CLEVELAND — When it comes to shipbuilding and repair, the U.S. Navy has the same issue as manufacturers across the country: finding skilled workers.
"The Navy has projected that they need 150,000 additional skilled tradespeople over the next decade," said Ed Bartlett, founder and chairman of Cleveland-based Bartlett Maritime, which entered into a $3 million contract in March to begin providing a rotational workforce of skilled laborers in support of the Navy's shipbuilding and repair business.
On Monday, they partnered with the International Boilermakers Union, tapping into their skilled membership, welders and the like to fill the positions on a rotational basis, live and work for most of the year at home and spend part of the year working in another part of the country during slow times.
"Boilermaker work tends to be very seasonal; it's cyclical," said International IBB President Warren Fairley. "In the spring, we can't find enough people; in the fall, we can't find enough people, but between those two times, we have plenty of people available. So this will be an opportunity for people to have more man hours than they would otherwise normally have."
"This agreement that we are signing today makes it possible for members of the construction sector of the Boilermakers Union to easily take assignments in the Navy's shipbuilding industrial base," said Bartlett. "It both immediately expands union employment opportunities and adds a vast new labor pool to the Navy shipbuilding industry."
Bartlett Maritime is the local company behind the ambitious proposal to solve the Navy's backlog of repairs on its attack submarine fleet using Northeast Ohio workers at two facilities proposed for Lorain and Lordsown.
The Lorain Plant would handle the repair, rebuilding, and refurbishing of all the components of a sub being overhauled.
They'd then be shipped to a kitting center in Lordstown. That's where the items used in a sub's overhaul would be shipped out ready to go ahead of its arrival, shaving 100 days off of the eventual repair time.
"That program is working its way through the bureaucracy in Washington," Bartlett said. "I believe it's getting favorable reviews, when that is announced that will have an impact, economic impact of as many as 15,000 new jobs in the Northeast Ohio area."
Initial plans to build a shipyard in Lorain to perform the work were altered a few years ago because of the logistics of getting the subs to Lake Erie through the St. Lawrence Seaway and other concerns. So, the actual overhaul work would be done at an East Coast shipyard but use Northeast Ohio-trained workers who would fill the positions, much like they will in the agreement announced this day, on a rotational basis.
"This is a precursor; this is a way for the Navy to test whether or not we're going to be able to deliver what we commit; we're over-delivering on what we signed up to deliver in this contract," said Bartlett.
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