Summary HII Ingalls Shipbuilding's workforce situation
1. Location: The shipyard is located in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
2. Current workforce: As of 2021, Ingalls employed about 11,500 people, making it Mississippi's largest manufacturing employer.
3. Hiring needs:
- In 2021, Ingalls announced planned to add 3,000 full-time jobs.
- The company regularly hires thousands of people annually.
- As of August 2024, they had 44 job openings listed, primarily for skilled trades.
4. Types of workers needed:
- Skilled trades: welders, electricians, pipefitters, machinists, painters, etc.
- Entry-level workers
- Experienced shipbuilders
- Supervisors and managers
- Technical and engineering roles
- Apprentices
5. Recruitment strategies:
- Operating an apprentice school with around 700 students
- Offering no-cost, pre-hire training for those without required skills
- Providing competitive pay and benefits
- Improving facilities and amenities (e.g., adding a Chick-fil-A to the shipyard)
- Recruiting across Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana
- Partnering with local schools and universities
6. Challenges:
- Competition from other industries offering similar entry-level wages for less demanding work
- Competition from other shipyards in the region
- Difficulty attracting workers to the physically demanding outdoor environment
- Lower average wages in the area compared to national averages
7. Focus on local hiring:
- The apprentice school aims to attract people nationally, but those with ties to communities closer to Pascagoula more frequently result in long-term hires.
- Most job listings don't offer relocation assistance, limiting the hiring pool to locals.
8. Importance of stable workload:
- Long-term contracts, such as the recent multi-ship buy, help with workforce retention and encourage investment in training and facilities.
Overall, Ingalls is actively working to attract, train, and retain workers, with a focus on developing local talent through their apprenticeship program and community partnerships. They face significant challenges in competing for workers but are implementing various strategies to address these issues.
At Ingalls, plenty of space for shipbuilding but ramping up workforce will be the challenge - Breaking Defense
The destroyer Ted Stevens (DDG-128) docked at HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding. (Photo courtesy of HII.)
PASCAGOULA, Miss. — At HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding, the yard can be split into two segments. There’s the main production facilities, humming with the sounds of construction and armies of workers going about their day, surrounded by numerous Navy vessels, some fully built, and others still little more than individual steel panels stacked on top of one another.
And then, on a recent August day, just across the Pascagoula River,
the San Antonio-class amphibious ship Richard M. McCool Jr. (LPD-29) sat
isolated along what HII calls the “East Bank.” The Navy crew was
preparing for the ship’s sail-away date — which came to pass this week —
but beyond that activity and workers at some scattered workstations on
land nearby, things were quiet.
There was plenty of empty space both in the waters around the McCool and on shore. It’s open real estate that Ingalls could use to build or repair more ships if they win future government contracts — and should they be able to find the people they need.
At Ingalls, the sprawling campus, roughly 800 acres in total, has plenty of capacity for new work, but every new project requires a bigger workforce to sustain it. And the challenges to ramping their workforce up — from competing industries to competing shipyards — have only grown since the 1970s and 1980s when this Mississippi yard saw 25,000 workers constructing the storied 500- and 600-ship US Navy fleets of that era. Currently, the Navy’s fleet is struggling to break 300 ships.
“We have a lot of physical capacity. It’s about people, and it’s about our ability to ramp up and retain should we take on more work than we already have,” Kari Wilkinson, president of Ingalls Shipbuilding, told Breaking Defense during a tour earlier this month. “We have a plan for the work that we have. But if we were to take on more, that would require more people, and obviously we’d have to adjust that plan.”
The ‘Big Gap’
Navy officials and shipyard executives will often remark about the challenge of hiring someone to do manual labor in a shipyard when an air conditioned convenience store or gas station can offer the same paycheck, at least initially. The reality of that challenge comes into focus when walking through Ingalls on a sunny day in the middle of the Mississippi summer where the heat was intense, even several hours before midday.
The sprawling nature of the shipyard means not every work station can be covered from the sun, and those that are can become excessively humid following a storm. There’s no getting around the fact that an outdoor industrial environment is not a place in which everyone wants to work.
During the tour, Breaking Defense walked through the destroyer Ted Stevens (DDG-128) and the amphibious ship Bougainville (LHA-8), both currently under construction.
While much of the actual construction takes place outside, company officials said their crews use locations on the ship in the same manner as the Navy. A central hall designed for congregating and eating serves as a meeting point. A room, usually reserved for chiefs — non-commissioned officers often credited as the sailors who “run the Navy” — acts as a hub for supervisors. This enthusiasm for tradition and history is part of how shipbuilders, and the Navy, have tried to sell itself to a generation they say is proving more difficult to recruit.
But culture is only one of the challenges. There’s also the money.
“It used to be that there was a big gap between manufacturing wages and other wages in any other industry,” Wilkinson said. “Now you’ve got service industry wages — you can go down and be an attendant at Buc-ees for the same as an entry wage at a shipyard.”
Asked about how large the gap once was, Wilkinson said it’s not a figure she has on-hand — partly because the difference was big enough such that shipbuilders didn’t consider themselves in competition for people with those industries, she added. That’s not the case any longer, at least when looking at entry-level paychecks.
“People can go do far less difficult things for just about the same money from an entry wage standpoint,” said Wilkinson. “I will say, though, that within a year-and-a-half to two years, you can double your salary as a shipbuilder.”
