This battle isn't going away, and it's a battle between nations, a battle within nations, and it's going to be a feature of the international economy for decades to come. From Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio, it's the big day. I'm West Cansova today. The war for workers is just getting started.
Historic unemployment in the US right now means there are many more jobs available than workers willing to fill them, and that means employers have to work harder to attract new talent and hang on to the employees they have. When this happened in the past, it was usually just a matter of time before the economy cooled, the job market tightened again, and companies seized back the advantage. That
might not be the case this time around. Me Sean Donn and Bloomberg's senior economics writer and friend of the Big Tag podcast, is back to tell us how even some of the biggest, best known companies like Intel are preparing for a future in which they have to compete for every worker. Sean, glad to have you back, people wars. That's how you've been describing the job market of the future.
Can you start by painting a picture of the current mismatch between jobs and workers, and why you think it's going to become even harder for companies to fill out their ranks in the years ahead. So if you look out at US economy today, everywhere you look, you see shortages of workers, and there's a temptation that we have to blame that on the pandemic. Right. Pandemic upended how we think about work to put a lot of people out of work and then back into work when the
economic response happened. It also is a story though, about demographics in America and the moment that America finds itself at. One of the great competitive advantages that the American economy has had almost since its inception has been people. It attracts a lot of people, and it has through its history it has always been you know this idea, it's this honey pot for talent around the world, and through immigration, through birth rates and so on, the population has grown,
and as the population grows, the economy grows. It's this amazing resource. Well, for the first time in its history, America is confronting a problem now whereby its working age population is growing at its slowest rate since at least nineteen sixteen. Quite possibly since the end of World War Two and is likely to shrink in the years to come. Take that apart a little bit, what are the different
pieces of that pause. So the biggest piece of that puzzle is this generation, the baby boomers, who were born in the decade after World War Two and have been the biggest presence in the American labor force ever since. They're retiring. They're cycling out, and that is hitting all sorts of professions, from construction workers to police men and women to manufacturing. All these key parts of the economy
are losing this big cohort of people. The other end of that is there's fewer babies being born, and there were fewer babies born eighteen years ago, which means there's fewer people young people coming into the workforce. And that's not even the end of it. There are still more cross currents, right, and then there's immigration. This goes back to the nineteenth century. One of the ways the US
has built this incredible workforce has been through immigration. And what we've seen since twenty sixteen and the election of Donald Trump has been a slowdown in the number of migrants coming into America, which means again, this is less working age migrants coming into America, which means less workers in America. You started out by saying that we think of this as a COVID problem, but it's not. But
COVID does play a role in that, Is that right? Oh? Absolutely, Look, we lost more than a million people in America as a result of COVID. That clearly has had an impact on the labor for us. Also, you know, there was a pandemic slowdown in immigration the borders were closed. That had an impact as well. But that impact is on top of this bigger, broader demographic impact that we really are just at the start of. We're at the start
of this chapter in American economic history. And so companies of all kinds, employers of all kinds are looking at their situation now and saying we need workers. They're looking down the road and saying we're going to need workers. And your story focuses on one of those companies is one we all know, Intel, the computer chip makers, probably got a chip in something in your pocket or something on your desk, and they're building a big new plant in Ohio and thinking, what are we going to do
for workers? What did you find? So this is one of the great projects. It's not just that we know Intel and that we have these chips in our pockets and our phones and in our cars. It's also that if you look at American economic policy right now and America's economic ambitions, getting semiconductor production back in this land is a huge priority for the Biden administration, in fact,
a bipartisan priority. And Intel this project in Licking County, Ohio, a place called New Albany, in a farm field there where they're going to build two enormous semiconductor chip plants and eventually five times as many as well around there.
It's a huge twenty billion dollar project. But right now they are scrambling to find not just the workers to go into that plant there's about three thousand workers that they'll need in that plant two or three years from now when it opens, but also the seven thousand workers that they need to build that plant. So this is an interesting sort of puzzle because on the one hand, they have a problem right now, you say they need to build this thing, who is going to build it?
