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A Well-kept Secret
Connecticut's manufacturing jobs offer high school graduates a way
to support their families without working two or more jobs
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Business New Haven
10/6/1997
By: Linda Mele
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There's good news and not so good news about the state of manufacturing in Connecticut. Although everyone agrees the industry has stabilized after a massive exodus in the last decade to other states and countries, there are still a lot of problems that need to be addressed if manufacturing is to remain stabilized and continue to grow.
Connecticut Business and Industry Association (CBIA) Media Relations Manager Brian Nekus says the state may not be adding “a tremendous number of jobs, but we're not losing them like we were either.” According to CBIA economist Peter Gioia, as of July 1997, there were 275,900 employees working for more than 6,000 manufacturers in Connecticut. “Manufacturing accounts for 20 percent of the state's $120 billion gross state product,” Gioia says, “and it's becoming more diversified all the time.”
Chris Cooper, spokesman for the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, says between 1990 and 1994 the state had a net job loss, but between 1995 and today, there's been a net job gain. Since January 1995, the 140-plus new companies that located in Connecticut generated more than 10,000 new jobs, many of which were in manufacturing, according to Cooper. “We are getting new manufacturers, many of which are in high technology fields like photonics,” Cooper says.
Brian Beaudin, director of the CBIA's Manufacturing Council said manufacturing in the state is no longer dominated by the aerospace and defense industries as it was during and after World War II when it ranked number one per capita in the production of war goods. “Connecticut manufacturers make everything from witch hazel, potato chips, pasta and pewter to mandolins, racing shells, eyelets and jet engines,” Beaudin says. “There are more small rather than large manufacturers, and the job growth is coming from the small companies.”
Francis Eastwood, president of the Technical Plastics Group Inc. of Wallingford, agrees that Connecticut's manufacturing future is in the hands of small companies like his, but says operating in the state becomes more expensive every day. “We're getting killed by taxes and the cost of insurance,” Eastwood says. “Property taxes, real estate taxes, unemployment compensation, workman's compensation, social security taxes, health insurance, liability insurance, and now the IRS wants its money on a weekly basis. We have to watch our overhead and cash flow on a daily basis, which is a full-time job in itself.
“I'd love to see the state get more involved in small businesses and streamline the grant and loan processes so we small manufacturers can grow our businesses,” Eastwood says.
Tab Wilkins, director of the Connecticut State Technology Extension Program, says one of the big problems for manufacturers is the lack of a skilled workforce. “The average tool and die maker in Connecticut is 50 to 60 years old, and we're not training people to take their places when they retire,” Wilkins says. “Experienced tool and die makers can pretty much write their own tickets today.”
Carl Klimovich, 56, is a quality control supervisor for Eastwood. He has worked for 27 years in the quality assurance field and says he and a lot of people his age and older who were technically trained encouraged their children to go to college to pursue professional degrees instead of following in their footsteps, which certainly has contributed to the lack of younger, skilled workers to fill jobs in manufacturing. “Not everyone is cut out for college, though, and I think guidance counselors need to take more time to find the students who aren't interested in college and want to work with their hands and steer them toward manufacturing jobs. Their focus seems to be on four-year colleges and professional fields rather than technical occupations,” Klimovich says.
Some efforts are being made to replenish the state's skilled work force. Eastwood says the Naugatuck Valley Deployment Research program helped develop technical apprenticeship programs, but young people don't seem to know it exists.
State regional-vocational high schools and community colleges are also adding new programs and trying to recruit students whose interests lie outside the realm of what's offered at the college and university level, according to Wilkins. “In the last ten to 15 years, few youngsters have been encouraged to investigate manufacturing, and it hasn't been painted as a good, positive alternative to college,” Wilkins says.
Many skilled workers also left the state over the last ten to 15 years when their employers moved out. One 54-year-old Connecticut native packed up his family and moved to South Carolina when his company relocated its headquarters there. As one of the company's top quality assurance experts, he says the company “bent over backwards” to sweeten the deal and convince him to move with them. He says he felt he had no choice at the time, but wishes - along with more than 25 others who moved with the company - that he had stayed here because the company was sold twice after the move, eventually closed, and they all ended up having to look for other jobs anyway.
“I was a few years from being vested in the company's retirement program, and before I found that job, I was out of work for 18 months. Many others who made the move felt there was no future for them in Connecticut,” he says. “We all thought it was a question of our families' survival and future.”
Another problem facing the state's manufacturers is one of perception, Gioia says. The manufacturing work environment has changed dramatically from the 1790s when Eli Whitney introduced specialized labor and interchangeable parts in his firearms factory and from the sweatshop conditions in the textile mills and clothing factories of the late 1800s and early 1900s. “Manufacturing in 1997 is not what it was at the dawn of the 20th century,” Gioia says. “It's not necessarily the dirty, noisy, hazardous occupation it once was. Many of today's manufacturing plants are state-of-the-art, highly sophisticated operations.”
Beaudin says the future of manufacturing looks good, and the truth about working in the industry seems to be a well-kept secret. “Manufacturing is the only industry where someone who is a high school, but not college graduate, can go to work and earn a living wage to support a family without having to work a couple of jobs,” Beaudin says.
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