There are 72,000 manufacturing jobs on Long Island, NY...

[TreasonousBastard]

Sunday's Newsday (don't bother searching-- it's blocked for subscribers only) had an article about how maybe thousands more are available, but employers can't find qualified people.

Welders, blueprint readers, solderers, machinists, tool&die makers, regulatory specialists, machine operators... Jobs are going begging.

It was different when Grumman had the Calverton facility and fueled a lot of education. It hired a lot of machinists and bought locally made equipment and parts, possibly an additional 30,000. The military used to have a lot more of these jobs, along with training, too, until they started farming them out.

NOt as good as it used to be with Grumman, but there are still nearly 3,000 manufacturing companies on Long Island. But, 80% are less than 20 employees, so they have no training budgets.

Suffolk Community College has one program, and graduates get snatched up, but there aren't enough. Farmingdale state college and Stony Brook state university are expanding their programs, but not fast enough.

Bringing back the disappearing shop courses in high schools could help, too.

The myth is that we don't make anything any more, but we do. A lot of stuff. And making it pays pretty well. These jobs won't solve all the problems, but there is no reason not to go for them.

[brush]

1. I used to live on L.I. back in the 80s. Is Grumman completely gone? And Fairchild Republic too?

[lucca18]

2. Sperry Gyroscope Company

My father worked for Sperrys in New Hyde Park on Long Island.
The union there was great.
.

[TreasonousBastard]

3. Fairchild closed down in '87 when the Air Force decided not to buy their trainer...

Grumman closed down in '96 when Northrop bought them and moved everything down South. Nothing's left but the air strip and a few old planes on display.

Since then, the town of Riverhead has bravely gone on to figure out just what the hell to do with the place. Every so often someone comes up with a plan, but it gets lost in the local politics. Somebody's brother-in-law is left out of the plans and they get tossed. There is a water park that I think is part of the old property, and some small businesses moved into the hangars, but that, and the biz incubator and bike trails are about it.

www.riverheadida.com/epcal.php

[FarCenter]

4. I'm surprised that there is that much manufacturing, since there is no freight rail service to LI

Aside from a very small amount of rail cars barged across NY Harbor, all rail freight from the west has to cross the Hudson at the rail bridge at Selkirk, near Albany.

There is a small amount of freight that comes south along the Hudson and then across the rail bridge adjacent to the RFK bridge from Bronx to Queens, but the LIRR has not been maintained or improved to handle modern freight car weights and dimensions. It is basically a commuter only railroad.

Long Island depends either on barges for things like construction materials or on trucks through the congestion of NY City for everything else.

It is not a place to put a manufacturing plant. Due to the high cost of living, it isn't even a good place to put offices.

Rep. Nadler has proposed a freight rail tunnel under NY Harbor, but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

[TreasonousBastard]

5. We don't make refigerators or cars. We have machine shops...

pharmaceuticals, and such, so there's little heavy freight and trucks can handle most of it.

I seem to remember a rail spur at the Grumman plant, and maybe that's another reason they moved. There was another spur somewhere that always had rail cars sitting there with lumber and other construction stuff, but I have no idea where that was, or went.

Coal and oil always came in by ship and barge, and trucking misses Manhattan when it can. Staten Island and the Bronx take the brunt of truck traffic.

Costs are high, but that's what comes with a metropolitan area, where higher paid people want to live. But, We're not Seattle of SF yet, and a lot cheaper than NYC.

And I can still walk to a place where they grow acres of corn and cauliflower. And even a herd of buffalo.

[brush]

6. What about the ducks?

[TreasonousBastard]

8. No more ducks-- I believe the last one shut down a few years ago...

Ducks are expensive to raise, and the duck ponds for any decent size operation get polluted so fast it's tough to keep the water supply safe.

And, just to make it worse, ducks have to be slaughtered when the ag guy is there to watch, and he only shows up once in a while. So, you can only get a fresh duck if you're lucky enough to be there at the slaughter. If you're gonna be stuck with a frozen one, who cares if it came from Minnesota?

[brush]

10. You sound like a true Longuylander. Are you a native?

I moved there from the Bay Area in '79 worked at Newsday in Garden City first then out to Melville when they moved the plant out there. Lived in Uniondale near Hoftra and the Coliseum.

[TreasonousBastard]

11. Queens, actually, and moved to Manhattan, but had a summer place on the North Fork...

and ended up back here out after a lot of moving around.

I'm just active in a lot of stuff, including the local Democratic committees and clubs.

[FarCenter]

7. IIRC I had bison at Tweed's in Riverhead

You can probably do light manufacturing on Long Island, but manufacturers of bigger stuff like Sperry and Grumman are gone. No more aerospace industry on Long Island.

[Squinch]

9. We manufacture more in the US today than we have ever done before.

[awoke_in_2003]

12. Too much of it

is now non-union labor in the south.

[Squinch]

13. Actually, the vast bulk of the jobs have been lost to mechanization. Nothing's going to change that.

So whenever someone says the manufacturing jobs are coming back, he's either the stupidest person you know, or a lying sack. Twitler is both.