Blue-collar jobs seeking younger workers

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BY ANTON TROIANOVSKI / The Wall Street Journal

Even as the economy slumps and unemployment rises, strong demand for power plants, oil refineries and export goods has many manufacturers and construction contractors scrambling to find enough skilled workers.

With the shortage of welders, pipe fitters and other high-demand workers likely to get worse as more of them reach retirement age, unions, construction contractors and other businesses are trying to figure out how to attract more young people to those fields.

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Mike Rowe, host of the Discovery Channel show "Dirty Jobs," stands next to venting gas on torch bottles at Cash's Scrap Metal in St. Louis. Rowe has worked with a company that makes construction equipment to help it recruit young workers as the company’s current work force ages. (Courtesy of Discovery Channel)

Mike Rowe, host of the Discovery Channel show "Dirty Jobs," stands next to venting gas on torch bottles at Cash's Scrap Metal in St. Louis. Rowe has worked with a company that makes construction equipment to help it recruit young workers as the company’s current work force ages. (Courtesy of Discovery Channel)

Some numbers

Skilled-labor shortages are likely to intensify in coming years as more workers retire and the economy picks up again. By 2012, predicts construction-industry consulting and investment banking firm FMI Corp., nationwide demand for electricians, masons and pipe fitters, if their numbers remain constant, will exceed supply by at least 5 percent. Regional and seasonal shortages are expected to be much steeper.

Their challenge: overcoming the perception that blue-collar trades offer less status, money and chance for advancement than white-collar jobs, and that college is the best investment for everyone.

To highlight the benefits of a career in the skilled trades, unions and employers are turning to schools, the military, MySpace and even a 46-year-old former opera singer named Mike Rowe.

Rowe is the host of the Discovery Channel series “Dirty Jobs,” which chronicles him tackling tasks ranging from alpaca shearing to steelworking. Rowe is in talks with Terex Corp., a maker of construction equipment, which has a two-year backlog of crane orders, thanks to strong overseas sales. Terex, which hired Rowe to appear at a trade show earlier this year, is hoping he can help it recruit young workers as the company’s current work force ages.

“Attracting the best and brightest into the industry is a challenge; it’s not happening,” says Mike Bazinet, a spokesman for the company.

Rowe confirmed he is talking to Terex, but doesn’t know what his specific role would be. It would likely involve extolling the virtues of manual labor, as he has done on his show since its debut three years ago.

“We’ve made work the enemy,” Rowe says. “Essentially we took the nobility and the necessity out of it and replaced it with this vague sense of drudgery.”

Rowe has also spoken to employees of W.W. Grainger Inc., an industrial-supplies distributor. Jim Ryan, the chief executive of Grainger, says his company has no immediate plans to team up with Rowe, but that it has spent about $400,000 over the past two years to fund technical-education programs around the country.

“In the last several years ... all of the benefits of a career in the trades have kind of gotten lost in the clutter of all the other career opportunities,” Ryan said. “What the industry needs is to be much more aggressive in marketing and creating visibility.”

Companies and unions don’t dispute that college can be a wise investment, but they also say some unionized craft workers can earn more than the average college graduate, without the burden of student debt.

“You earn while you learn,” says Brian Couch, a young electrician, in a video posted on the Web sites YouTube and MySpace. “It’s not like going to college where you go to school for five to eight years and have to work a part-time job.”

That video and several others like it were developed by public-relations firm Pac/West Communications for Local 48 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association in Portland, Ore.

The two groups have teamed up for the online campaign to encourage high-school graduates to consider an apprenticeship as an alternative to college.

In many parts of the economy, there are too many workers, rather than too few. Since January, the U.S. has lost 463,000 jobs. Residential construction and manufacturers that rely primarily on the U.S. market have been hit especially hard.

But the energy industry is hard up for workers who, among other things, can make precision welds, fit pipes for pipelines and oil refineries, and understand the complex electrical wiring in modern power plants. Though the weak housing market has idled many workers who did similar jobs for home builders, their skills often aren’t sharp enough to make the cut.

Dusty Henry, a 25-year-old electrician in Portland, Ore., who belongs to IBEW Local 48, says he earns $34 an hour working on renewable-energy projects while some of his friends who went to college are having a hard time finding jobs.

“I chose the path that I wanted to take...and learned as much as I could for that one thing,” Henry said. “You go to college to kind of figure out what you want to do, but if you don’t figure it out, you go out with debt and you still don’t know.”