scheduled speaker at the Philadelphia Navy Yard Symposium on Sept. 26.<\/a> He agreed to an interview with The Inquirer on a recent visit to Philadelphia. Questions and answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.<\/p>\nYou\u2019ve written that shipbuilding is heavy construction work \u2014 more dangerous than putting up buildings, less comfortable than modern factories, but not better paid. <\/p>\n
Shipyards are great for everyone except the people who work there. The economic boom is paid for in blood.<\/p>\n
The question we should be answering isn\u2019t \u2018Why can\u2019t we convince 150,000 more kids to build ships?\u2019 but \u2018Why are the 30 million Americans already in the industrial workforce \u2014 construction, manufacturing, transportation \u2014 refusing shipyard jobs?\u2019<\/p>\n
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\u2019s dark work in dangerous corners. And it doesn\u2019t pay much. <\/p>\n
Companies have invested a lot in improving factory conditions over the past 30 years. Manufacturing became gentler on your body. <\/p>\n
But it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
Construction is a rough trade, but it pays better. The economic rewards have increased. Not only there\u2019s better pay, but it\u2019s a way men and women can become entrepreneurial. Some become contractors. It\u2019s just as hard as shipbuilding, but the payoff is better. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Could Philadelphia double the ship workforces, as Hanwha Philly Shipyard and Rhoads Industries say they hope to do in the next few years?<\/p>\n
Philly is going to struggle to recruit an industrial workforce. There is a rhyme and rhythm to an industrial city. <\/p>\n
You have industrial accidents. You have elevated rates of chronic conditions years afterward.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s too much risk, nobody needs to be told what you are taking out of the city if you close. <\/p>\n
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]. <\/p>\n
The economy here has been running on services and logistics for so long that I don\u2019t think Philadelphia any longer has that intestinal fortitude to accept what shipyards really are. <\/p>\n
Do U.S. shippers really want more U.S. commercial ships at U.S. prices?<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
And you need more orders. If a shipyard does not lay out several a ships a year, you can\u2019t develop a career. You start laying a keel; you need a lot of welders. Then cutters. Then plumbers. Then there\u2019s a surge of need for electricians. You can\u2019t sustain that workforce unless you can stage crews across different jobs in the time it takes to build a ship. <\/p>\n
Rhoads in Philadelphia fabricates nuclear-submarine modules for General Dynamics. Can this region eventually build subs? <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n
The government has ordered two missile and satellite tracking ships from Hanwha Philly Shipyard. Will Philadelphia-area defense contractors likely do the electronics?<\/p>\n
[The Lockheed Martin-run Navy electronics facility in Moorestown<\/a>] 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. <\/p>\nHanwha wants to buy Austal\u2019s Alabama shipyards and submarine module works and its California ship repair facility. What does that leave for Philly Shipyard? <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
I expect the Austal yard would focus on smaller warships. Philly would focus on surface auxiliary vessels. <\/p>\n
Most yards lose more money the more ships they build. Hanwha thinks they can do better, and I seriously hope they are right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min The U.S. government is spending over a billion dollars to recruit hundreds of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[117890,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-282252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-hanwha-philly-shipyard-jobs-careers-risks-pay","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}