Published Monday, December 6, 1999 Information Age products require Information Age workersSharon Schmickle / Star Tribune Standing behind the quiet cash register in his comfortably gritty garage in south Minneapolis, Joe Wiehle wistfully summed up the status of auto repair work: "A young guy today could make a whole bunch of dough in this business if he wanted to be a top-gun electronic troubleshooter." Indeed. Two decades after the first computerized cars hit America's highways, the nation continues to suffer chronic shortages of technicians with the skills to repair vehicles that carry more and more embedded microchips with each model. Top-flight technicians can earn $60,000 a year -- more than many professors and engineers receive, and without the burden of student loans.
Here's the rub. There are plenty of traditional mechanics like Wiehle who hunger for more work even while consumer demand for auto service grows. And every time an older car goes to the crusher, the available work to fit their skills shrinks again. Wiehle, who operates Nokomis Service without a computer or even a fax machine, estimates it would take at least a year in automotive school to catch up with his trade. "I figure I'm too old now," said Wiehle, who is 44. "I couldn't deal with that." What is true for cars is true for many other products that workers today must create, deliver and service. From newsrooms to operating rooms, embedded intelligence is changing work fast. And it's changing it faster than the corresponding changes in job skills, even while it is making work easier for millions of Americans. The implications reach far beyond the individuals who are left behind. Productivity suffers. And consumers suffer. To examine the severe shortage of skilled auto service workers is to see the complexity of the problem that cuts across many lines of work. It should be no surprise to anyone who has shopped for a vehicle recently that with each new model, embedded intelligence drives more functions. Even lower-priced cars carry several smart chips. Luxury models feature dozens of them, and automakers are now embedding e-mail and other fittings for a veritable office on wheels. "A car is nothing more than a Java browser that has tires," Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems Inc. quipped during a visit to Minneapolis in September.
Less obvious has been the challenge thrust upon auto service workers. President Clinton put it this way in a speech this year to the Economic Club of Detroit: "A lot of these cars that I saw today have more computer power in them than Neil Armstrong had to steer Apollo 11 to the moon." Clinton called for more investment in worker training, saying, "The income gap in America is a skill gap." But who should pay for the training and how should it be delivered? State and federal officials along with corporate and labor leaders have grappled with the question for years. The National Association of Manufacturers, a leading voice for one camp, calls for tax incentives to boost private investments in education and training. Rep. Martin Sabo, D-Minn., champions another view in Congress: The private sector alone cannot bridge the gap, and government must play a major role. A common theme in the debates is that technology is trapping workers in low-wage, button-pushing, burger-flipping jobs. Less noted are the rewards begging to be claimed on the other side of the skills gap. It is not unusual for a skilled auto technician to pull down $60,000 a year, said Tom Tweet, principal officer of Teamsters Local 974, which negotiates labor contracts with 60 auto dealers in the Twin Cities area. And the workers can pick and choose among jobs. Dealers have raided one another's shops, offering signing bonuses, overscale pay, extra vacation, retirement savings plans, training, dental insurance and discounts on vehicles, parts and service, he said. The crying need is not for mechanics in any traditional sense of the work. "This technology has by-passed the coming-off-the-farm type of mechanics who used to learn on tractors and then come to town and work in a garage. That's gone," Tweet said. Once the work called for spotting and replacing broken parts. Now it presents electronic puzzles that often are invisible. The problem is that many mechanics still are trying to fix what they see is broken, but it's "getting harder and harder" to earn a living doing that, Tweet said. He'll get no argument from Wiehle at Nokomis Service. "You can't see things move in these new cars," Wiehle complained. "With the old cars, you'd step on the gas, the carburetor would open and the car would take off. Nowadays, you step on the gas and all it does is tell the computer to give the engine gas." Wiehle's shop echoes the 1960s-era Standard Oil station that it was when he grew up in south Minneapolis and a corner garage was a neighborhood fixture with a hopping crew of workers that filled the tank, washed the windshield and answered most of your service prayers. "The car could come in the driveway, you'd hear it coming in -- and, depending on the problem, you could know what needed to be done," said Wiehle who started at Nokomis in 1972 and bought the business in 1992. The gas pumps are long gone, and the "crew" has shrunk to Wiehle and another mechanic. Almost everyone who's tinkered with a car knows that there's less and less you can fix yourself, said state economist Tom Stinson. Harder to see is the quiet loss of shops like Nokomis. Such "a gas station on every corner," he noted, has "pretty well disappeared." The upshot is that more people than ever before are paying for work on cars, and the money is going to fewer shops. At Nokomis, business still pulls into the driveway. But Wiehle turns away more and more work: "I tell them I'll guarantee to look at it and make a decision if I should fix it." He makes his living on such work as broken belts, filter changes, exhaust systems -- and, of course, older cars. Wiehle has plenty of company in America's work force. With embedded chips governing everything from fuel-injection systems to heart pacemakers, they are redefining work. Many workers eagerly welcome the changes. Take the members of the Mankato Sewing Guild, who showed up at Clarity Fit Technologies Inc. in northeast Minneapolis to have Edith Gazzuolo scan their bodies for clothing patterns. Over the decades defined by the Industrial Revolution, home dressmakers, like almost everyone else, accepted the standardized sizing that mass production demanded. They worked within variations on a Vogue size 10 or a Butterick 12. Misfits were common, and adjusting the patterns was an imperfect art, said Nancy Krenik of the Sewing Guild.
Inside Gazzuolo's black scanning booth, a series of white lights plays across a body, capturing individual features: a slight roll above the waist or a back posture that gives a shirt a different hang. Microchips in the scanner translate 300,000 measurement points into a data set, which Gazzuolo can manipulate to make a unique pattern. In this case, new technology creates, not kills, opportunities for small operators. Body scanners are expected to reawaken prospects for small-scale clothing work, making it possible for home sewers to do a better job of offering customers highly tailored garments. Customers could carry their scans on smart cards or get patterns generated from scans. In larger stores, ever smarter tools pitch into work ranging from the loading docks to the check-out counters. Target Stores rolled out a new system this year, for example, that allows freight-dock workers to scan cartons coming off a truck and to learn whether the goods should go to the sales floor or back-room storage, said Marty Brakel, who directs store operations. Formerly, these workers needed to walk to sales-floor displays to see if space was available. In grocery stores, the chips are simplifying chores from turning chickens on a spit to decorating cakes, said Kurt Radecke, director of information technology for Cub Foods. "It's everywhere," he said. But the technology also has thrown a steep learning curve into the careers of millions of Americans: Doctors use devices that didn't exist when many of them went to medical school. Dr. Jay Simonson jokes with other cardiologists at North Heart Center in Robbinsdale that he's a heart electrician. The work of implanting smart heart devices has grown into a technical subspecialty, and surgeons who can do it are in short supply. Simonson's office needs to hire another electrophysiologist, but it may take years to find one. "There are very few people who understand the nuances of the technology," said Simonson, of Cardiovascular Consultants Ltd. "Spending time to learn it and keep up with the changes is tough." In eye surgery, most doctors learned to remove a cataract by making an incision in the eye and squeezing out the clouded lens. Now, ultrasonic probes make it possible to do the surgery faster and with a smaller incision by breaking the cloudy lens into tiny pieces and sucking them away from the eye, said Dr. Donald Fong, an assistant clinical professor of ophthalmology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Most doctors take advantage of training from companies that sell the new equipment and from professional organizations, said Fong, chairman of a committee that assesses new procedures for the American Academy of Ophthalmology. But some stick with the older procedures. "There are practitioners who haven't been able to master it," he said. "If you finished training 30 years ago, you probably aren't using it."
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