Manufacturing is cool
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010167
Lehman Brothers filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on 15 September 2008. Although the collapse of the giant financial services firm was a result, not a cause, of the Great Recession, the date remains a convenient and grim milestone.
In the winter that followed the collapse, something odd, even paradoxical, began happening in the US economy: Job openings in manufacturing began to rise. They’re still rising now. As of December 2011, US manufacturers had 264 000 open jobs, up from a historical low of just under 100 000 in early 2009.
The news is both good and bad: good, because companies are looking for workers; bad, because they can’t find them. A report in the 19 February Washington Post by Peter Whoriskey examined the shortage of workers and its causes.
One cause noted by Whoriskey is the changing nature of manufacturing. The jobs that remain in US factories tend to require more computational skills than those that disappeared overseas. Reeducating the US workforce for new-style manufacturing jobs is a slow process. Technical schools are adding classes to meet the demand, but high schools continue to focus on getting their graduates into four-year colleges, not into factories and workshops.
Another cause of the shortage—and a surprising one—concerns the image of manufacturing work. Quoting Whoriskey’s story,
“It’s a glamour issue,” said Dave Van Dam, 37. “The kids come in here and see a dirty, loud place. We get oil on ourselves. Then they go upstairs and they see the designers in their cubicles with two screens and headphones on listening to music.
“Plus, there’s the uniform we wear on the floor,” said Van Dam, dressed in work pants and a shirt with his name embroidered in blue stitching on the chest. “You go into a restaurant dressed like this, and you get treated different than if you have a suit on.”
The funny thing is, Van Dam said, that a skilled machine operator makes more than a designer. Pay for skilled operator-programmers runs from $18 to $28 per hour; the designers upstairs make $14 to $24.
Van Dam’s comments remind us that money isn’t everything when it comes to choosing one’s vocation. The undergraduates who join the UTeach program at the University of Texas at Austin, for example, know that high salaries won’t await them when they land their first high school teaching jobs.
And my hometown of Washington, DC, is full of idealistic young people who forgo money for the chance to make the US and the rest of the world a better place. People who are lucky enough to have a choice of vocation want jobs that are interesting as well as purposeful. Can manufacturing provide such jobs?
Yes, I think so. Last week my friend Kevin announced that he was looking forward to receiving a pair of gray “dress pant sweatpants” from Betabrand , a company based in San Francisco. Curious, I visited Betabrand’s website and discovered that it also sells a “DARPA hoodie.”
Wondering what the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has to do with leisurewear, I investigated further. It turns out that Betabrand collaborated on the hoodie with another San Francisco company, Otherlab .
Situated in an old pipe organ factory in the city’s Mission District, Otherlab has 14 employees who work on a mix of projects in robotics, energy, education, and industrial design. Here’s how the company describes itself:
Otherlab is a private Research and Development company with a number of core competencies. We welcome industrial partnerships and commercialization partners. We have worked with dozens of companies globally from small start-ups to multi-nationals and Fortune 500 businesses. We develop enabling new technologies through an emphasis on prototyping coupled to rigorous physics simulation and mathematical models. We develop our own design tools because it’s lonely at the frontier and to create new things and ideas, you often have to create the tools to design them.
I’m not sure how many companies like Otherlab exist in the US. Nor can I determine how many people they employ. But it’s clear that the work Otherlab does is interesting and purposeful. Even if Otherlab remains an R&D boutique, it serves the US economy by demonstrating to students that manufacturing can be cool.