Erie, Pa. — Plastics Hall of Famer John Beaumont taught at Penn State Erie for 25 years and is still educating people.
At the recent Beaumont Executive Summit in Erie, Beaumont covered a wide range of issues impacting the workforce for plastics and other industries. The event was hosted by the Beaumont Family of Cos., which includes four businesses that Beaumont launched over his long career.
Beaumont explained how the U.S. unemployment rate increased only slightly between March 2020 — the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and August 2022, but the later date had a much more significant worker shortage and a greater struggle to find skilled labor.
U.S. workforce participation dropped from 63.4 percent to 62.1 percent over that span, taking more than 4 million people out of the market. Stimulus checks and reduced consumer spending also resulted in almost 70 percent of Americans making more in September 2021 than they had the year before, resulting in less of a need to work.
Many baby boomers also decided to retire early during the pandemic, and lack of workers also resulted in less access to child care, causing other workers to decide to stay home. "A lot of people chose to stay at home and learn to live with less," Beaumont said.
The rate of new business startups — including online retail — also increased during the pandemic, meaning more people were working while dropping out of the official workforce. Reduced legal immigration because of travel restrictions also reduced the size of the labor pool, as did the deaths of more than 200,000 potential workers from COVID-19.
Drug use also increased in recent years, with the number of Americans diagnosed with substance abuse disorders up 23 percent since 2020. Beaumont said that factor may account for as much as 25 percent of the drop in workforce participation.
Younger workers also want different things from their careers than previous generations did, he added. Millennials and members of Generation Z want remote work opportunities and they value continuous education. Beaumont said these factors were becoming more important even before the pandemic.
At current hiring rates, 2 million manufacturing jobs will be unfilled by 2025, with 3 million unfilled by 2028.
"Manufacturing has a low standing with younger people," Beaumont said. He cited a Deloitte study in which manufacturing placed last out of seven career choices offered to people ages 19-35. Technology was the top choice in that study.
"With interest in flexibility and working from home, how does manufacturing work?" Beaumont asked.
The U.S. also is facing a growing technology gap. China surpassed the U.S. in patent filings around 2010, Beaumont said. In 2016, China filed 1.1 million patents — up almost 19 percent from the previous year — while the U.S. filed just under 600,000, up less than 2 percent.
China and India also now graduate 14 engineers for every U.S. engineering graduate. In the broader STEM categories, China has an eight-to-one advantage over the U.S. in graduates.
Two-thirds of engineers receiving Ph.D.s in the U.S. aren't U.S. citizens. In the plastics field, the U.S. currently graduates only 250 engineers each year.
"Where do injection molders get tech people?" Beaumont asked. He added that at the current rate — and with more than 15,000 plastics manufacturers in the U.S. — it would take 60 years to put a new plastics engineer at each company.
For solutions, Beaumont said injection molders need to "hire intelligent, reliable people and develop them according to the jobs you need." This process can involve both in-house training — including transfer of skills and "tribal knowledge" — and outside training including education related to injection molding.
"Injection molding is the most complex part formation process on the planet," Beaumont said. "You can design a part and make the perfect mold and find a skilled molder, but it's still a complicated process with multiple steps. It can be in a loop of weeks, or months or more than a year.
"Sometimes we stop learning and sometimes we lose knowledge," he added. "We need to understand what we're doing today and how we can move beyond it. There need to be changes to our skill set and knowledge base."