Skilled Workers

Three jobs are open at Rodon Group, the plastic-parts manufacturer in Hatfield. But CEO Michael Araten isn't sweating it. Rodon works with local community colleges to make sure students - the firm's prospective employees - get the math and computer skills they need to work at the company making plastic parts for products such as bed frames and machinery. "We're willing to look at non-traditional methods," Araten said. Companies across the country have been working short-handed because it's hard to find workers with the skills they need.

A serious shortage of skilled workers and a surplus of unskilled imperil economic growth, according to a report presented to Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole yesterday. With a slap at American educators, businesses and parents, the Commission on Workforce Quality and Labor Market Efficiency's report outlines steps to upgrade what it said was the nation's woefully inadequate workforce. "Increased demand for highly skilled workers, combined with an aging workforce, has already created shortages of skilled workers (that are)

The Pennsylvania Shipbuilding Co. is sending recruiters to Baltimore, Md., and Norfolk, Va., today to hire skilled workers to complete work on four U.S. Navy contracts worth $420 million. "We're at the production stage on these contracts, and we need 300 first class, or journeymen, shipfitters, pipefitters, welders and electricians," said Jim Nealis, vice president of human resources for Pennsylvania Shipbuilding, in Chester, Delaware County. Nealis said the company, which employs nearly 1,800, has contracts to build four 677.5-foot oilers that will be used to supply U.S. Navy destroyers and aircraft carriers while they are at sea. The first oiler is scheduled for delivery in March 1989 and the last in 1991.

Textiles, once a signature craft of Philadelphia industry, teeters on the brink of extinction, with 178 companies left in a city that once housed many times that. There are hopes of sustaining the sector - mainly by connecting it with a younger generation of more design-oriented artisans. But to do so, the textile-manufacturing sector must overcome a daunting calculus: Are enough skilled workers available in the Philadelphia area to keep the existing companies alive long enough for the young entrepreneurs to grow enough business and expertise to sustain them?

Despite high unemployment and a national recession, Chester County businesses remain in dire need of skilled workers. The problem, business executives say, is that teenagers are encouraged to get college degrees at the expense of the trade professions. Because not all students are college-bound, educators should be doing a better job of informing students about the trades as a career option, said Gary Smith, director of the Business and Industry Chamber of Chester County. To help, Smith's group, along with two other groups, has come up with a plan to target students early - in the eighth grade.

After rejecting four contract offers in the last five months, workers on the high-speed commuter line operated by the Port Authority Transportation Corp. yesterday ratified a new agreement that gives raises totaling 21.2 percent over three years. The contract, approved overwhelmingly in a meeting at the headquarters of Teamsters Local 676 in Collingswood, helps narrow the wage gap between employees at PATCO, a branch of the Delaware Valley Port Authority, and workers on port authority bridges, said Dennis Moore, a spokesman for Local 676 vice president John Jackson, chief negotiator of the contract.

The chiefs of more than 200 major technological companies pledged yesterday to use their clout to push educators to adopt voluntary national tests aimed at building a stronger educational system. The executives, who gathered here to endorse President Clinton's proposal to establish national testing standards for fourth and eighth graders, said U.S. schools were failing to provide enough skilled workers to fill thousands of high-tech jobs. Without skilled workers, they warned, American leadership in technology, and the economic growth that it brings, is threatened.

The meeting was billed as a chance for area residents to learn about the job openings and supply contracts that will be available when the new 640-bed medium-security state prison opens its doors here in June 1997. State Rep. Thaddeus Kirkland (D., Delaware) told about 80 citizens at the Deshong Museum Thursday night, "We want to make sure we are prepared and first in line when opportunities open up. " But many in the audience wanted to ask Kirkland and a complement of state Department of Correction officials about more immediate job prospects.

The announcement that the Philadelphia Navy Yard will probably close within the next few years set off an outcry of alarm and protest. At least 7,700 jobs would be lost at the Yard and total closing could impact as many as 29,000 jobs in the area. The local economy would be devastated and it brings little comfort to know that similar scenarios are being faced in many communities across the country. The recently announced base closings do not imply a lessening of our commitment to the military but are part of the changes needed to move us toward an era of greater dependence on "smart" (and ultra-expensive)