Austin Hufford
speaker
97 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2019
last heard Jan 2020
Austin Hufford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
WSJ Your Money Briefing · U.S. Factories: White-Collar Education for Blue-Collar Work · 10 Dec 2019
podcast
manufacturing economy, they're not going to need that many workers with minimal physical skills.
It's important to remember that for some of these jobs, they don't need a four-year degree from an Ivy League school.
They may only need a two-year associate degree or even a short-term certificate program.
And so I think that a lot of it has to do with educating workers and educating families about the path to prosperity in this country.
When I talk to these factories and these factory owners, they say that they can't find enough skilled workers, that they want to be hiring more and more
skilled workers, but the skills just aren't there.
And so it does seem like there is definitely a skills mismatch in this country where the skills that companies want in manufacturing are not being supplied by workers who have them.
I spoke to a number of current and former employees at Pioneer Service, and for them, they said learning the advanced skills was pretty difficult.
You know, even though the factory has remained open and has about the same number of employees, very few of the production workers at Pioneer remain the same today.
Basically, less than five of them were able to successfully make the transition from manual production worker to a machine operator.
And that's, I think, a very troubling trend that is likely to repeat itself across the broader economy.
I spoke to one worker who left his manufacturing job at Pioneer, and now he's a construction worker.
And he says he enjoys it.
He says it was a change of pace.
But you also have to wonder, what is stopping more workers from getting these degrees?
Is it about not having child care because you have two kids at home and you can't leave your job in the short term?
I hear a lot about initiatives like that to pay for workers beyond just the cost of education itself.
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