CANTON, MISS. Nissan struggles to find technicians for new plant

The plant has hired 130 workers but needs an additional 50.
CANTON, Miss. (AP) -- In a state that has lost about 50,000 manufacturing jobs since early 2000, it would seem Nissan North America Inc. could easily find workers for its new assembly plant.
The Japanese automaker quickly hired and trained nearly 3,000 people as production technicians to work in the plant's body, paint and trim and chassis shops.
But five months after the plant opened, Nissan still struggles to find industrial maintenance technicians, the workers most critical for the plant's success.
Maintenance technicians will comprise less than 4 percent of the 5,300 workers the plant needs when it reaches full production in mid-2004.
Valuable
But these are the folks who keep all that expensive machinery running at the $1.43 billion plant. They're responsible for 17 miles of conveyor belts, 853 robots, 70 lasers and 300 programmable logic controllers that control the entire assembly process.
"They're required to fix whatever breaks down out here," said Galen Medlin, the Canton plant's human resources director. "We totally depend on them."
When the body of a minivan doesn't descend effortlessly onto a frame as the vehicle moves down the assembly line, the line stops dead. That's when the maintenance technician is summoned.
"If for some reason that body would drop at the wrong angle or we blew a transformer, the maintenance technician has to find the root cause of the down time and make the correction to that," said Mike Baber, the plant's maintenance manager.
Downtime is a critical issue -- every minute an auto assembly line is down adds to the production time and costs.
Hard to find
But finding workers with the skills needed to keep the assembly process flowing at record speeds has been tough.
Even with the proliferation of auto plants in the South, the region is still short of maintenance technicians with the auto industry-specific skills needed by both assembly plants and the suppliers that have moved to serve them.
Auto suppliers have an additional challenge in finding skilled maintenance techs. Suppliers' hourly wages are several dollars less than the auto makers; consequently, they frequently lose their best workers to their customer auto assembly plants.
Nissan pays its maintenance techs up to $26 an hour. And overtime is almost a given, particularly since Nissan is ramping up its new plant to be able by next year to churn out five different vehicles at annual volumes approaching 400,000.
Nissan has held more than 30 job fairs around the state, drawing some 90,000 applicants -- many of them laid-off workers from the dozens of manufacturing plants that closed or severely curbed operations the last few years.
But only 130 industrial maintenance technicians have been hired. Nissan needs at least 50 more.
Medlin said Nissan's Tennessee assembly plant has a four-year apprenticeship program for maintenance technicians.
"But there was no time to do it here because of the plant's quick ramp up," said Medlin. Nissan has launched the Quest, the Pathfinder Armada SUV and will begin production of its Titan pickup Tuesday.
Holmes Community College, which has a campus near the Mississippi Nissan plant, is providing training for maintenance techs.
"During pre-employment training, we're evaluating them to see what skill level they are at and training them at the same time to take them to the next level," said Glenn Boyce, vice president for community and work-force development at Holmes Community College. "These have to be highly skilled people, academically and technically diverse."
Rickey Johnson, a 43-year-old Quitman, Miss., resident, lost his maintenance technician job last year at Burlington Industries when it closed a plant.
Johnson was hired from the Holmes' pre-employment tech training program. But even with a decade in the field, he still needed several months of additional training to upgrade his skills in such areas as electronics and automation.
"This job is much more challenging," Johnson said. "They expect a lot out of you. Downtime is a serious issue with Nissan. But I love the challenge."