If you pay well people stay. They don’t.
Ships except military likely will get built abroad.
Ships except military likely will get built abroad.
Keeping workers
- Thread starter oldcodger
- Start date
Worked at Fore River Shipyard, Quincy, MA. When I started, I was building engine room staging for various trades. The work fascinated me. When I went on the 2nd shift, I was involved in dropping 3 units a night on the hull of the LNGs. Much climbing and height involved in side shell staging. I had 11yrs in when the place closed in '86. I miss it, but by age 65 the men were used up.
You have obviously never been to Newport News Shipbuilding, you don't want to live anywhere close.Many decades ago, most of the execs lived on the top of the hill overlooking the yard, believe it was called Huntington Heights and was really nice. Most of the large old houses are still there but they are trap houses now or the slumlords have converted them into section 8 apartment buildings.
Here is the rub. I listened to the NNS president speak a month or so ago, he says their skilled labor retention problem stems from inflation. NNS bids these contracts 5 years out but they didn't anticipate 10% inflation, so their labor pay rates can't keep up. Their employees are jumping ship (no pun) to their competitors, often back in the same yard next week as a subcontractor.
If you’re having hard time keeping skilled labor, you’re not paying enough. But of course, the MBA types only know how to pay themselves, others can break their backs for peanuts, for all they care.
SammyChevelleTypeS3
$50 site donor 2023
In my area, the health cares system is on its head trying to keep nurses. The last 4-5 times I have either been to hospital or to clinics for tests and start talking to the nurses I found a disturbing trend. Not even one of them was a permanent employee or lived local. They all bragged to me (young/old/black/white/etc...) that they were "contract" nurses. All getting paid near $100 an hour to go from one 6 to 8 week temp job contract flying from one place to another. They actually prefer this and all told the reason is that most places can not keep enough nurses on staff. A couple even told me that they know Doctors who have started doing it too. Of course Doctors starting out , I assume did this anyway as part of early training.
You missed a critical part of what I stated about NNS in my original post. No other shipyard is capable of building a new nuclear powered Ford class aircraft carrier for the U.S. Navy or performing a refueling/complex overhaul (RCOH) of a Nimitz class or Ford class carrier.
A few shipyards can build/refuel nuclear submarines, but only NNS can build/refuel an aircraft carrier because of the deep channel access afforded by the James River.
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I was talking to my nurse wife yesterday and we came to the conclusion that the only job that's not going to be done by AI in the future will be cleaning patients' 
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Welding can and will be automated, and ships will be designed to accommodate it. Whether they will float or not that's a different question.
.Welding can and will be automated, and ships will be designed to accommodate it. Whether they will float or not that's a different question.
SammyChevelleTypeS3
$50 site donor 2023
There certainly will be many of jobs lost to AI. There is one thing folks forget about with that sort of thing. All of these AI operated work places will need crews of temporary -(may be years) of construction workers to build and put all of these feared AI manufacturing facilities in place. Once up and operational, there will still be need for trained operations personnel as well as a highly trained mechanical and electrical work force to keep these places up and running. So , maybe not the higher numbers of lower skilled operations jobs , but different types of trained workers will be needed always. Just another transition in the work force that happens all the time. Of course it is scary to think about as it is just another unknown... I would have a level of fear of the future myself if I was still young and in that type of workplace.I was talking to my nurse wife yesterday and we came to the conclusion that the only job that's not going to be done by AI in the future will be cleaning patients'
Welding can and will be automated, and ships will be designed to accommodate it. Whether they will float or not that's a different question.
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ls1mike
$50 Site Donor 2025
Fair enough.
Yep.
Maintenance type career fields will never go away.
I don’t care how awesome artificial intelligence gets in 10, 25, 50 years from now.
4WD
$50 site donor 2025
Yep, we run heavy duty automated kit daily - the ET’s are busier than the mechanics - most of the remote support we get are licensed software updates from OEM’s …
As for AI taking jobs - the sector will launch allot of construction and manufacturing in the meantime …
My parents were machinists, they lost their jobs in their 40s and became real estate agents. Their advice for me is don't do hard labor for low pay if you don't have to, and if you want to do it you better do it for a real good pay.
Why would you want to ruin your body and take safety risk just to be macho? There is no point in bragging about how macho you are when it doesn't pay you for your ruined body. The only good thing coming out of it was you don't have to worry about it 247 like running your own business or managing people. My dad was always cautious and made special tools for his own safety, and had he not he would have lost his hands before 40, twice.
I don't look down on blue collar workers, I pay them what they ask for if it is market rate and don't negotiate by penny pinch (just want them to do a good job and I will pay them fair and square, what we agree upon ahead of time). There is a reason we have a lot of work condition improvement in the developed world because people here value the work safety and health over making every last penny like the 3rd world starving workers there, and often times they have no safety net they have to take the risk to support their families. We don't need to go that far here.
Another potential risk for high paying blue collar workers is if they pay that high because it is a stressful job and has safety risk, there is a lot of incentive to automate it. Want to do long haul truck driving? We don't know when will self driving be here replacing your job before you retire. Same for a lot of career with high risk high pay out there not just blue collar.
