Why don’t construction and factory workers want to build ships?

The U.S. government is spending over a billion dollars to recruit hundreds of thousands of workers it estimates will be needed in Philadelphia and other shipbuilding centers to expand the Navy and compete with lower-cost Chinese yards, as President Donald Trump proposes. The campaign includes “Build Submarines” ads on social media and SEPTA bus shelters and grants to training programs.

“You have to work the parents,” Michael Cadenazzi, assistant secretary of war for industrial base policy, told contractors assembled by Trump and U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle in July. “Mom and Dad need to understand their kid is succeeding, even if they skip college for “AI-proof jobs” as “the wizards behind the warriors — shipfitters, welders, pipe fitters.”

If would-be college students prove a tough sell, there’s an even larger population of American workers who have what it takes to build ships but don’t want to, said Gary Kim, a Wharton School graduate student who has studied U.S., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean shipyards.

In essays for the U.S. Naval Institute and a series of papers titled The Brutal Realities of Building Ships, Kim, formerly a junior officer with U.S. Navy construction units in Asia and a Detroit manufacturing manager, has detailed rough conditions and skilled-labor shortages and suggested what shipyards have to do to realistically fill those jobs.

Kim is a scheduled speaker at the Philadelphia Navy Yard Symposium on Sept. 26. He agreed to an interview with The Inquirer on a recent visit to Philadelphia. Questions and answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Shipyards are great for everyone except the people who work there. The economic boom is paid for in blood.

The question we should be answering isn’t ‘Why can’t we convince 150,000 more kids to build ships?’ but ‘Why are the 30 million Americans already in the industrial workforce — construction, manufacturing, transportation — refusing shipyard jobs?’

Shipyard work is an agglomeration of tasks done in the wider industrial economy: welding, plumbing, truck driving. Why does most of that workforce turn away from building ships? Because it’s dark work in dangerous corners. And it doesn’t pay much.

Companies have invested a lot in improving factory conditions over the past 30 years. Manufacturing became gentler on your body.

But it’s also less unionized than before. In the new factories, adjusting for inflation, the pay is less. Factory workers and warehouse workers accept repetitive labor in air-conditioned facilities, in exchange for lower pay.

Construction is a rough trade, but it pays better. The economic rewards have increased. Not only there’s better pay, but it’s a way men and women can become entrepreneurial. Some become contractors. It’s just as hard as shipbuilding, but the payoff is better.

In shipbuilding, the pay in real terms has declined, but the workplace is only transforming recently with advanced robotics. Sometimes shipyard apprenticeship programs that teach industrial skills see [their graduates] leave for other industrial jobs.

Philly is going to struggle to recruit an industrial workforce. There is a rhyme and rhythm to an industrial city.

You have industrial accidents. You have elevated rates of chronic conditions years afterward.

Look at the reactions to the Canada wildfires. Detroit had the worst air quality in the world for a day, but nothing shut down. Everyone from the UAW director to the people in the city government knows the four or five closest auto plants each generate tens of millions of dollars in economic activity daily. Even if city health officials say it’s too much risk, nobody needs to be told what you are taking out of the city if you close.

Industrial work brings prosperity and less economic inequalities, with [personal and environmental] costs. Manufacturing requires higher risk and having your citizens accept that risk. You have that in the Gulf [home to the U.S. oil industry] and in the Mississippi Valley [where the U.S. steel industry has moved], and in Michigan [auto plants].

The economy here has been running on services and logistics for so long that I don’t think Philadelphia any longer has that intestinal fortitude to accept what shipyards really are.

If the Jones Act [requiring U.S. ships for cargoes between U.S. ports, suspended by Trump] is waived indefinitely, companies are not going to need more ships built here.

And you need more orders. If a shipyard does not lay out several a ships a year, you can’t develop a career. You start laying a keel; you need a lot of welders. Then cutters. Then plumbers. Then there’s a surge of need for electricians. You can’t sustain that workforce unless you can stage crews across different jobs in the time it takes to build a ship.

Nuclear reactors, spaceships, and American submarines are the most stringent things to build in the world. If Philadelphia wants a more meaningful part of the submarine value chain, we need to build with spaceshiplike tolerances.

The Navy is putting out the correct messaging that the industrial base needs a diversity of jobs. An amazingly large part of the maritime industrial base doesn’t come from port cities but from inland operations. The most critical part of submarines is the gearboxes, built at the Philadelphia Gear plant in California.

[The Lockheed Martin-run Navy electronics facility in Moorestown] is the technology center of that industry. But I think the biggest reason Philadelphia landed the tracking ships here was that the yard needed a win. And backlogs in other shipyards are now 10 years and more.

Hanwha wants to be a globally competitive defense prime contractor. Buying Austal would make Hanwha a solid #3 shipyard operator in the U.S., plus their megayard in Korea.

I expect the Austal yard would focus on smaller warships. Philly would focus on surface auxiliary vessels.

Most yards lose more money the more ships they build. Hanwha thinks they can do better, and I seriously hope they are right.