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President Trump has promised a golden age for American workers, a renaissance for U.S. manufacturing. He says the road to get there is through apprenticeships. One Arkansas manufacturer is embracing the idea. NPR's Andrea Hsu paid them a visit.
ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: My trip starts with a ride on a golf cart.
STEVE PRESLEY: Is everybody on? All right.
HSU: I'm with Steve Presley, vice president and general manager of Virco Manufacturing. Their headquarters are in California, but we are cruising through the company's giant factory in Conway, Arkansas, half an hour outside Little Rock. This is where they make a lot of the furniture you see in American schools. It all starts with flat sheets of steel.
PRESLEY: We're going to bend it, manipulate it, spot weld it to make case goods - teachers desks, office administration desks, vertical, lateral file cabinets, all-metal bookcases, things like that.
HSU: Presley's been working at Virco for 37 years. He and his brother both started at 16 when their dad was the plant manager.
PRESLEY: My dad drug our butt in here, and we worked every Saturday and Sunday, and we worked in maintenance department.
HSU: Doing grunt work, cleaning up wet paint and sawdust. At one time, Presley says, Virco had 1,500 employees in Arkansas.
PRESLEY: We were so labor-intensive 'cause we could just throw labor at it.
HSU: Those were the days before the company had to compete with cheaper imports. Today, Virco has about 500 employees here. Technology has made the plant more efficient. They've got a new million-and-a-half-dollar saw, 30 robots that weld steel and a fancy new paint system.
PRESLEY: It's a little noisy, but this is an electrostatic powder coat booth.
HSU: Automated paint guns shoot gray powder onto table legs that come through on an overhead conveyor. Someone has to program this system to identify the different parts and move the paint guns accordingly.
PRESLEY: Whether it's up and down, in and out.
HSU: With all this advanced technology, Steve Presley's concern is building up a workforce that can operate and maintain it.
PRESLEY: That's where we're really behind the eight ball.
HSU: And trying to hire people with those skills is hard here in Arkansas. Not for the reasons you might be thinking.
PRESLEY: You know, everybody can make fun of Arkansas, say what they want to say, but this is a really strong economy here, and with a strong economy, there's a lot of competition for labor.
HSU: Especially skilled labor. Adding to the problem is the fact that here at Virco and across manufacturing, the workforce is aging. They've lost a lot of collective experience.
PRESLEY: We've probably had 250 years retire since the first of the year.
HSU: Presley knows, in order for Virco to survive and thrive, he needs a deeper bench. Already last year, the company reached out to Pulaski Tech, a community college, who, in turn, reached out to a nonprofit called Apprenticely. Together, they created two apprenticeships in tool and die. They're training up machinists to make highly customized tools that can handle measurements down to ten-thousandths of an inch.
PRESLEY: That requires skill sets that you can't buy.
HSU: So Virco plucked two promising workers from other parts of the plant and pledged to give them three years of training. Caleb Moss (ph) had worked in shipping and receiving and in the flat metal department. He was game to learn something new.
CALEB MOSS: I didn't get the opportunity to go to school because I had kids really early.
HSU: Straight out of high school, he went to work, first in construction, then in wastewater management, and later to the oil fields before landing at Virco a decade ago. Now, as an apprentice, he works here at the plant part of the week, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays he's at Pulaski Tech. It's where I find him the next day, planning out a project with his instructor.
MATT WALROND: What do you think? Quarter-20? We know we got a bunch of those.
MOSS: A lot of quarter-20.
HSU: In this safe space, Moss gets to try different approaches to tasks he may already be doing at work.
MOSS: So I'm always learning something new somehow.
HSU: His instructor, Matt Walrond says in manufacturing, you have to learn how to roll with the punches. That means improvising, if necessary.
WALROND: You can make anything with anything. And that's the goal by the time they get through the Machining 3 course.
HSU: That's next semester. Out of this apprenticeship, Moss will get a sizable pay bump, and Steve Presley says Virco gets an even more valuable employee.
PRESLEY: This is honestly more critical than what he was doing before.
HSU: Presley is so pleased with how Moss' journey has gone so far, he is now committed to creating more apprenticeships at Virco.
PRESLEY: I would love to get a minimum of, like, 20 more.
HSU: It's not the easiest thing. They have to find the right people and give them substantial time off the job for training. But as part of President Trump's push for apprenticeships, there are now federal incentives for companies like Virco to help a little bit with the cost. And the bigger thing Presley believes Virco is gaining is a plan for the future. He says one thing's for certain.
PRESLEY: We're going to be American-made.
HSU: He knows that can't happen if he doesn't have the right workers in place. Andrea Hsu, NPR News, Conway, Arkansas.
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