But then they're thinking who will do the highly skilled jobs necessary to build these very complex components. Right, So, if you break it down, there is Intel's problem two or three years from now in terms of training the people that needs those three thousand workers it needs initially. And then there's the problem that it's big contractor, Bechtel has,
which is finding those seven thousand workers. Bechtel says it is going to need to bring forty percent of those workers from probably out of state, from other projects because they're just not available locally. Another build to build the plant. This is pipe fitters, electricians, welders, bulldozer drivers, all of the things you need to build a high tech plant. And if you look at all the jobs that they're advertising for, they all are you know, we will pay
relocation expenses on there. So they've got to find these workers, and they're looking all around the country because they're not available there in the Columbus area in Ohio. Thirty percent of the workers who build the plant are going to be in premises that they have to. Lauren, you talk to the local unions and they are reaching down into
middle schools to try and attract apprentices. And why do they need those apprentices Publicas at the other end of their membership, they have these baby boomer electricians and pipe fitters and so on, who have been retiring over the last few years, so that is a scramble on on the construction side. On the side of Intel, they have to create a whole educational infrastructure in order to find these workers. There are no semiconductor engineers being trained at
Ohio State right now. It's not a program that exists because a lot of the semiconductor industry, as we've been reading about, is in Taiwan, it's in China, it's other places. And that's this whole semiconductor war that we've been hearing about. And as you say, it's a big priority of the
Biden administration to bring that back to the US. Right So, Intel is having to spend one hundred million dollars fifty million dollars of it in the kind of Ohio area in the Midwest, just on education and training, and you know, that's the semiconductor engineers. So at Ohio State they are trying to create a program with Intel that will generate those semiconductor engineers. But then there's also the bulk of these jobs are actually jobs that you don't need a
college degree. For seventy twenty three hundred people who will work in that factory will be there with an associate's degree or some kind of certificate there, and so they're working with community college is there. And we spent time with Central Ohio Technical College, and what you find there is amazing and that they have a program that trains people in kind of electrical engineering technology. It's the basics
of understanding circuit boards and electricity works. And so they've only got one hundred and fifty people in that program right now, and it's a part time program to your program, how many people do they eventually need until needs twenty three, Sean. You spoke with John Barry, who's the president of the Central Ohio Technical College, this place that is training up workers who will eventually go to work for Intel. Here's
what he had to say. Intel literally being in my backyard from that botascical campus, they are nine minutes and twenty eight seconds this boom. This is significantly different than I think any of us have ever experienced. And where we see it continuing to go, it will be transformed. Some of our communities are no longer going to be what we'd known them to be. He seems pretty optimistic about this. He's got to be optimistic, right, It's his
job to meet the challenge here and so on. But at the same time, he knows that he isn't just recruiting people to work in a chip plant. He also has a big program training up EMTs and nurses and radiology technicians and all of these other careers that are in demand in central Ohio that are also facing their demographic challenges. Is Intel approaching young people in saying go to school, yet you're training and we're going to hire you, or are they saying you're hired now, we're going to
send you to school for now? They are relying on the institutions to recruit people, right, So they're helping the institutions get people into their programs. Where we go eventually is unclear, But you know, Intel is working really really hard to build this network of educational institutions, not just in the Midwest but around the country. They also have a big plant out in Arizona to create these workers because without those workers, it can't do what it needs
to do. And so are these classes that you can take to get this technical training the sort of thing that you would get and you can go anywhere if people are competing, or is this very specifically aimed at getting you a job at this plant in this state. At the technical college level, these courses are pretty general. It's understanding how to use AutoCAD, the kind of design tools,
understanding how circuit boards are built, and so on. Understanding the different technical and I guess I want to say mechanical, although it's not mechanical, but you know how to operate robots, how to operate machinery, and so on. One student at the Central Ohio Technical College is Maddox Curless, and he talked to us about all the opportunities he has. If I look on the internet, you know, look up engineering
tech roles, there's a plethora of opportunities out there. And you know, there's multiple times I've been over to my friend's apartments and we'll just sit there for a couple hours and we'll just talk what about this job? What about this job? You know they got this you know it's dangerous work, but they get paid good. I don't know, you know, those conversations happen all the time. You know, this is it. The Maddox Cross is twenty years old and the world is his oyster. Right. He has all
of these amazing opportunities, and that's wonderful. And thematics croll list. But it also gets at a problem for Intel. It's not the only game in town. These young people who are coming out of technical colleges like Central Ohio Technical College with these skills are in huge demand. Intel is going to have to fight for every last one of these people. Sean, please stay with me. We'll keep talking
after the break. Sean, Earlier you talked about how Intel is having to essentially steal all of these construction workers from other US states. Imagine that's not so popular. There's a long history of governors trying to poach industries from other states. How are they actually doing it? What is their pitch to people from other places? Right? So, I mean it used to be that the war between states was a war for investment, right and factories. Well, now
it's kind of a war for people. The people wars are here and you can see it in Ohio where during the pandemic they were putting up billboards in New York City in Austin, Texas kind of making fun of the local situation. In New York City. It was a billboard that when I'm said, work from home, not a tiny studio apartment. In Austin the billboard that went up was like keep Austin weird, like weirdly high priced of living, right.
