By Timothy Aeppel
BLYTHEVILLE, Arkansas (Reuters) – Thomas Reisinger commutes almost an hour-and-a-half each way for a job in a cavernous steel processing plant here.
“I don’t speed,” he said dryly.
Some of his coworkers come from much farther, including one who spends workweeks living in a camper and returns home only at weekends. This corner of eastern Arkansas is dotted with RV parks that cater to such workers.
America will need many more like them to achieve President Donald Trump’s vision for a hugely expanded U.S. factory sector. The steel industry — hit with 25% tariffs as one of the first salvos of Trump’s trade war — is a prime example of his quest to use taxes on imports to rebuild manufacturing in the American heartland.
But foreign competition – while a drag on steel prices – isn’t the biggest challenge for steel companies around here. It’s finding workers.
Mississippi County’s slogan is “The Land of Steel” and that’s no exaggeration. Nearly a quarter of the 20,000 jobs in the county are in sprawling mills owned by Nucor and U.S. Steel and ancillary businesses like pipe makers and other metals processors that have flocked here to be close to them, according to Chmura Economics & Analytics, an economics analysis firm.
Clif Chitwood, president of the Mississippi County Economic Development Foundation, estimates 9% of direct jobs in the steel mills are filled by workers who come from such great distances that they live in RVs or cheap apartments during the workweek.
LONG SHIFTS, LONG COMMUTES
“Many of these guys work four-day, 12-hour shifts – then have four days off – which make it possible for some to live five or six hours away,” he said. Some even share temporary accommodation with workers on opposite shifts, he added.
The tight labor market here reflects local and national trends.
The U.S. stopped training hordes of factory workers decades ago; retirements and immigration crackdowns are draining the pool of labor available. Many Americans have come to see these jobs as precarious, as globalization has forced the closure of swathes of domestic manufacturing.
Just over 20% of manufacturing plants across the U.S. that said they failed to produce at full capacity cited a shortage of labor or specific skills as the key reason, according recent data from the Census Bureau.
Asked about a skills shortage in manufacturing, White House spokesman Kush Desai said that more than one in ten young adults in America were not employed, in higher education, or pursuing some sort of vocational training.
“There is no shortage of untapped potential within the labor force we already have to grow our manufacturing sector,” he said.
Mississippi County — even as the steel industry blossomed — has gone through decades of economic decline, which has eroded the quality of life.
MORE THAN HALF LIVE OUTSIDE THE COUNTY
At this point, less than half of steel workers in “the land of steel” live in the county. Good wages help cover the cost of commuting or setting up a temporary home.
The paychecks are indeed good. Workers in the county’s metals-related businesses earn an average of just over $116,000 a year, far above the $69,000 average for all industries in the county, according to Chmura. Workers in the big mills can earn much more, thanks to bonuses tied to output.
But driving around the county reveals few signs of this prosperity. Mississippi County, a mostly flat expanse hugging the banks of the Mississippi River that was once dominated by cotton farms, has been losing people for decades. Its population peaked in 1940 at about 88,000 and has fallen to less than half that.
Blytheville — which shares the role of county seat with the only other town in the county of any size, Osceola — was hit especially hard in the 1990s by the closure of an air force base on the outskirts of town that once housed strategic bombers. Six thousand people departed in just two years after it closed.
Other manufacturers haven’t fared as well as steel. A looming reminder of that is a brick building on the outskirts of town, its windows boarded and its lawn overgrown, which was once a bustling shirt factory. A plaque by the front door pronounces: “This building dedicated to the industrial prosperity of Blytheville.”
One legacy of this long economic slide is a devastated downtown, dotted with empty storefronts. The local high school, which had 800 students two decades ago, is down to 460 — and the district carries the state’s lowest rating for school performance. The county’s poverty rate is 21%, well above the state’s average 15.7%, according to the Census Bureau.
“Housing is our number one crisis,” said Melisa Logan, Blytheville’s mayor. “We’re a housing desert.”
UP TO $50,000 TO BUILD A HOUSE
The problem’s so bad that they’ve launched a program, funded largely by steelmakers, that offers workers 10% of the value of a new home up to $50,000 in forgivable loans if they build a house and stay in their job for four years. Most of those homes are getting built in small, outlying hamlets that are deemed in better school districts.
Chitwood, with the local economic development agency, said there have been 151 new homes built in the county over the past 15 months. “That’s more than the previous 20 years combined, maybe longer,” he said.
The disconnect between a thriving steel industry and a faded local economy highlights a problem that faces any region hoping to rebuild its manufacturing base.
A key challenge in luring Americans into factory work is the perception, largely accurate, that even manufacturers who invest in sparkling new operations will readily shut or curtail them when the economy turns sour.
Reisinger, the worker who commutes nearly an hour and a half, likes his job working on the machinery at Atlas Tube, a division of Chicago-based Zekelman Industries.
He’s 55 and grew up in Blytheville, moving to different cities during his career.
“I always said I’d never drive this far for a job,” he said. But when he returned to the area in 2016, he met his now-wife, who wanted to live close to where she grew up. Then there’s the money. He earns over $30 an hour, which allows them to live well with him as primary breadwinner.
Greg Galbraith, a coworker at Atlas who commutes from his home an hour away in Tennessee, points to another problem. “This isn’t a great area,” he said. “There isn’t much to do and the crime rate is high.”
The steel industry here is non-union, which means less protection from layoffs. That’s increasingly the norm. Less than 10% of American workers are union members, according to the Labor Department, down from just over 20% in 1983.
THE SCRAMBLE FOR TALENT
“All manufacturers are struggling with talent. That’s not unique to us,” said Katherine Miller, a spokeswoman for Nucor, the nation’s largest steelmaker, which operates three sprawling mills in the county.
Jerald Gaines, general manager of Nucor’s flat-rolled mill, said they’re able to attract workers, but it’s not quite as easy as in the past.
Leading the way through the mill, where steel is progressively rolled into thinner sheets, Gaines made his way up a series of metal stairs to one of the air-conditioned control booths high above the production floor, called a pulpit. Inside, workers keep watch through windows and on a bank of computer screens that line the walls.
One of the lures of these jobs is that entry-level workers only need a high school diploma or an equivalency diploma. Specialized jobs, like metallurgists, require degrees or other qualifications.
One place creating more home-grown factory talent is Arkansas Northeastern College, which has a leafy campus on the outskirts of town. A quarter of the students, about 300, study fields such as welding and aircraft repair. Administrators say nearly all those students end up going into the steel plants though.
Alyssa Summerville is one of them. The 19-year-old graduates next month from a two-year program in which she worked part-time at one of U.S. Steel’s big mills nearby.
“I always wanted to get out of Mississippi County,” she said, until she heard about the program.
She’ll be working with a team that maintains the giant cranes that move steel inside the plant. “This is something I didn’t even know I wanted to do.”
(Reporting by Timothy Aeppel; additional reporting by Howard Schneider in Washington; editing by Dan Burns and Claudia Parsons)
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