When state officials held a construction resource fair in Racine, Wis., in late March to recruit workers for Foxconn Technology Group’s $10 billion manufacturing plant, only about 250 people showed up. It was a somewhat inauspicious beginning to a recruitment campaign that will ultimately have to find as many as 10,000 people for a job that’s well on its way to becoming the biggest construction project in state history.
Granted, not all those workers will be needed immediately. State officials have said they expect the construction of Foxconn’s 1,000-acre manufacturing campus to take between four and six years. That means there will be time to bring new recruits up to speed. Still, the relatively low turnout for the state’s construction resource fair is not the only sign that recruitment for the Foxconn project will be difficult.
Like many sorts of businesses, construction companies in Wisconsin have for years felt the pinch of a protracted labor shortage. Wisconsin’s construction-unemployment rate hit a record low for the month of November when it fell to 5.7% that month last year. Though seasonal layoffs have caused that number to climb, there are other signs that hiring remains difficult for Wisconsin contractors. In an employment report from April, the Associated General Contractors of America trades group sounded a familiar note, warning once again that the two biggest threats to growth in the industry were President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on steel and aluminum and “a lack of available, qualified workers.”
Attracting the Next Generation of Skilled Workers
Even before the Foxconn project was announced, companies were struggling to find skilled tradesmen amid the building boom taking place most noticeably in Downtown Milwaukee, but also in many other parts of the state. Their response to the labor shortage has been to wage a multi-front campaign meant to encourage interest in the trades.
State officials have pumped money into apprenticeships and other training programs, legislators have passed a bevy of laws lowering regulatory barriers to getting into the trades, and school officials have begun to encourage students to consider construction as a way to get a well-paying job without all the attendant debt of college. Trades groups have also been pitching in.
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Local 139 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, for instance, held an “Externship Day” for about 360 high school students on Wednesday, April 18, at its training center in Coloma—about 40 miles south of Stevens Point, Wis. Terry McGowan, president and business manager of Local 139, said the event was designed to give those in attendance a chance to try out equipment and gain first-hand experience in what it’s like to do construction work.
Some might question if students still in high school can really be expected to be part of the future construction crews that will help build the Foxconn project. But McGowan said newcomers to the trades can be made ready to take on certain tasks with a fairly minimum amount of training. For some types of work like material hauling, two or three weeks are enough. “We start them slow, introduce them to safety, put them on equipment so they don’t hurt it or, God forbid, anyone around them,” McGowan said.
Even as McGowan and others work to bring Wisconsinites into the industry, they are quick to point out that the Foxconn factory will be a draw for skilled workers with years of experience. McGowan said he thinks the project’s schedule is aggressive enough that people who choose to will be able to work 12 hours a day, six days a week. “That’s their living,” McGowan said. “It’s years of work for them to get to this point. So there are a lot of guys who want to be on that project.”
Yet, even as Wisconsin construction groups try to stir up interest in the trades inside the state, others acknowledge that it won’t be possible to get the job done without bringing in workers from other places. Wisconsin’s construction industry employed slightly more than 120,000 workers in March. That’s not a huge pool to draw from when thousands might be needed for a single project, especially when many workers are already engaged on other projects. And with the state’s unemployment rate for all industries at a historic low of 2.9% as of March, there are likely to be few opportunities to poach people from other industries.
Should We Follow North Dakota’s Example?
Nearby states furnish examples of how construction workers from elsewhere can be brought in to help supplement the local workforces. When North Dakota was struggling earlier this decade to build infrastructure and housing projects to keep up with its booming oil and gas industry, officials there found themselves in much the same situation as their counterparts in Wisconsin do now.
“It was the exact same questions,” said Russ Hanson, executive director of the Associated General Contractors of North Dakota. “Number one, do we have enough contractors to do the job and, if not, where are we going to get them?”
In the end, basic economics helped to ensure the job got done. Pay rose to a point at which working in North Dakota became very desirable. Out-of-state contractors and workers poured in. “They know where the work is, and they will follow it,” Hanson said.
Yet some in Wisconsin object to the prospect of the Foxconn project benefiting out-of-state companies. Because Foxconn stands to receive as much as $3 billion worth of subsides from the state—and to benefit from an additional $1.5 billion worth of road spending and local assistance—critics contend the bulk of the work should be reserved for Wisconsin companies and workers.
Foxconn officials have responded to such arguments by agreeing to at least try to have 70% of the job hours on the project go to Wisconsin residents, and 10% of the total job hours to minority-, female- and/or veteran-owned businesses.
Yet, at a meeting that was held on Thursday, April 12, by the Milwaukee Common Counsel’s Steering and Rules Committee, city officials pointed out that Foxconn’s stated objectives would result in no penalties should the company fail to meet them. Alderman Bob Bauman wondered if the state might not have done better. Didn’t the offer of $3 billion worth of incentives, he asked, provide “a little leverage to require more than goals?”
Wisconsin Workers Come First
McGowan, for his part, is confident that Wisconsin’s construction industry can build the Foxconn factory with only minimal reliance on out-of-state workers and companies. If most of the companies employed on the project are union shops—a strong likelihood given the fact that most big contractors in Wisconsin are unionized—then they will be operating under rules requiring them to turn first to local hiring halls when they need workers.
Even out-of-state companies must operate under these restrictions. When large Chicago-based company Walsh Construction was contracted by the state to oversee the expansion of parts of Interstate 94 along the stretch running north and south between Illinois and Milwaukee, the company was allowed to have no more than six out-of-state workers on the job at a time.
Beyond such rules, there’s also McGowan’s own resolve to achieve what he has made a personal priority. “I’m going to make every effort that we have Wisconsin workers in those seats,” he said. “And when I’m trying to keep from being wrong, I try extra hard.”
