Hiring younger manufacturers who work to live

The younger generations of Millennials and Gen Zers are more about working to live instead of living to work. Can manufacturing and metal fabrication companies accommodate this reality? Getty Images

Folks in the metal fabricating industry won’t find this hard to believe, but there aren’t enough people looking for work. Fab shops live with this reality each and every day.

As of January 2018, the U.S. economy had more job openings than people looking for work, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. It’s been that way since then. In June the job market had 7.4 million openings, but only 6 million seeking out those opportunities. It’s definitely a job seeker’s market.

The manufacturing sector is being hit particularly hard as baby boomers, who had no qualms about earning a living as a blue-collar worker, are heading into retirement. In fact, 10,000 boomers turn 65 each day and that number will increase to 12,000 within the next 10 years. With parents and educators pushing students to pursue college degrees and young people’s lack of experience when it comes to working with their hands, manufacturers don’t have a deep pool from which to find new talent.

Metal fabricators have invested heavily in automation in recent years to lessen the blow of this demographic reality. In The FABRICATOR’s “What Keeps You up at Night?” survey, which was featured in our September issue, 48 percent of the fabricators that responded indicated they planned to add some sort of automation to the shop in the coming 12 months. That was up slightly from 45 percent in the 2017 survey.

Automation alleviates some of the pain points in a shop, but people are still a prerequisite for a successful metal fabricating operation. They can adjust quickly to changing job parameters and production schedules, no programming required.

Amerequip Corp., a Kiel, Wis.-based fabricator of end products and components for customers in the agriculture, construction, landscaping, and defense industries, is well aware of this. It has a huge 15-tower, 200-shelf automated raw material storage and retrieval system that feeds its six laser cutting machines and 10 robotic welding cells, yet it was in desperate need of people in 2018. Amerequip President and CEO Mike VanderZanden told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel last October that the company turned away more than $10 million in business because it simply didn’t have the labor in place to absorb the additional work.

Rob Abfall, Amerequip’s COO, was heavily involved in trying to stabilize the labor situation at the company. Being in the midst of one of the most robust metal fabricating economies in the Midwest and having nearby competitors recruiting their workers, Abfall said he knew the company had to take drastic action. So the company reopened the contract with its union and raised wages. It also got creative with scheduling.

“Our welders approached me and asked if we would consider a weekend shift,” Abfall said. “We had three pretty full shifts at that time, but we decided to try it.”

Now the metal fabricator has two 10-hour shifts, Monday through Thursday, and a weekend shift that runs Friday to Sunday. Employees on the weekend shift work three 12-hour days, but get paid for 40 hours.

Abfall has seen the shift in priorities for manufacturing workers. Fifteen years ago, someone might have been interested in working as much overtime as possible. Today, workers desire free time. (Read more about Amerequip’s aggressive sales revenue goals in “Gearing up for growth” in our upcoming September issue of The FABRICATOR.)

Amerequip improved its dearth of labor by being more flexible, trying something it hadn’t tried before. Sure, it’s still looking for talented people to join its team, but management now has the time to focus on shop floor improvements and value-added services that turn customers into long-term partners. A company can’t focus on its goals if its leaders are reacting to shop floor emergencies caused by a lack of staffing.

Some fabricators might argue that they aren’t in a position to be more flexible, but that’s just an excuse nowadays. Younger workers expect more from employers, and if they want to be looked upon as a desirable place to work, they need to be open to scheduling flexibility.

Weekend shifts are a huge benefit for families where both parents work. But fabricating operations can try other things:

• Have employees be more active in their own scheduling. Many shops have self-driven teams. If they are on top of project scheduling, they might be able to handle personnel scheduling in their department.
• Consider how shifts are set. Not all companies have shifts one right after the other. Some overlap, where the morning and afternoon shifts may be working at the same time for a short while. A 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. shift doesn’t sound like a big deal, but getting home for a child’s bedtime every now and then is a perk that you can take advantage of only for so long.
• Be open to split shifts. Shifts that have two- to three-hour breaks in the middle of them could be extremely helpful for workers that need to run errands associated with children or aging parents.

Flexibility isn’t guaranteed to remedy a shop’s hiring challenges, but you know that doing the same thing isn’t going to improve the situation either.