Area leaders see need for trained workers

A group of about 25 Rockford-area manufacturers met Monday morning with elected officials at Sunrise Restaurant on Wansford Way. Represented by the Tooling and Manufacturing Association, these are business owners who don’t often have time to go to an 8 a.m. breakfast because they’re already at work.

Winnebago, Boone and Ogle counties have hundreds of these small factories making all sorts of high-precision gizmos out of metal. They’re worried, not just about high taxes and mind-numbing regulations, but about the lack of young people trained in industrial skills needed to make up for retiring baby boomers.

Brian McGuire, president of the association, explained the situation to U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Shannahon, state Sen. Dave Syverson, R-Rockford, state Rep. Joe Sosnowski, R-Rockford, and Rockford Mayor Larry Morrissey, a conservative independent.

“Manufacturers have been notified that did not fund the Employee Training Initiative Program, which many manufacturers take advantage of to help train their workers,” McGuire said. At the federal level, manufacturers are concerned because the Department of Education reforms put through by the No Child Left Behind Act actually gave an incentive to dismantle vocational training in high schools. “We are very concerned with the shortage of skilled workers that is already here, and by the massive retirements that will come. It will affect the recovery of the economy because there’s just not going to be new workers to put into these positions.

Production will go offshore simply because of lack of manpower,” McGuire concluded.
Sosnowski noted that his brother Doug, six years older than he is, “went to high school and was able to take shop, a carpentry class, an electrical class. The only thing left when I came along was automotive class,” he said.

Not all students are college-bound, Sosnowski continued. “There’s a whole lot more out there than going to a four-year college,” he said, asking what the schools are doing to offer students who aren’t going to college “the opportunities that are out there.”

The reason state-funded training programs are being cut out, Sosnowski said, “is that we are dumping our cash into a variety of other entitlement programs, and now we’re at the point this year where we’re starting to trim back on every single area so we can continue to fund other programs that aren’t producing well.”

Syverson said “there are important (training) programs that our manufacturing caucus is trying to get legislators to understand we need to keep those going.”
Kinzinger, who beginning in January will represent much of Rockford in Congress, said No Child Left Behind is a dud.

“My mom’s a public school teacher, and she told me when this law was passed that ‘there’s a train wreck coming,’” Kinzinger said. “It looked good on paper but in practicality, it doesn’t work.” It needs to be repealed or drastically changed, he said.
Kinzinger said that around the year 2000, a national attitude developed that manufacturing was passe.

“It became cool to go work on Wall Street. A financial job isn’t bad, but it doesn’t create wealth, it just shuffles money around. Now it’s OK again to want to go into manufacturing. It’s the biggest driver of the middle class we have. We talk about a disappearing middle class, and it’s not because of tax inequity, it’s because of disappearing manufacturing and jobs,” Kinzinger said. The federal government can help with funding, but “let’s allow state and local governments to educate kids as they see best.”

Kinzinger and U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Western Springs, are introducing a bill to develop “a manufacturing strategy, basically a way for the federal government to take all the entities associated with manufacturing and to figure out ways to streamline those, bring them together and make those more effective, and make a report to Congress, to get a grip on how the federal government can better help manufacturing.”