Though the slim, 5-foot-5 teenager dreams of becoming a basketball star, Nautika now has a backup plan after her weeklong immersion course: a career in manufacturing.
Just over a quarter of the 11.7 million workers in manufacturing are women. But Gadget Camp, a workshop for girls in this suburb west of Chicago, is part of an effort to change that.
Although the economy is wobbling and nearly 14 million people are looking for work, some employers are still having a hard time finding skilled workers for certain positions. Manufacturers in particular complain that few applicants can operate computerized equipment, read blueprints and solve production problems. And with the baby boomers starting to retire, these and other employers worry there will be few young workers willing or able to replace them.
Gadget Camp, sponsored in part by a foundation affiliated with the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association, which provided financing to nine other camps this summer, is intended to help over the long haul by exposing girls to an occupation they might previously have considered unappealing, if they considered it at all.
By the last day of camp, Nautika had told her parents that manufacturing was “cool.” Fashioning a lamp shade out of a thin piece of cardboard, she mused, “I have two good careers ahead of me.” Since the fragile recovery began, manufacturing is one of the few sectors that have added jobs. But the image of manufacturing as an occupation of the future has been tarnished by the exodus of factory jobs to foreign sites and the use of machinery to replace workers. Younger people, especially, see more alluring opportunities in digital technology, finance or health care.
“The perception is that there are no jobs in manufacturing,” said Susan H. Palisano, director of education and training at the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology, a nonprofit group in East Hartford that promotes manufacturing employment and has run summer programs for middle-school students for the last three years. “It seems that everybody had an uncle or grandfather that got laid off.”
Across the country, a handful of companies, nonprofit groups, public educational agencies and even science museums are trying to make manufacturing seem, well, fun. Focusing mainly on children aged 10 to 17, organizations including the Da Vinci Science Center in Allentown, Pa.; and Stihl, a maker of chain saws and other outdoor power equipment in Virginia Beach, Va., run camps that let students operate basic machinery, meet workers and make things.
Nuts, Bolts Thingamajigs, the foundation that helped sponsor the Gadget camp in River Grove, has awarded $2,500 grants to 112 manufacturing-themed camps — most of them for boys and girls — around the country since 2004. “It’s not easy getting people into the career field,” said Marcia Arndt, a board member of the foundation. “I think there’s a myth out there that manufacturing is dirty and undesirable, but it’s really highly technological.”
Impressions also persist that manufacturing is a man’s job. Technical fields in general, and those that require scientific or mathematical backgrounds, are indeed dominated by men. Yet a Commerce Department report released early this month showed that women in such fields earn 33 percent more, on average, than women working outside of scientific and technical fields, a higher premium than men enjoy in similar occupations.
Antigone Sharris, who came up with the idea for the all-girls Gadget camp, had worked extensively in manufacturing before becoming an instructor in electronics, welding and computer-aided machinery at Triton College, a two-year public school here that provided some funding for the camp.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ab16d2db4569a4464e313a2314bf31be
Economix Blog: What Economists Think About Raising the Minimum Wage
CATHERINE RAMPELL
Dollars to doughnuts.
As Christina D. Romer wrote in a column on Sunday, there is some disagreement among economists about the prudence of raising the minimum wage. The Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business recently queried a panel of 38 economic experts on the subject, and the responses were mixed, particularly about the effect on low-skilled job seekers. (Nancy Folbre mentioned this survey in passing in her weekly post; here are the fuller findings.)
These were the responses to the first question, which dealt with whether raising the minimum wage would make it more difficult for low-skilled workers to find jobs.
As you can see, of those who responded, about a quarter said they were “uncertain” about the proposition. Exactly zero percent said they either agreed or disagreed “strongly.”
It’s no wonder there’s so much expert uncertainty on this question, given the contentious and tangled literature on the subject. Twenty years ago, a groundbreaking study by Alan Krueger (now chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers) and David Card was the first to use empirical data to study an increase in the minimum wage. It found that raising the wage did not reduce employment. Repeat studies since then have had more mixed results, and some have shown negative, though generally small, employment effects.
Ask economists about whether raising the minimum wage is worth the potential risks to low-skilled workers, though, and the responses tend to be much more favorable to a minimum-wage increase:
Nearly half of the panelists agreed or strongly agreed that the benefits of raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation outweighed the costs. In the comments section, several of the economists mentioned that other policies, like the earned income tax credit, might be better suited to addressing the needs of low-income workers. Professor Romer had mentioned this in her column, as well.
These responses do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of all economists, the way a traditional poll might aim to be; rather, the panelists are among the more elite members of their profession and were selected to represent some of the better-known conservative, liberal, young and old scholars. They include Nobel laureates, John Bates Clark Medal recipients, Econometric Society fellows, past presidents of both the American Economic Association and American Finance Association, past Democratic and Republican members of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and editors of leading economic journals. A full list of the respondents and their comments can be found at the IGM Forum Web site.
Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/what-economists-think-about-raising-the-minimum-wage/?partner=rss&emc=rss