How to Survive in Manufacturing
A look at where jobs are today. And you won’t even need to change your major.
by Cheyenne Derksen
When the economy beat them down, these workers kept their paychecks with a truck bed factory. The recipe for a truck bed is rather simple. All you need is aluminum, a welding torch, and two very steady hands. Though the tricky part is finding the right pair of hands.
The Right Hands
First of all, these hands need to be gloved. Fingerprints stain aluminum, so gloves allow the worker to handle the pieces. Welding gloves are a priority — a pair is cheaper for a small company like Hillsboro Industries, a plant in Kansas that produces high-end trailers and truck beds, than the cost of Worker’s Comp or a welding robot. Secondly, the right hands need to be working hands. Most factories have a night shift or early start, like the 5 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. shift at Hillsboro, but a few come early or stay late to open and close shop. Thirdly, these hands need education. Aluminum welding is a highly skilled line of work that requires steady hands to form expensive materials. Weld training can happen on the job: Chris, 33, learned welding at Hillsboro while supervising the paint shop, but many go through a voc-tech for licensing.
A manufacturer’s hands are fairly talented, steady, hard working and gloved, but they can also be young. Most welders start their first job around 19 years old when they finish weld training after high school. For some, manufacturing is the only job they know. Larry, 56, took his first job 35 years ago at Hillsboro Industries and worked there ever since. He rose through the company by serving in every area of the shop and now supervises the entire aluminum fabrication shop. Larry’s hands can do the work—that’s not an issue—but he sees that issues on the factory floor stem from disagreements between particular pairs of hands working together.
“If you have a dislike in an area, a lot of times it’s who you work with and how well they work well together,” Larry said. “You can have more employee issues than issues with the actual work you’re doing.”
Here’s all the steps on the factory floor:
Mike Gerken is the Chief Operating Officer at Hillsboro Industries and guides production. Business is good and jobs are available, but Gerken has trouble filling them. He finds that this problem comes from the devaluation of factory jobs — society ignores honor in the night shift — so the educated unemployed pursue other options. Modern factories cover a range of skills, from non-skilled positions like shipping or washing truck beds, to skilled jobs like welding or machinery operation. An experienced welder can find work easily, although Gerken sifts through a stack of welding applications full of hires that never touched a torch. If these applicants had spent some time practicing at a weld school or in a class in high school, this would be a different story.
“If I worked in manufacturing in the 1970s, I’d say I like to work with my hands,” Gerken said. “Now, it’s like manufacturing is second best; something happened to plan A and now you’re in a factory.”
The Right Ingredients
Once the factory has the right hands, they’ll need to find the right pieces for them to assemble. Truck beds and trailers can’t be made with any old scrap — they need aluminum or cold hard steel. But these tough materials need tough machinery. Hillsboro Industries uses a plasma machine to cut the sheet metal into shapes for the welders to torch and bend. Out of all the machinery in the shop, this one is the most fascinating. It’s a room-sized Cricut cutter: a torch arm glides over sheet metal, barely grazing the surface, as a blue cutting flame dances in the aluminum’s pre-programmed design. This technological advancement did not replace a person, but it improved on how that person does his job.
“We have better equipment than we had back then,” Larry explains about original plasma cutting methods. “Your specifications can be so much closer than way back when we had to shew and torch, but now we’ve got a plasma torch that can stay within a thousandth of an inch. You can’t do that with a hand-held cutting torch.”
“I don’t see technology as replacing people, it’s improving performance.”
When the cutouts go to the welders, they begin assembly into larger parts for the bed using some other ergonomic technology — no one will ever lift more that 50 pounds at work. They use a winch to lift or the welding torch itself, but welder Julie, 32, agrees that a machine wouldn’t take her paycheck; she uses welding to make and sell artwork on the side. Machines require individual programs for each task, while a person can think on their own and learn from mistakes.
The Right Weld
Acquiring the pieces for a truck bed is easy compared to acquiring the welder. Factory workers are more likely to stay in the factory if they have ample reasons to stay. The first is usually to provide for their family.