I mean, the whole idea is pitching an alternative lifestyle that is a kind of healthy middle class lifestyle with space and with opportunities and so on. But if you don't attract those people, you're not going to attract the factories.
And that's where things have really turned around. Ohio was a state that in the last couple of years has actually lost population and it was one of twenty four states where we saw that phenomenon, and that is really going to change the balance of the economy in the United States. And that is a kind of existential fight between states. I imagine New York and Texas, which are being raided by Ohio, are not too happy about it. How are they essentially fighting back in the people war, right, Well,
they're fighting back with their own training programs. So up near Syracuse, New York State, has a new semiconductor plant coming in where they're facing a lot of the same problems in terms of developing people in education and so on. You can see in Texas clearly they have been attracting a lot of people in recent years they are able to offer a housing picture that is easier than the suburbs of New York. The theme across the country, though,
is pretty clear. We have seen for a number of years now people moving out of the Northeast and industrial Midwest and moving south, and that is changing the balance in the economy and that's going to be going on for some time. But what we're starting to see now is states like Ohio fightback kind of clawback some of those people. And it's not just state versus state within the US, but it's the US competing for talent, especially very highly skilled talent, with other nations around the world.
Absolutely so, one of the great advantages that the United States has had for many decades has been its university system and its ability to attract foreign students, particularly in science programs and so on. Well, the answer is that China and Taiwan and South Korea and Japan have all developed their own universities and they're able to keep more of their students at home now, which means fewer students coming over here. And there is a real war for talent going on now. The US may be in a
better position than some other countries. It's population isn't as old as Germany's. Per se we actually saw China lose population last year for the first time since the nineteen sixties, and that is a much more dramatic picture. But this battle isn't going away, and it's a battle between nations, a battle within nations, and it's going to be a feature of the international economy for decades to come. So, Sean,
we started out with you describing this demographic problem. There are simply fewer people working now and because of all of the things you described, there are going to be fewer people of working age in the future. So people and move around from state to state to fill immediate needs, but ultimately there won't be enough people to fill the jobs to drive the economy. So what are the solutions here?
This is where it gets difficult, and this is where politics intrude, and this is where the political divisions in America intrude on the ability to find solutions. The central problem, as we said, is not enough people. There were five hundred thousand fewer babies born last year than there were
eighteen years ago. That means that eighteen years from now there will be five hundred thousand fewer eighteen year olds unless you add to them via immigration, and that is the obvious solution, and we see other countries like Canada and Australia going very aggressively after skilled migrants to try and welcome them there. In Australia, for example, they have a program now whereby if you have a nursing or an education job, you can get your visa within three days.
In Canada, the population last year grew at its fastest rate since in the nineteen fifties because of immigration, because they welcome the immigration, because they recognize this problem. That is not happening in the United States right now. There is no constructive debate happening on Capitol Hill about immigration reform and how you attract more skilled migrants, how you retain PhD students in key areas. In other countries they
given the equivalent of green cards when they graduate. That just does not happen in the United States yet kick them out. So that is a fundamental problem. The other solutions are even harder in some ways, and that is delaying access to social security, making people work longer, which is politically unpalatable. We've actually seen that in France, where they've tried to extend a retirement age, and people have
taken to the streets. There are some other ways you can try and draw more people into the workforce, like offering affordable childcare to try and get more women into the workforce, and but again that's something that we haven't seen much movement on Capitol Hill. The problem America faces is it's got this enormous demographic challenge and it's got a political situation right now where it can't actually engage with the solutions because they are too toxic for the moment.
