Transatlantic cable
March 2014
46
Manufacturing
Inspired by Germany, employers and
educators in the American South are
exploring the bene ts of an apprentice system
“The European in uence is huge. They are our strongest
partners.”
Brad Neese, director of Apprenticeship Carolina, which links
the South Carolina state technical college system with private
companies to help create specialised programmes, was referring
to an e ort to introduce a European-model apprentice system to
the United States. Inspired by the partnership between industry
and schools that is seen as a key to Germany’s advanced
industrial capability and relatively low unemployment rate, such
projects are practically unknown in the United States.
Apprenticeship Carolina started in 2007 with 777 students at
90 companies. It now has 4,500 students at more than 600
companies in the state, with the typical apprentice in his or her
late twenties. The goal is to have attracted 2,000 companies to
the programme by 2020.
To help develop his programme, Mr Neese has travelled to
Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where apprenticeships are
thriving, youth joblessness is relatively low, and blue-collar work
is prized. Business writer Nelson D Schwartz of the
New York
Times
pointed out the contrast with the US, where the economic
fortunes of younger people with only a high school diploma
have plummeted, and the unemployment rate among workers
age 16 to 19 stands at more than 20 per cent.
From Greer, South Carolina, where Tognum America has
established its North American operations, Mr Schwartz
reported on the di culties encountered by the German
builder of heavy engines in sta ng a new factory there. Having
exhausted the local talent pool after hiring 60 workers – and
needing 60 more – the company’s vice president did what he
would have done back home in Germany: he set out to train
them himself.
Now, with a curriculum identical in most respects to the one
in e ect at the headquarters in Friedrichshafen – and having
enlisted the help of ve local high schools and a career centre
in the state’s Aiken County – Tognum has nine high school
juniors and seniors enrolled in its apprenticeship programme.
(“Where Factory Apprenticeship Is Latest Model from Germany,”
30
th
November)
According to the
Times
’s Mr Schwartz, experts in government
and academia, together with those inside companies like BMW
– which has its only American factory in South Carolina – say
apprenticeships are a desperately needed option for younger
workers who want decent-paying jobs; or, increasingly, any job
at all. Without more programmes like the one at Tognum, they
claim, the nascent recovery in American manufacturing will run
out of steam for lack of quali ed workers.
Despite the South Carolina example and the support of
President Barack Obama, who cited the German model in
his State of the Union address last year, other states have
been resistant to the concept of apprenticeship. Since
2008, the number of student trainees in such programmes
in the US fell by nearly 40 per cent, according to a report
(“Training for Success: a Policy to Expand Apprenticeships in
the United States”) from the Center for American Progress, a
Washington-based research organisation.
Thomas E Perez, the US secretary of labour, deplores the
trend. “As a nation, over the course of the last couple of
decades, we have regrettably and mistakenly devalued
apprenticeships and training,” Mr Perez said in November.
“We need to change that, and you will hear the president
talk a lot about it in the weeks and months ahead.”
Manufacturing institutes: an alternate
method of addressing the attrition in well-
paid work in the US industrial sector
As South Carolina promotes apprenticeships, a near neighbour
is trying a di erent but related approach – also with the strong
encouragement of their mutual friend in Washington. In January,
speaking to 2,000 students at North Carolina State University,
President Barack Obama announced the establishment there
of a high-tech manufacturing institute that is, he said, the kind
of innovation that will reinvigorate the nation’s manufacturing
economy.
Centred at the Raleigh campus, the institute is the joint project
of a group of universities and companies to address a matter of
pressing concern at the education/industry interface: reversal
of the e ects of a decade of manufacturing job losses in North
Carolina, where the unemployment rate is higher than the
national average.
“We’re not going to turn things around overnight,” Mr Obama
declared in Raleigh. “But we are going to start bringing those
jobs back to America.” (“Obama Announces Institute to Create
Manufacturing Jobs,”
New York Times
, 15
th
January)
The announcement of the new manufacturing institute re ected
the White House’s determination to forge ahead with such
programmes, with or without the cooperation of Congress.
Despite the partisan politics that has all but paralysed the
legislative branch of government for years now, Mr Obama said
that he is determined to make 2014 “a year of action.”
The North Carolina institute was the rst of three that would
be announced within weeks. It will be nanced by a ve-year,
$70 million grant from the Department of Energy, matched by
funding from consortium members including the equipment
maker John Deere and the auto-parts maker Delphi.
The institute will apply advanced semiconductor technology
to the development of a new generation of energy-e cient
devices for automobiles, industrial motors and consumer
electronics. Earlier in the day of his address to the students, Mr
Obama toured the plant of a Finnish company, Vacon, which
makes drives used to control the speed of electric motors to
increase their energy e ciency.
In 2013 the president announced a $1 billion plan, also on a
German model (See “Apprentice system,” above), to create a
network of 15 institutes that would incubate new industries.
But congressional opposition compelled him to scale down his
immediate ambitions to the establishment of three, using his
executive authority and previously allotted funding. At the same
time, he raised his long-term goal to 45 such institutes over ten
years.
Mr Obama regularly visits factories, reminding Americans
that manufacturing has been a comparative bright spot in
the job market over the course of his presidency. But the
timing of the Raleigh visit this January was unfortunate,
coming as it did days after the release of a surprisingly weak
job report for December.
