.S. has stopped doing that because of the standards movement and No Child Left Behind.
Jean Claude Brizard oversees the career and technical schools for New York City. He says the city schools will not return to a two-tiered educational system.
BRIZARD: When you look at the competition that we have and look at how the work is changing we have to build a student that can shift and be sort of flexible and move in and out and keep going forth for continuing education.
REPORTER: Brizard acknowledges that the school system needs to work with the city's small manufacturers to help them find suitable employees.
City and state officials are also recognizing the need to create a local skilled labor pool so these manufacturers will stay in the city. In October, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a $4.2 million job training initiative to help small business manufacturers. These companies will be able to hire workers and train them for their specific needs.
REPORTER: Hendrickson Custom Cabinetry is one of the first recipients. Lisa Hendrickson says the training money will help. She's interviewed job applicants who can't do fractions or read tape measures. Many of the young people have gone to programs that train them for service industry jobs - some of which may not need academic requirements.
HENDRICKSON: They take a lot of these kids and they try to train them to be focused into the service economy so they have all of this security guard training or they train you do some kind of retail job or some sort of hospitality thing or whatever but they are really these dead end jobs there's not really a future in it and it really doesn't take them anywhere.
REPORTER: She says she's looking for more people like twenty-six-year-old Bronx resident Brandon Taylor who finished high school, had vocational training and the necessary math skills for the position. Taylor describes what he might be doing if he didn't have the steady manufacturing job that pays well.
TAYLOR: I'd probably be on the same path I was before which was going from one job to the next and trying to find something stable trying to make ends meet just surviving off of a bare minimum income and stuff like that.
REPORTER: Government officials are starting to understand the significance of keeping manufacturing jobs that pay livable wages that can range from $20 to $40 an hour. So the city has established hiring and recruitment programs in all five boroughs. Otherwise, they say companies which can provide middle class incomes to city residents will leave for other areas that can provide the skilled workers they need. For WNYC, I'm Elaine Rivera
For more information about those hiring and recruitment programs, go to nyc.gov/smallbiz