Your garage may need a mechanic, too
Shops struggle with ongoing labor shortage
SEATTLE – When Mike Zebley took a job delivering tools to Seattle-area car shops this year, he quickly learned that what most of his customers needed wasn’t tools so much as people who knew how to use them.
Nearly every shop on Zebley’s route was so hard-up for skilled mechanics that many promised Zebley up to $1,000 for anyone he could recruit. Despite the incentive, however, Zebley hasn’t been able to deliver a single mechanic. “Everybody that I go to needs techs,” he said. “They’re pretty desperate.”
Stop by any Seattle-area garage, car dealership, or body shop and you’ll likely hear a similar take on one of the region’s labor crunches.
Demand for repairs and maintenance is rebounding from the pandemic. But many garages are so short-staffed they’ve had to delay work or send customers elsewhere – despite, in some cases, offering hefty signing bonuses and six-figure salaries for experienced candidates.
“I would hire two guys today,” said Charles Jung, manager at Fix Auto Collision in Seattle, where lack of staff means about $40,000 in forgone business every month.
At Jakob Lorz’s recently opened garage, he now has enough business to add a mechanic, but can’t find any.
The shortage is so severe that some shops are trying to poach rivals’ talent.
“You’ll get someone who just drives in off the street and wants to talk to one of your technicians,” said Tim Eaton, past president of the Automotive Service Association’s regional affiliate and owner of Hi-line Auto Electric, which is down three positions, despite offering salaries of up to $100,000.
Seattle isn’t the only place short on mechanics, collision specialists and other automotive technicians – the problem is national – but its problem is especially acute. As of July, Seattle-area job postings for the broader category of vehicle and mobile equipment mechanics, which also includes truck and aircraft mechanics, was nearly double the supply of unemployed mechanics, according to a monthly estimate by the state Employment Security Department. That’s the biggest shortfall in the state.
The factors driving that shortage – among them, Seattle’s infamously expensive housing market – won’t be fixed simply.
One longstanding problem: In Seattle and across the country, fewer people want to work on cars.
Even before the pandemic, enrollment was slipping in automotive technician programs at many community colleges and vocational schools. Many high schools no longer offer automotive shop classes and fewer students seem interested in fixing cars.
One reason, experts say, is that automotive repair often clashes with our evolving attitudes about what counts as a “good” job, especially in labor markets, such as Seattle’s, that are so dominated by well-paid “knowledge” workers.
Physically, fixing cars is “is hard on your body,” said Jerry Barkley, owner of Crown Hill Automotive in Seattle.
Yet increasingly, it’s also a job that demands high-level technical knowhow and problem-solving skills, especially as cars have become more computerized.
These days, a mechanic is “somebody who is able to analyze data and process that information,” said Amber Avery, a former mechanic who now teaches at Shoreline Community College. Those demands, which help explain why the industry prefers “automotive technician” to “mechanic,” will only intensify as electric drives replace internal combustion engines.
The problem, industry officials say, is that students with the aptitude for today’s automotive technology choose engineering or programming jobs, which are high-status and well-paid, over automotive repair, which is still widely seen as a lower-status job.
“There’s still a stigma that these are guys back in a gas station in the 1950s that are just changing oil, when in fact, it’s some of the smartest people I know,” said Paul Svenkerud, service director at Carter Volkswagen & Subaru, which is short at least 20 technicians across four Seattle-area locations.
Yet despite the profession’s increasingly technical bent – and corresponding potential for high salaries – Svenkerud said, “I think a lot of parents are not encouraging their kids to go to an automotive trade school.”
Between 2016 and 2019, enrollment in the automotive program at Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake fell from 52 to 39, according to school officials.
A person’s job status isn’t the only barrier. An experienced master automotive technician or collision specialist can indeed earn upward of $100,000 a year. But many entry-level techs will make close to the minimum wage, which even in Seattle means barely $40,000 a year.
As challenging, at many shops, entry-level techs are still expected to have perhaps $5,000 to $10,000 invested in their own tools – and to be willing to invest many thousands of dollars more as they advance.
That’s one reason many would-be techs switch to trades with lower entry costs and faster payoffs.
Some industry officials and educators think new recruitment initiatives could ultimately broaden the profession’s appeal and attract more students. But those initiatives will take years, and in the near term, the mechanic shortage is expected to worsen as the profession, which now has a disproportionately large share of older workers, starts seeing more retirements.
That’s going to mean more delays for customers and fiercer competition for talent. That probably means offers of even higher wages (and higher prices for customers).