05.07.11
The Process of American Bullshit and Short-sightedness
Here today, a story from the Wall Street Journal on US manufacturing work.
Baby-boomer retirement, a minor fall in the dollar and slight upticks in demand after the bottom year of the Great Recession have caused slight growth in manufacturing hiring. What the article also does not say is that many of the jobs are also dependent on arms manufacturing spending.
These jobs pay well, as readers of this blog know, but they’re still not anywhere near significant in terms of the entire US employment picture.
In fact, they’re a constant reminder of the two-tiered rigged nature of the US economic system, one in which manufacturing jobs for non-military production were all thrown away while weapons-making was preserved.
Manufacturers say the U.S. education system doesn’t produce enough students strong in math, science and engineering. About 5% of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the U.S. are in engineering, compared with an average of about 20% in Asia, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation. In the most recent comparison of math and science test scores of 15-year-old students by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, American students trailed far behind those from China, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Germany.
While community colleges and technical schools struggle to keep up with demand for skilled workers, some prisons are trying to help. At California’s San Quentin prison, the machine shop offers training to prepare prisoners to pass exams demonstrating skills in such areas as operating computer-controlled lathes and mills. Some inmates get classes in calculus and trigonometry to help them work with machinery.
Swift-Cor Aerospace, a maker of airplane parts, has hired several former prisoners for its plants near Los Angeles and Wichita, Kan., and is happy with their work, says Cecilia Mauricio, human-resources manager.
As a graduate of Lehigh University when its sports teams were still called “The Engineers,” as opposed to the more modern, “Mountain Hawks,” I always look askance at claims that the US doesn’t produce enough people adept in science, math and engineering.
My experience was the opposite. During my years in advanced education this country produced more than enough. And they didn’t go away.
It was US business that just wasn’t particularly interested in hiring them.
Everyone wanted experience. And very few wanted young people who didn’t already have an in through acquaintance hiring, much less spending time — like a mere couple months — training people for the jobs.
What makes this story even more odious is the insinuation that prison is a good place to learn such skills, or that training programs there somehow produce workers who might be better than those you might deign to try out and train from high school.
What you’re probably not being told is there is some manner of systemic bribe in action here — a kickback from state or federal government given to firms that hire cons.
The other pernicious thing floated in this story, and others like it, is that it’s hard to train people to do the kind of work described.
It’s not.
It just takes will, some patience and the desire to remove the usual human resource impediments to hiring that dismiss everyone who doesn’t look like a pure tabula rasa lily-white gift to American business.
And it’s worth saying again: Prison-training for employment in some minor area like specialty aerospace manufacturing is more of an indicator of the odious quality of American business and hiring practices rather than of some place where precious skills are nurtured and maintained.
And it was only about a month ago that DD linked to a story on prison labor being used in another aerospace manufacturing job — that of making Patriot missiles for Lockheed Martin.
There is a common thread here — and it’s not necessarily about some supposed shortage of skills and smarts in Americans.
Here’s the Swift-cor Aerospace website.
What are those pictures?
Ah-ha!
The common element is prison labor as a potential cheap exploitable resource for arms-manufacturing firms. You see, they don’t have to train the people. It’s done on the taxpayer’s dime while enjoying the hospitality of the authorities (or her majesty, as the usage was coined in England).
The two other firms used as the sources for the story — both in southeastern Pennsylvania (one in Bethlehem, Lehigh Heavy Forge, is quite obviously a remnant of the much larger, famous and now defunct Bethlehem Steel ) are both intimately aware of Lehigh University training. And they both rely, to varying extent, on arms manufacturing contracts.
When DD has seen stories in the alleged loss of math, science and engineering skill in this country, they have almost never been linked to concerns over loss of general innovation or a true middle class national edge.
Invariably, they are packaged with material and subtext indicating what the interviewed businessmen and experts are really getting at: “We’ll lose our lead in arms-manufacturing and weapons technology.”
user_hostile said,
May 7, 2011 at 10:56 am
Yup, as an engineering student in the early 80’s, this was the standard whine by businesses. The dirty secret is that they want to dump the older, more expensive engineers, for cheaper, work-crazy-hours-engineers. But having worked in both the in and out of the military industrial-congressional complex, those jobs are protected. Which is why hiring prisoners is such a great idea. Cheap, and best of all, the person is ultimately expendable no unemployment insurance, no SSI, etc.–best of all, that defense company is never going to hire the ex-con when he gets out of the joint–that would be a security risk.
And the ex-con? How easy it will be to find a manufacturing job here in the States? Sucker punch!