Alcoa Inc. said late last month it plans to cut 6,700 jobs in a bid to boost profits. But don’t tell Craig Brown that.
The director of operations at the Pittsburgh-based company’s Alcoa Fastening Systems Inc. in Fullerton has big hiring plans,if he can find the workers.
Alcoa Fastening makes heavy-duty bolts for planes. Alcoa’s three local plants employ about 1,000 workers. They’re booming.
The company’s cuts are due at units making aluminum products for vehicles and other uses.
Locally, Alcoa is looking to hire 300 workers to boost production and meet demand, Brown said.
Alcoa has posted large “hiring” signs outside its plants on South State College Boulevard and Placentia Avenue.
The company has been looking to hire for about a year and a half, Brown said. It only has hired some 200 people, he said.
That’s brought the operation closer to its high of about 1,400 workers in the early 1990s and up from 800 or so during the downturn that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Alcoa bought the business in late 2002 from Virgina’s Fairchild Corp.
The Fullerton plants make self-locking nuts, or bolts that hold together parts that make up the aluminum bodies of airplanes.
The nuts originally were made of aluminum,Alcoa’s specialty,but now are made from temperature-resistant non-metal alloys.
The plane race between Boeing Co. and Airbus SAS is spurring demand.
“Boeing and Airbus are both building aircraft at record rates,and you can’t do it without fasteners,” Brown said. “The market could use a whole lot more fasteners than we are making right now.”
In Fullerton, Alcoa is losing about 1% of its workers every year to retirement and is having a tough time replacing them with younger ones, Brown said.
“We could use a couple hundred people here tomorrow if they had the right skill set,” he said.
The problem is they don’t.
“There’s a certain basic skill set that we require, and that’s just a year or two of some kind of mechanical job,” Brown said.
Alcoa is looking for tool and die makers, operators who form nuts and screw machine operators, Brown said.
Trained machinists are in short supply for a number of reasons, he said.
Cutbacks at public high schools have all but eliminated wood and metal shops that teach the basics of manufacturing and safety, Brown said.
Trade schools aren’t seen as a viable option for new graduates and are declining in numbers, he said.
“This work force isn’t being developed anymore; you can’t even encourage them into the trade,” Brown said.
The aerospace industry as a whole is suffering from the effects of an aging work force.
One Alcoa employee has been working at the Fullerton plant for more than 50 years, Brown said.
Two recent retirees had been working at Alcoa for nearly 40 years.
The average tenure for an Alcoa employee is about 10 years, Brown said.
Alcoa has scoured the country for new workers.
“It’s really expensive to relocate people here,” Brown said. “We’ve given up looking” across the country.
The company is turning to its own to fill skilled manufacturing jobs.
Alcoa has teamed up with state-funded trade groups and schools to set up evening training classes.
It’s developing its own internal apprentice program. A group of about a dozen workers is set to begin the program in January, Brown said.
While these efforts are a start, it takes years of training to get to the skill level that Alcoa needs now, he said.
Meantime, Alcoa has spent millions of dollars in upgrades to make the Fullerton plants more efficient and reduce the need for labor, Brown said.
Alcoa also is having problems attracting the right people and retaining them.
The company holds job fairs every other month in Fullerton, he said. It offers signing bonuses up to $2,000 and referral incentives for current employees.
“Our average wage is in the high teens per hour,” Brown said. “For the skilled trades, it’s in the mid 20s. It’s not a bad wage to live on, and it’s a whole lot better than the other service trades.”
The Fullerton site,which is made up of three buildings,dates back to 1962.
The plants are more than 50 years old and have gone through a couple of ownership changes.
Alcoa paid $657 million for the business three years ago as part of a bid to diversify from commodity aluminum.
Alcoa combined it with its existing fastener business, Huck, which it acquired back in 2000.
The main plant on State College is about 200,000 square feet. The plant on Placentia is about 64,000 square feet. The company also maintains a 10,000-square-foot warehouse across the street on State College.
In addition to bolts, Alcoa makes tools for installing the bolts and nuts.
The plants ship more than 10 million parts per month.
The Fullerton operations make up 10% of sales for Alcoa Fastening Systems.
The company doesn’t break out sales for the unit, but it could do about $120 million in sales next year, Brown said.
Alcoa fasteners are found in Lockheed Martin Corp.’s Joint Strike Fighter and F-22 fighter jets and Boeing’s C-17 cargo plane.
On the commercial side, Alcoa recently qualified to make parts for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner and the new A380 from Airbus.
Alcoa has several fastener rivals, including Irvine’s Shur-Lok Corp. and Troy, Mich.-based Acument Global Technologies, which has a plant in Santa Ana.
As for workers, Alcoa competes with other regional manufacturers for employees.
It’s an employee’s market.
“There’s a lot of employee swapping between the manufacturers that are still left in California,” Brown said.
It’s too soon to tell if Alcoa’s strategy of investing in its own workers will pay off, Brown said.
“We are back to developing the talent because there’s no one doing it for us,” he said. “Except now it’s a whole lot harder.”
