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Battling a
labor drought
Construction companies court
a future generation to fill
expected openings
With an intense focus and some well-placed hammer blows, Castle High School 10th-grader Justin Alejandro transformed a blank piece of sheet metal into a nifty tool tray complete with handle.
"It's cool. It shows you what that work is really like so you can decide whether you want to do it or not," he said, admiring the souvenir he would take home from yesterday's Construction Career Expo.
Alejandro hasn't decided whether he'll pursue a career in sheet metal work or carpentry, but the fact that he's even considering either should come as a small ray of hope to construction industry employers increasingly worried about labor supply.
The event at the Blaisdell Center Exhibition Hall was aimed at raising awareness of employment opportunities in the construction trades, and exhibitors said the word has to get out -- fast.
Hawaii's building industry already is working flat out to handle a boom in high-rise and new-home construction, and is expected to get even busier as billions of dollars worth of military housing and other projects get underway.
To those in the industry, it feels like preparing for a big game without a full roster.
"Our benches are pretty empty," said Leonard Leong, vice president of Royal Contracting Co.
But with unemployment at a 13-year low, employers and trade unions know that "help wanted" ads alone won't do it. So they're reaching out to high school students in hopes of planting seeds that will bear fruit in the years ahead.
The youthful focus was plainly evident at yesterday's event, co-sponsored by the state and federal labor departments and the Apprenticeship and Training Coordinators Association of Hawaii.
Yellow school buses lined Ward Avenue outside the exhibition hall while inside, pimply-faced kids in baggy trousers weighed the relative merits of careers in carpentry, masonry, electrical work and other building trades.
"We gotta get 'em while they're young," Leong said. "The military market made us realize there is real urgency to this."
The early recruitment effort is motivated not only by the tight labor market but by concern over what is perceived as today's poor-quality labor force.
There is no shortage of young local men and women interested in the $60,000 to $80,000 that a journeyman carpenter or electrician can make a year. The promise of steady long-term work also has lured a sizable number of skilled workers to Hawaii from the mainland.
The problem is a shortage of local workers with the most basic of qualifications, said Denis Mactagone, training director with the Hawaii Carpenters Union, who says many aspiring carpenters lack the eighth-grade-level reading and math skills needed to navigate through the union's three-year apprentice training program and its requisite exams.
Mactagone said the union has lowered its test requirements four times in the past dozen years to avoid cutting off the supply of freshly minted local carpenters.
Still, the ranks of available carpenters remain depleted, especially due to the quickening pace of new home construction in the state, 75 percent to 80 percent of which is being handled by the union's carpenters, Mactagone said.
"We're worried -- big time. But our guys have to pass a certain (education) level due to safety and quality issues," he said.
The carpenter's union is positioning itself for future training needs, having recently taken out a five-year lease on a former military warehouse at Barber's Point that is being turned into a training center. The center will open in about two weeks, Mactagone said.
But there is a danger of ramping up too quickly, said Tracy Hayashi, an assistant training director with the Hawaii Electricians Training Fund.
Thanks to wage rates of around $30 an hour plus a generous benefits package and the less messy nature of the work, the electrical trade isn't quite as starved for good applicants, he said. But the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers faces the tricky task of balancing the number of electricians it trains with the amount of work in the pipeline.
"We know the work is coming but we need to know where and when before we flood the market with workers who just end up sitting around," he said. "We gotta strike a balance and be responsible about it."
The scourge of drugs is another complicating factor.
Due to the potential dangers of impairment while performing construction work, training programs for most trades these days require drug tests upon enrollment, graduation and in between. But they are eliminating a depressing number of potential workers, said Al Kaopuiki, training coordinator with the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union.
Kaopuiki says training candidates have learned to use the Internet to obtain blocking agents that mask drug use, which has forced the union to include tests for blocking agents as well. Any positive test or failure to show up for a test rules out an applicant.
"Some of these kids are so sophisticated about drugs these days. They know all about drugs I've never even heard of," Kaopuiki said.
The industry hopes that preaching to teens now about the need to stay clean and get a good, basic education will pay off later.
"The message we've got to get out is that there is that construction offers kids an opportunity to make a good livable wage and offers them a good respectable place for them in Hawaii," said Arthur Tolentino, president of Hawaii Sheet Metal Workers Local 293.
The message seemed to be getting through yesterday.
Daniel Wright, a ninth-grader at Mililani High School, said he's considering a career in medicine but that carpentry is a close second.
"It's good to have a backup plan," he said.
The carpentry union's Mactagone fears, however, that the majority of kids today probably don't have the stomach for the hard work offered by the construction industry, partly blaming the rise of computer training in public schools at the expense of the more traditional vocations taught in shop classes.
"Most kids just don't want to work hard. We lost that 20 years ago," he said.
