Labor: Shortage of Skills

“How would you like to do your husband a big favor?” cooed the radio ad. “It doesn’t involve more cooking or housework.” With that come-on, Pittsburgh’s Dravo Corp. took into the kitchen its urgent plea for more engineers, draftsmen and designers: “Just mention Dravo to him when he gets home tonight.”

The search for skilled workers is reaching fever level as the U.S. manpower pool is drained at an accelerating rate by the nation’s 58-month economic advance. Last week the Labor Department reported that nonfarm payrolls covered a record 61.8 million workers in November, a 4.4% gain from a year ago—the largest in 14 years. While overall unemployment fell to an eight-year low of 4.2% in November, the jobless rate among skilled craftsmen has slumped to 2.5%.

Over from Ireland. During the first eleven months of 1965, 2,200,000 additional people have found employment (or have been sought out for it), the largest year-to-year increase since the Korean War buildup. Even so, the November work week was the longest (41.4 hours) in more than two decades, and average overtime (3.8 hours) came close to a record. Naturally, pay has risen with demand: workers in manufacturing earned $2.64 an hour in November v. $2.55 a year ago. Reports the National Industrial Conference Board:

“The labor market is now as tight as during the Korean War—and Viet Nam could tighten it further.”

Qualified workers are hardest to find in such industries as shipbuilding, aircraft and aerospace, metals, machinery and tools. In many cities, there is also a growing scarcity of teachers, nurses, social-welfare workers and even typists. Labor pirating by firms has broken out in the Midwest as a result of shortages of ironworkers, carpenters and cement masons. Contractors in Springfield, 111., are so short of bricklayers that they have enticed 15 Irish craftsmen to immigrate to the U.S., are clamoring for 40 more. Older people find it easier to get jobs because of the pinch: Des Moines Contractor Don B. Betts recently hired an 83-year-old carpenter—and was delighted to get him.

No License. In their scramble for skilled hands, many industries have either had to relax their standards for hiring or launch costly on-the-job training programs. United Air Lines, the nation’s largest line, is expanding its flight-training center in Denver at a cost of $25 million, has begun signing up trainees who lack a commercial pilot’s license to meet its need for 800 new pilots a year. Pan American has dropped its insistence on a college degree. All four auto producers have set up training centers (General Motors has 30, Ford 56), summer seminars and mobile classrooms in an effort to solve a growing shortage of auto repairmen. In 1950 there was one repairman for every 70 cars on the road; today that ratio has slipped to one per 117—while auto innards have grown more complex.

The contrast between the shortage of skilled labor and the continuing unemployment of the unskilled is winning support in Congress for a bill that would help right the inequity. It would allow businessmen a 7% income tax write-off on the cost of employee training, a move intended to spur the upgrading of such underemployed groups as high school dropouts, teen-agers and Negroes.