Julie waited tables for years as a single mom, but one day decided to go back to school to provide stability for her family, so she started welding. This move pulled Julie from a patchy job to the threshold of a career. She didn’t step down to a factory job, she stepped up. Waitressing exhausted Julie, because she had to keep smiling with little respect paid to her, but now, she uses her factory job as freedom from stress in the public eye. She looks forward to work every morning because it actually relieves her stress — Julie puts her weld hood down and can think without distractions.
Her boss, Gerken, explains the value of women in factories from his experience at Learjet. He supervised a room of 50 women wiring tediously with careful dexterity to complete a part. Because of the nature of the job, these women were better choices to perform the task. Julie is the only woman working on this factory floor, but she doesn’t see that holding her back.
“I love being able to prove myself, like being the only female in the shop and doing a good job. That’s very important. I have two young girls so I want them to see they can do anything they set their mind to. It’s not necessarily about stereotypes and general consensuses because of your gender or age or social status.”
“There’s nothing better than good people that give a damn about how things is, making the efforts. That’s kind of hard to beat. A machine don’t give a damn about nothing.”
Secondly, workers stay in a factory if they can take pride in their work. Chris started welding initially to provide for his two children, but also because the factory shift ends at 3:30, just in time to pick them up from school while his wife is still at work. However, Chris stays at Hillsboro because of the fulfillment of a job well done.
“When I build stuff, I build as if I were the one receiving it,” Chris said. “You can’t just come in here and slap stuff together. You got to put quality in it in order to get anything out of it.”
Here’s all the steps in action:
The Right Motive
The worst thing about factory jobs is repetition. Every person I talked to pointed out the monotony of performing the same task for ten hours a day, five days a week. Every product needs to be identical, so all the parts, wires and welds are put in the same places. Once the worker knows how to make each part, they don’t need to think about much else. Shipping manager Brian, 57, works some of the longest hours in the shop, so he told me a few ways that people in factories might deal with stress and monotony from the job.
“There’s a thing called beer and it seems to calm my nerves. Some of them have one every night, my goodness. But when there’s a certain office girl out here, then morale is real good, that’s for sure. Then people are in a good mood. She makes cake sometime, and that’s always a good reason to go up and sample it. A lot of people don’t like the repetition, but if most people give it a chance and they could do it. It takes a little patience. I told the bosses I’m the morale officer around here. It keeps their morale up when they can mess with me. They laugh about it and it gets their minds off of stuff for a little bit.”
Pranks. That’s how they cope with stress at Hillsboro Industries. And the office girl’s motivational rum cake, which you can find the recipe here.
One of the younger workers, Ross, 25, incites a few prank wars, but that helps the bunch through the workday. This generation feels lost when they realize college “just wasn’t for me,” like Ross did, and after a few nightshift jobs in other factories, he found himself with the Hillsboro shift wiring beds. Here Ross feels like a member of a family, not belittled as the young kid at work. Age does not matter in a factory, as long as the worker is experienced and efficient. Now he feels equal with the older guys in the shop because he can always rivet a drawer shut when someone playfully zip ties his pliers together. The company has picnics and holiday potluck lunches, but they can mix across the age gap on a daily basis.
“If someone’s in trouble or needs a ride to work, someone always jumps in and helps. Unless you deserved it.”
Ross told me about the bed scraper, Ben. He lives in town, but walks to work every day, so the guys all take turns picking him up and dropping him off.
“Everybody definitely part of a big group. Ben gets a ride everyday, especially in winter. No one’s going to make him walk that far. He never asks, everybody offers, or tells him they’re going to pick him up. But if you’re a minute late, he’ll just start walking and you’ll have to find him. He will not be late to work. I mean, he ran though a blizzard for Christ’s sake.”
So to make an average truck bed, you’ll need aluminum, some technology, and the steady hands to cut it. But to make a better truck bed, motivate the person making it.