Why would you want to ruin your body and take safety risk just to be macho? There is no point in bragging about how macho you are when it doesn't pay you for your ruined body. The only good thing coming out of it was you don't have to worry about it 247 like running your own business or managing people. My dad was always cautious and made special tools for his own safety, and had he not he would have lost his hands before 40, twice.
I don't look down on blue collar workers, I pay them what they ask for if it is market rate and don't negotiate by penny pinch (just want them to do a good job and I will pay them fair and square, what we agree upon ahead of time). There is a reason we have a lot of work condition improvement in the developed world because people here value the work safety and health over making every last penny like the 3rd world starving workers there, and often times they have no safety net they have to take the risk to support their families. We don't need to go that far here.
Another potential risk for high paying blue collar workers is if they pay that high because it is a stressful job and has safety risk, there is a lot of incentive to automate it. Want to do long haul truck driving? We don't know when will self driving be here replacing your job before you retire. Same for a lot of career with high risk high pay out there not just blue collar.
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If you pay me enough I would move my whole family to the middle of a mountain to do your job.
Not for $72k a year and my wife cannot find another job locally, and my kids have to drop the quality of their school district from a 9 to a 3.
Back in my days my dad and I have to haul propane tanks (for cooking) up 10/F of stairs to our apartment with no elevators. We tell the youngsters, "go get an education so you can do better work and not have to live like we do".
That's what both my parents said, fleeing their 3rd world country turning communist. They lived a partial nomadic/hunter-gatherer lifestyle where they would have to walk a far distance to get water. Education was unavailable unless you were lucky enough to pay to send a kid to boarding school. So I never understood the whole "real man's" job; Americans have freedom of jobs and freedom of choosing their own specializations, not my problem they decided to chose their job so they can brag about while their bodies are broken.
You’re missing the point by a mile.
The point here is that not everything can be a service or a desk type job and not everyone can get an education that will make them a good living.
Yet here we are, telling our kids to get useless degrees that will never get them a good paying job, while very well paying trade jobs are being frowned upon.
We have a perfect manifestation of this mind set right in this thread. Skilled labor, which is critical to the operations, is hard to retain because it’s not compensated well enough. But instead of compensating these skilled workers more, management just lets it happen and wonders why they have this problem. It’s quite clear to a normal person what the problem is. But the management will not increase the compensation of the “laborers” because it would be close to their own. We cannot have a skilled laborer making more than a college educated dimwit now, can we?
And honestly, our society is being feminized and part of the problem is that men don’t really do any hands on type jobs. That’s how our brain is wired up, to do things with our hands and problem solve. So the “real man’s job” claim has some merit to it IMO.
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I understand that. I'm not talking down or disparaging blue collar and trade jobs at all. My point is I'm not going around glamouring my job or trying to prove my job is more manly than any other job. They had their choice of careers, they made their bed now they get to sleep in it. If anybody wants to tell me to go find a real man's job, I just tell them to go join the infantry before talking to me.
I don't think it's so much how our brain is wired by nature, but what we're exposed to when growing up - especially the first 18 years when we go through schooling and try to figure out what to do after high school. Too many schools have removed technical classes because it doesn't help their bottom line and ranking system. Schools in poorer districts can't afford the additional cost of technical classes so those kids don't know what options they have in life; and schools in wealthy districts don't care about these classes because their silver-spoon fed students and family think it's underneath them to turn a wrench.
I for one would love seeing more of these jobs come back to rebuild the middle class. Careers where people who can't or don't want to go to college can learn and grow with and can live and raise a family comfortably...but the massive move of industries moving overseas in the 70s-90s decimated that. They just don't exist close to the amount they used to anymore. Sure we can bring jobs like these back, but not immediately considering we'd have a massive lack of both new and experienced workers - similar to the US trying to get semiconductor manufacturing back but we have now gone 3-4 generations without so we're back starting at square 1 as a first world country with stringent environmental rules.
I agree with most of what you have said, except for the schooling system.
Every masculine type behavior is being squashed and eradicated on purpose, not because of budgets.
Example, I confronted the school principal recently because my son got in trouble for “rough” play. They showed me the video of him and his friends playing around and bumping into each other lightly. I could clearly see the joy on their faces while playing with each other. Absolutely normal play, but they got in trouble for it. Her defense, it’s against the rules.
I told my son that he didn’t do anything wrong and that he will not get in trouble with me. I assured him that it’s normal to play this way and that they should hide from the cameras next time. He liked the idea.
I think that's the school fearing legal and liability issues. My aunt works at a junior high and she often states how much parents expect teachers to act as parents and always threaten to sue because " my little jimmy is perfect and can never do wrong" or "you don't know our living situation at home". So now they always have to err on the side of caution; so like in your case if your kid and another kid starts rough playing and the other kid starts complaining, their parents will in turn complain to the school, blame them, blame the teacher, etc etc, and the schools don't want to get into it.
