Auto turmoil casts cloud over factory jobs

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Ron Maccari, an assembly worker for General Motors for nearly 30 years, has been angry lately over the negative comments he’s heard on TV and read on the Internet about his chosen career.

For weeks, the Big Three U.S. automakers have been on a campaign for a federal bailout, leaving the manufacturing industry as a target of public vitriol.

Lawmakers, economists and business executives have joined in the attack.

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., called the U.S.-based auto industry a “dinosaur.” An analysis in The Wall Street Journal titled “Just Say No to Detroit” by economist David Yermack suggested: “We would do better to set this money on fire rather than using it to keep these dying firms on life support.” Media mogul Ted Turner,   in an interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw, questioned why the country was still trying to “keep alive a smokestack industry of the past.”

Maccari, who works at the Newport, Del., plant that makes GM's Saturn Sky and Pontiac Solstice, thinks blue-collar work is getting a bum rap.

“If someone is producing something in this country, is making money and has a semi-decent house, we thumb our nose at them,” he said. “I read what they’re saying on blogs: ‘Let the auto industry die.’”

Maccari sees a growing movement in the United States to “disregard manufacturing, to eliminate it.”

Maccari’s not alone in his feelings.

“What killed Detroit was Washington, the government of the United States, politicians, journalists and muckrakers who have long harbored a deep animus against the manufacturing class that ran the smokestack industries that won World War II," conservative pundit Pat Buchanan said in a recent article published on WorldNetDaily.com. (Buchanan is a msnbc political analyst.)

Today only about 13 million people work in the manufacturing sector, down from nearly 18 million 10 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Despite the decline in jobs, there are expected shortages of skilled production workers in a host of industries. These include everything from aerospace to medical manufacturing to products needed for infrastructure improvements and green industries favored by President-elect Barack Obama, says Patricia Lee, a spokeswoman with the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association, a trade group.

A recent survey by the group found that the most serious concern about the sector, behind the cost of raw materials, was availability of skilled labor.

But companies have no plans to hire significantly in the sector, at least for a while.

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ manufacturing barometer, which reports on hiring and business in domestic manufacturing, found that only 12 percent of manufacturing executives surveyed in the third quarter were planning to expand their work force over the next 12 months; 40 percent were planning cuts.

Longer term the outlook is less grim. “Manufacturing is not dead,” says Barry Mishtal, industrial manufacturing sector leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers. “It has a great future in the U.S., but now is a difficult time.”

He believes that in years to come U.S. manufacturers will need workers with higher skill levels, unlike the lower-level skills that were needed for many jobs that went overseas.

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