The good news is we are starting to see some changes in politics. We're starting to see governors in red states like Ohio talk about the need for more sensible immigration policy. We're starting to see mayors talk about it. I was in a place called Hamilton County, Indiana last year where a very Republican mayor was telling me that he needs more immigrants in town to fill the gap. So the conversation may be changing and that may lead us to some solutions. Sean, always great talking to you.
Thanks so much for coming the show. It's always wonderful to be here. Thank you when we come back. The Hunt for Tomorrow's workers today. So we've heard how Intel needs a lot of workers for the plant it's building in Ohio, But where will they come from. Gabriella CRUs
Thompson is in charge of answering that question. She's the company's director of University Research Collaboration, and she joins me, Now, so Intel is building this very big chip manufacturing plan and you need to fill I believe it's three thousand jobs. That is correct. Yes, how are you going about doing that? That seems like a really big task. We most importantly are working on building up the education pipeline that will provide new people to our factor in Ohio. Tell me
about that. How is that going to work? How do you reach out to the community to say, hey, we've got really good jobs here. Yeah. Well, as we thought about how we build a new factory in the United States, which we haven't done in decades, the first thing that we realized we needed to do was to reach out
to the higher education community in Ohio. So even before the announcement of the selection of the site, we were already having conversations with the universities, with the community colleges, even with the K through twelve system, just to make sure that the education system as a whole is ready to welcome us as a new employer in Ohio. What did you tell them You went to them and say,
we're building this big plant. What was your sort of pitch to them, Well, that's it, We're building this big plant. We acquire this large amount of land, and for the first phase of the project, we expect two factories, two buildings will become an existence in then the next three to five years. And those two buildings that we committed to, those two factories that we were committing to build in
Ohio will need three thousand employees, full time Intel employees. Gabby, when you went to the schools and told them a few years, we're going to need employees, but really into the future, we're going to need employees. What did you ask the schools? What did you want of them to prepare their students to potentially become Intel employees. We typically discussed us with educators in two cents, we need technical
skills education in engineering. Most of the engineering disciplines. For example, we need electrical engineers, we need chemical engineers, we need mechanical engineers. We need even a few computer scientists. We need materials engineers. So it's almost the entire breath of
education in the engineering disciplines. But we also need two year associate degrees graduates because most of the people that we're going to hire are going to be technicians that are in the production floor, and we need them to have either two year associates degrees or equivalent experience from an existing industry, and we need to give them skills
so that they can transition into semiconductors. They can transition from a factory, a more traditional manufacturing place that exists in Ohio today, to working in a clean room in a fab creating silicon chips, which is a very advanced type of manufacturing. Are you providing resources or money to schools to train these students to do this kind of work. That is definitely what we decided at the very beginning of this program that we needed to do the big
scheme of things and the long term. We committed to invest at least fifty million dollars in Ohio for education. So instead of investing the entire fifty million right away, we know this as a long term activity, we are dividing that fifty million in three phases. Yeah, I mean, when you say education, fifty million dollars is a lot of money, but how is it divided what does actually
go for? So we encourage the institutions to work together to leverage other programs that exist federal government grants, local state government grants, and that they put together groups to achieve the different things that we want to achieve. First, we are funding opportunities for experiential opportunities for students hands
on lab activities. So we wanted the institutions to propose to us what kind of on hands lab, maybe lab equitment and maybe lab experiences they could provide two students. We also are providing funding for creating or upgrading curriculum. We know that Ohio institutions have not been focused on semiconductor manufacturing per se because that didn't exist in Ohio. So building up a curriculum that supports the type of
education we need is part of the grants. The other thing that we want to make sure is that we provide funding for educating the educators. Right, many professors that are in the institutions today they were not delivering content on semiconductor manufacturing. So we are providing some financial incentives for the professors educations themselves. The institutions came together beautifully.
