Manufacturers still face labor shortage after erasing COVID losses
Connecticut is still working to regain all the jobs that it lost during the first couple months of the COVID-19 pandemic. But one of the state’s most important sectors recently completed a comeback. The state finished 2022 with 161,200 manufacturing jobs. With that total, the state surpassed the number of positions in the sector that it had in February 2020, which was the last full month before Connecticut recorded its first COVID-19 case.
While manufacturing’s recovery of thousands of positions since the spring of 2020 attests to the robust demand for Connecticut makers’ products, further employment growth in 2023 is not a foregone conclusion. The state has the same number of manufacturing jobs as it did 10 years ago — and now, as they did then, manufacturers are struggling to fill all their openings. But today, there is arguably more commitment to tackling the shortage.
“It’s a significant milestone for us to be right at our pre-pandemic job levels,” Paul Lavoie, Connecticut’s chief manufacturing officer, said in an interview. “The manufacturing sector’s workload is very healthy. The single biggest thing that is preventing the manufacturing sector from continuing to grow is really the lack of an available workforce. There are just not enough people.”
Recovering jobs in Connecticut
Connecticut lost nearly 290,000 jobs in March and April 2020 as much of the economy shut down during the early stages of the pandemic — a recordbreaking loss for the state in a two-month span.
Factory employment was not
immune from the disruption, as manufacturing employment dropped by nearly 12,000 positions, or about 7 percent, in those two months. But it was less hard-hit than other sectors such as leisure and hospitality because manufacturers were designated as essential businesses that could keep operating.
Since then, many manufacturers in Connecticut and other parts of the country have been hiring to meet escalating demand for their products and services. Among the fastest-growing companies in the sector is ASML, the world’s largest semiconductor-equipment manufacturer. Last year, it announced that it would add about 1,000 jobs during the next few years at its research-and-development and manufacturing center in Wilton. At that point, about 2,500 employees were based there.
“In recent years, the semiconductor industry has seen significant growth as microchips become more and more a part of our daily lives,” Louis Lu, the head of the Wilton site, said during a groundbreaking ceremony in September to mark the facility’s expansion. “As a result, ASML has been growing at its headquarters in the Netherlands and also here in the U.S., including the Wilton site.”
At the same time, the defense industry remains an indispensable source of manufacturing employment. Groton-based submarine maker General Dynamics Electric Boat ranks as the state’s largest private-sector employer, with about 13,400 employees.
Some large manufacturers, however, are reducing their contingents. Last month, Lockheed Martin announced that it would cut about 800 positions in its approximately 35,000-person rotary and mission systems division. The unit includes Stratford-headquartered helicopter-maker Sikorsky, which employs about 8,200 in Connecticut.
“This [plan] will be achieved through redeployments to other parts of the business, natural attrition and a limited reduction in force,” Sikorsky said in a written statement. “We are still conducting a thorough analysis, and do not have specifics on the roles and locations of these impacts at this time.”
The statement added that “most notifications to impacted employees will occur by the end of March. Employees who qualify will receive severance benefits, consistent with Lockheed Martin policy and our collective bargaining agreements.”
At the same time, Sikorsky is grappling with the setback of the U.S. Army awarding in December a $1.3 billion contract to Texas-based Bell to produce an aircraft that the Army sees as a replacement for its fleet of Sikorsky-produced Black Hawk helicopters. Sikorsky is appealing the decision.
Last year, New Britainheadquartered toolmaker Stanley Black & Decker embarked on a “global cost reduction program” that aims to save about $1 billion by the end of 2023.
The company refuted in October what it said was an “inaccurate” Wall Street Journal article that reported the company had cut about 1,000 finance positions.
Chief Executive Officer and President Donald Allan Jr. said in October that “our head count reductions are largely complete,” but the company has declined to specify the amount of job cuts.
In Connecticut, Stanley employs about 1,815 people, according to its website. There were about 1,935 employees based in the state in October, the website said then. Most in-state employees work in manufacturing facilities in Danbury, Farmington, Manchester and New Britain, while there are 520 based at the corporate offices in New Britain.
A message left last week for a company spokesperson seeking more information about the head count reduction in Connecticut was not returned.
Efforts to tackle the ‘workforce crisis’
The 161,200 manufacturing jobs that Connecticut recorded in December equaled the number that it had in January 2013. But if the sector is to avoid repeating its stagnant jobs growth of the 2010s, it will need to tackle a perennial challenge: a shortage of workers.
Highlighting the need for more personnel, Electric Boat has about 3,400 job openings. As of September, there were an estimated 11,000 manufacturing openings statewide, according to the 2022 Connecticut Manufacturing Report, which was produced by the Connecticut Business & Industry Association and affiliates CONNSTEP and Ready CT. Among other key findings, the report noted that 87 percent of manufacturers reported difficulties finding or retaining employees and 44 percent cited the lack of skilled applicants as the greatest obstacle to growth.
Not including an influx of new residents in the first year of the pandemic, Connecticut’s weak population growth in recent years looms as one of the greatest impediments to hiring in manufacturing and other sectors. The state’s population ticked up only 1.5 percent between 2010 and 2022, compared with a national increase of 8 percent, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
The retirement of many older manufacturing workers since the beginning of the pandemic has also contributed to the proliferation of job vacancies.
“We continue to say the workforce crisis is the greatest threat to Connecticut’s economy,” Chris DiPentima, CBIA’s chief executive officer and president, said in an interview. “If we can’t fill these job openings, after a period of time, there will become an impatience. And the businesses will either try to go to a state that doesn’t have such a workforce crisis or the customers will move the demand to a state that doesn’t have a workforce crisis. We can’t let that happen.”
Public officials and educators are trying to tackle the labor shortfall by advocating for greater investments in workforce development. Among new initiatives, a training center is scheduled to open this fall at the University of Bridgeport. More than $1 million in federal funding is supporting the facility.
“There are so many people with energy in Bridgeport who are just trying to figure out how to get into the game, how to become stable economically,” Mark Scheinberg, president of Goodwin University, which owns and operates the University of Bridgeport, said during a tour of UB last month with U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy. “We can take those students and in a very short period of time give them more than a living wage and really transform, not just their lives, but their family and hopefully the entire community.”
Murphy said during the tour that federal policy is encouraging the return of manufacturing jobs to the U.S., but that Connecticut is competing with other states.
“I don’t want those jobs to just come back to North Carolina and Florida, [or] Texas. I want them to come back to Connecticut,” Murphy said. “If we want them to come back to Connecticut, we need to have trained workers.”
In addition to workforce development, some of the state’s largest manufacturers are exploring other ways to bolster the labor supply, such as through expanding housing inventory.