Machinists a Key Part in Short Supply

CANOGA PARK — If you were looking for a good machinist, Southern California use to be the place to find one.

Now it’s a place where employers import their machinists from other countries. They hold jobs open for years because they can’t find workers to fill them. And they spend years--seven or more--trying to teach employees on the job because they can’t recruit them ready-trained.

“You don’t find qualified machinists anymore,” said Antonio Candia of ACL Development, a Canoga Park machine shop.

The machinist shortage defies logic in a region where machining, the making of metal parts, was once the bread-and-butter trade of the vast, postwar middle class. About 5,000 such jobs have disappeared from the defense industry in recent years, displacing armies of specialized workers. But still, want ads go unanswered.

“Top-notch machinists are so hard to find, that if someone like that comes to the door, even if we don’t have an opening then and there, we make room for them,” said Dennis Dupuis of Haas Automation in Chatsworth, a company that has brought in four machinists from England. “They are that few and far between.”

The scarcity of machinists in Southern California is really the story of the demise of craftsmanship.

Nationally, manufacturers complain about skills shortages in other trades. But in precision machining, a field in which the wrong worker can ruin $300,000 worth of equipment in seconds, the shortage is keenly felt in lost efficiency and higher costs.

The problem, say experts, is hampering the very businesses that are spearheading the region’s defense conversion. “I’ve got machines sitting down and not running and no one to run them. It’s been happening every day,” said Geno DeVandry of Burbank-based De King Screw Products.

A Chino employer, who asked not to be identified, said: “I am not saying it’s a good thing, but we are making do with less of a caliber [of employee].” Machining, he added, “is a craft of yesterday.”

“We don’t have skilled employees and our job shops can’t grow,” said Roger Schultz, vice president of operations of A T Engineering & Manufacturing in Chatsworth. “It’s like a cancer. It’s just a little sore now, but eventually you die from it.”

The causes of the machinist shortage are straightforward. Many machinists who worked in aerospace never learned the skills or flexibility that other industries want. The few remaining apprenticeship and training programs have withered with the decline of unions and corporate budget cuts. As a result, “the basics are dying,” said Chatsworth tool-and-die maker Paul Derderian.

Explained Jim Glenn, vice president of sales at Titan Spring in North Hollywood: “We are losing our edge. We are losing knowledge.”

It was once thought that technology could replace the master craftsman machinist. But today, industry is waking up to the fact that--despite a computer revolution in machining--success still hinges on the raw instinct, practiced hands and patient devotion of the old-time artisan.

A computer “doesn’t think, doesn’t see, doesn’t care what happens to a part,” said Van Nuys machine shop owner Joe Grossnickle.

Widely seen as the most difficult of the blue-collar trades, machining is regarded as an unappreciated art form by its acolytes. It is arguably the skill closest to the heart of an industrial economy. Yet the trade is so little understood that machinists are regularly mistaken for mechanics.

“For everything around you, there is some machinist somewhere involved,” said Jerry Kinnan, professor of machine-tool technology at El Camino College in Torrance. “Your table, your garments . . . the phone you have in your hand, the computer keyboard in front of you--there was tooling that made the die and mold for those parts.”

Toiling anonymously in gritty, noisy shops, machinists shave down hard steel or aluminum castings with machines that sculpt metal as if it were butter. Their tools are fast and dangerous yet must be mastered to a degree that yields near-perfect dimensions. Margins of error a fraction of the diameter of a human hair are common.

Besides shaping metal, master machinists can draw up blueprints, plan jobs, make tools and fixtures and program computers. They know metallurgy, trigonometry and mechanics. They know what makes metal brittle and how it responds to heat and humidity.

There are no shortcuts. Top machining jobs often require 10 to 20 years of learning on the job. “These types of workers are not created through training schools,” said Carnegie Mellon University professor Maryellen Kelley, a machine shop expert.

Applicants for machining jobs are typically so lacking in knowledge that recruiting just wastes time, said Gordon Auclair, owner of a Northridge machine shop. “I don’t dare to look for people to hire anymore,” he said. “I just pray about it.”

Burbank machine shop owner David Goodreau, who’s gradually upped the ante to $60,000 per year, said: “I’ve been looking for a shop foreman since 1987.” But he has yet to find the right combination of knowledge, brains, talent and guts.

The problem has caught industry by surprise. When computers revolutionized machine shops in the 1980s, “they assumed they didn’t need skilled workers to do the operation,” said Kelley.