I tell you it is so exciting to see. We announced in March March seventeenth last year, these grants we're going to be released, and I can tell you almost a year later, it's so beautiful to see eighty institutions working together, Gabby. Earlier, we heard from a young man
studying at Central Ohio Technical College. That's one of the schools where you aim to find employees, and he said he and his classmates have many choices of employers, and that means, of course that you're going to have competition for his talents. What's your pitch to him? Our pitch is that we have great benefits, We are a really good employer, and it's absolutely fun place to work at Intel.
The salary of today, the salary that we're going to be given to the average employee that we're going to hire, is a pretty good salary. One hundred and thirty five thousand dollars a year. And that's a starting salary for somebody doing what sort of work. That is an average starting salary for technicians in our production line. And what
is a technician? What does a technician do? So technicians are the people in charge of making sure that the production moves along without any issues and when there are issues, because there's production plants always have issues. That they are the first line of defense and the first line of problems solving in the production. If you see, and there's many videos out there of how this production lines are,
they're mostly fully automated. The materials run between machines in an automated fashion, so people are not pushing or doing hard work necessarily pushing the material, but people, the technicians are fixing the tools that fall out of specifications, if you will. So that's the main job of technicians, and it's about three quarters of the workforce that we're going
to be hiring in Ohio. So three quarters of the people of the three thousand we talked about will have a starting salary of one hundred and thirty five thousand dollars, that is correct. And then great benefits, right, great medical benefits, great childcare benefits. There's also tuition benefits. So you come to ININTIL with a two year degree, we have a tuition imbursement program so that you can continue studying if you want to become an engineer or if you want
to learn more about management and become a manager. We've been talking a lot about how Intel is trying to create this pipeline in Ohio for this plan. But if we're just looking at a numbers game, three thousand is a lot for that community to create even over time. Do you anticipate that you're going to have to lure in a lot of employees from other states? We think we will need to move, you help people move from other states, But I don't think it's going to be
a lot of people. I think the majority of people are going to come from the institutions in Ohio or from experienced people that are already in the workforce in Ohio. And why do I say that? Back to your question about the grants that we gave the institutions, the institutions that we provided the funds and that are working and then building this workforce pipeline, they are estimating that they
are going to be educating about nine and people. So simple math tells you that we are educating enough people for the people that we need to hire in our facilities. However, we are very much aware of the needs of our suppliers, so not just us Intel as a company, but our supply base that all the companies that support our factories. How does Intel look at hiring and training today versus say, twenty thirty years ago when Intel was building chips in
the US. Is there a lot that's different. Well, this is a very interesting question. Is it different? Yes, there are aspects that are very different today than thirty years ago or twenty years ago, but there is a fundamental similarity which Intel's DNA has always been to work very closely with the educators near our operations, our funding executives. They we're very close working with University of California at Berkeley and Stanford. A lot of the innovation and ideas
come from working with and talking to academics. That's where Until started, you know, more than fifty years ago in Silicon Valley, and that's been part of our DNA. So twenty years ago or thirty years ago, when we needed to hire people, the first place we always go is the community colleges and the universities. So in that sense, we are using that same playbook in Ohio. However, what is different today compared to twenty years ago is that we see that there's going to be a huge build
up of semiconductor manufacturing in the US. Many different companies are trying to attract this talent in engineering disciplines. It's a broad stroke of all the engineering disciplines, not one or two, but basically all. We're also competing for scientists, and we realize that we are competing, and we also realize that the US needs to produce more scientists, more engineers, more technologist. So yes, there is an aspect of competing
for the person that is graduating today. But there's recognition not just at Intel, but at the industry that we need to work together to build up that pipeline of STEM workers right science and technology and engineering. And we need to reach out to high schools and explain to high school students what kind of a career you can have either being a semiconductor manufacturing person, or being a
quoder for AI or doing cybersecurity. I mean, all of these three topics are major importance to an industry that needs to grow in the US, that needs to have a very secure footh hall in the US. Gabriella Cruz Thompson, thanks so much for talking with me. Thank you thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. Shows from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergolina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our producers are Michael Falerro and Mobarrow. Hilde Garcia is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take