Burgeoning demand for capital goods, especially in the heavy equipment market, has gone largely unnoticed in the past year, and that was one reason I was glad to be able to include this month’s FM&T feature story by the Steel Founders’ Society of America’s Raymond Monroe. Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal veered into this subject in a report about “manufacturers and construction contractors scrambling to find enough skilled workers to plug current and future holes.” There is a lot of money tied up in infrastructure and capital goods projects — and those investments need to be supported by reliable and productive workforces.

Labor and employee management are subjects that are never far from the minds of metalcasting executives and operators. The next issue of FM&T will have a report examining the looming threat of unionization if the Employee Free Choice Act becomes federal law during the next president’s administration.

But, in more general terms, the difficulty of recruiting good and talented people is a longstanding concern. The aging demographics of manufacturing workforces have been noted for more than a decade, as nearly as I can tell. The Journal report offers some clever examples of the ways some groups are working to catch the attention of good job candidates.

But, my own observation about this situation is that the “problem” isn’t merely a matter of recruiting good candidates: it’s also a matter of keeping them once they've been located and hired. As I wrote a few weeks back, I recently met a young man who’s rising fast in a good foundry organization, a talented individual who never considered his current career — but "lucked" into it. The foundry got lucky, too, I should say.

This young man, I suspect, would have succeeded in almost any career he chose to put his heart into, and in the coming years he will have that opportunity. Other foundries may offer him positions. Companies in other industries may see his potential for their own organizations, and woo him with attractive rewards and ideas.

Foundries and diecasters need to have viable and actionable organizational strategies in order to attract the best candidates, and to keep the good people they recruit. Even more important, they need to have that plan so that they know what they want to do, and to judge who they want to help them to do that.

I would be gravely mistaken if I didn’t use this subject to extol the good work done by the Foundry Educational Foundation over six decades to develop new generations of metalcasting leaders. FEF has an ambitious Endowment Campaign underway, which deserves support. As of August 1 the Campaign is more than 30% subscribed toward its $7.5 million goal, and they will succeed in reaching that goal because they have never failed in any important effort. But, your contribution would be a big help.