While computers have replaced machinists with low-level operators in many areas, industry soon found “they underestimated the skills that were needed,” she said. But machining craftsmanship remains beyond the most versatile computer, because the work is “not like a production line. It’s a variable process.”

Roy Rothlisberger, owner of Van Nuys-based RMI Inc., said he needs people who can detect a flaw in a blueprint or hear the sound of a dull tool and fix it on the spot. He needs expert machinists to do purchasing and quoting as well as handle the nightmare parts that insist on bending when you try to cut them.

And he needs them to plan the sequence of operations--sometimes dozens--needed to make a part. Here, the craftsman’s imagination is indispensable: Get it right the first time and you save time and money.

Unable to find high-caliber people, many shops muddle along, chronically short-handed and completely dependent on a single owner-manager. That person does the most vital jobs while scrambling to keep employees out of trouble.

Auclair, the Northridge machinist, is so afraid all hell will break loose without him that he closes his shop when he takes a vacation.

The few master general machinists who worked in aerospace “aren’t having any problem finding anything,” said Don Nakamoto, a former machinists union official who now works for the Verdugo Private Industry Council, a job-placement service for aerospace workers.

But the mass-production culture of the defense giants bred specialization and created legions of button-pushers, said Burbank union organizer Carl Kessler, a general machinist who began his career fixing diesel locomotives in the 1930s. Aerospace companies “broke the machinists’ trade,” said Kessler. “Now they are running out of people like me.”

Another problem is pay. Job shops by and large pay low-level workers far less than big aerospace firms did. Top-level machinists can earn $100,000 or more a year. But below them are ranks of operators and low-level trainees who are sometimes paid minimum wage.

Low wages and fading skills might be addressed through training. But with the defense downturn and the recession of the ‘90s came the erosion of four-year apprenticeship programs that unions and business once sponsored on a vast scale.

Nationwide, apprenticeships are on the decline. There were 325,000 apprentices in a variety of trades in 1979 compared to 230,000 now, a sharper drop if measured against growth, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Programs for machinists have slid sharply, too. Machinist apprenticeships numbered nearly 6,000 nationally in 1991. There were just over 2,600 in 1994.

Locally, there are some efforts to bring back apprenticeship. Bill Lavoie, who teaches machining at Valley College, recently started training nearly two dozen for local employers.

One is Luis Reina, 32, who works at Riggins Engineering in Van Nuys. “I’m not worried” about staying employed, Reina said, adding that he’s been approached by other firms.

Most machinists, though, are now trained informally on the job, which amounts to a huge commitment for employers because it might take a decade for a raw worker to mature into a useful machinist.

All that on-the-job instruction eats up productive hours in shops where “everything we do revolves around time,” said Thomas Mundy, president of Superior Thread Rolling in North Hollywood.

“We spend so much time and money training,” Mundy lamented. “It pushes up my costs, it pushes the price of a part up, and in a very small way, it pushes up the price of an airplane.”

Said John Demerjian of Asil Aerospace in Chatsworth: “When I’m explaining something to these guys, I could be finishing it myself.”

While local employers struggle to teach novices how to add fractions, industrial competitors such as Germany spend billions annually sending 60% of all high school graduates--more than attend college--into formal vocational apprenticeships, said Christoph Buechtemann, a Rand Corp. expert from Germany, who runs a Santa Barbara think tank on industrial education.

“There is strong obsession with high technology in U.S. policy discussions,” Buechtemann said. “But it’s sometimes good to remember . . . high technology has a down-to-earth mechanical basis.”

Even as employers here cry out for skills, the number of machine shops has declined. So has the number of jobs, a fact used to justify cutbacks in apprenticeships. The result is a vicious cycle--little money is invested in training even as the skill shortage increases costs.

At the same time, global trends toward smaller production runs and increased flexibility have boosted the demand for skilled workers worldwide, experts say.

The problem matters because the hundreds of tiny, nondescript shops throughout Southern California are essential to a strong manufacturing base, said Kelley of Carnegie Mellon.

They subcontract with and fill needs for larger companies, she said. And in Southern California, they are helping to turn the swords into plowshares--making medical and automotive devices where they once made parts for fighter planes.

Most people “could probably care less if I can make a piece of metal that can fly to the moon,” said Schultz, of A T Engineering & Manufacturing in Chatsworth.

“But the only way this country can make any money is to produce things . . . and if we lose manufacturing skill, we have lost the thing that has made our country great.”