Asked about the prospect of raising wages, an Ingalls spokeswoman told Breaking Defense, “We are actively exploring various initiatives to address the narrowing wage gap between entry-level pay and that of other industries. While we must currently work within existing union and Navy contracts, as we negotiate future agreements, we hope to be able to collaborate to find viable solutions.”
And it’s not just other industries with whom Ingalls must compete. At
a national level, the Navy in recent years has been actively working to
build up the shipbuilding workforce, although its activities have been
mostly focused on submarine construction
to aid in the execution of the AUKUS security pact. (Some of that has
been to HII’s benefit; their Newport News shipyard works with General
Dynamics Electric Boat to build submarines.)
Just a 30-minute drive east of here is another key Navy shipbuilder: Austal USA, whose executives recently told Breaking Defense they are planning a 1,200-person hiring spree.
RELATED: In Expansion, Austal USA Undergoes ‘Unique Evolution’ Beyond A Two-Trick Shipbuilder
Drive two hours west towards New Orleans, and Bollinger Shipyards can be found in Louisiana. That company, while not as closely associated with the US Navy as HII or Austal, is building the Coast Guard’s Polar Security Cutter and has been dubbed an integral industry partner in the Biden administration’s new security agreement, ICE Pact.
Those efforts are sure to raise its prominence — and its need for skilled shipbuilders — moving forward.
The amphibious ship Bougainville (LHA-8) under construction at Ingalls Shipbuilding. (Photo courtesy of HII.)
A School Inside A Shipyard
In the 1970s and 1980s, when the US Navy’s ship count was reaching the 600s, Ingalls’ shipyard boasted up to 25,000 workers. Today, the yard employs closer to 11,300 people.
Wilkinson is particular to not call the unused space “excess.” She argued, having just hired 4,000 people last year, Ingalls is effectively right-sized — there’s enough workers to meet the Navy’s demands.
But there’s always shipbuilding contracts on the horizon, and there’s also always veteran shipbuilders retiring. One of the main ways both of HII’s shipyards — Ingalls in Mississippi and Newport News in Virginia — contend with the workforce challenges are their respective apprentice schools.
It’s not uncommon for shipbuilders to establish training pipelines or other programs to boost their head counts, but the scale at which HII does it reflects their stature as the country’s largest military shipbuilder.
The “schoolhouse” is effectively a trade school owned and operated by Ingalls that teaches the different crafts needed to build Navy ships, with the promise of a job in the shipyard for graduates after two to four years, depending on their path. HII executives say the school’s overall enrollment is around 700 students, and roughly 100 graduated last year. Wilkinson said the school aims to attract people nationally, but those with ties to communities closer to Pascagoula more frequently result in long-term hires.
From HII’s perspective, and a view shared by most Navy shipbuilders,
one of the key factors that weighs on whether their workforce stays is
what work they see coming down the pipeline. A few weeks after Breaking
Defense visited the shipyard, Ingalls got a taste of that workflow
stability in the form of the Navy notifying Congress it would soon act on a long-anticipated multi-ship buy
from the company — four amphibious warships purchased together, saving
the service an estimated $1 billion. From Wilkinson’s perspective, that
kind four-ship deal is exactly the kind of stability her yard, and
others, crave.
“Our workforce — when they see stability for the next decade, that’s a great place to be,” Wilkinson said. “It really helps us from a retention standpoint. … It encourages investments and all the things that we’re doing …[and] what we’re going to continue to do because we have that that backlog.”
HII (Huntington Ingalls Industries) Ingalls Shipbuilding Workers Needed
1. Skilled trades workers: The article mentions that Ingalls operates an apprentice school that teaches different crafts needed to build Navy ships. I checked their job site on this date, expecting to find hundreds of openings, and found listing for 44 jobs at the shipyard, including their Job Corps. No pay range is listed. No relocation assistance is offered for most or all of them, which limits their hiring pool to locals. They need workers skilled in various aspects of shipbuilding, current jobs posted with links to their site include alphabetically:
2. Entry-level workers: The article discusses challenges in attracting entry-level workers, indicating a need for people willing to start at the ground level and learn shipbuilding skills.
3. Experienced shipbuilders: While not explicitly stated, the mention of veteran shipbuilders retiring implies a need for experienced workers to replace them.
4. Supervisors and managers: The article mentions using certain spaces on ships for supervisors, indicating a need for leadership roles.
5. Technical and engineering roles: Given the complexity of modern naval vessels, it's likely (though not explicitly stated in the article) that Ingalls also needs workers with technical and engineering backgrounds.
6. Apprentices: The company's apprentice school, with around 700 students enrolled, indicates a strong focus on training new workers through apprenticeship programs.
The key challenge for HII seems to be not just finding workers, but attracting and retaining them in a competitive job market where other industries might offer similar pay for less demanding work. The company needs workers who are willing to work in a physically demanding outdoor environment and commit to developing specialized shipbuilding skills.
Ingalls to add 3,000 jobs as shipyard gets contract worth more than $700 million
PASCAGOULA, Miss. -- A day after announcing it had secured a Navy contract worth more than $700 million, Pascagoula’s Ingalls Shipbuilding announced it would be adding some 3,000 full-time jobs.
Already Mississippi’s largest manufacturing employer with about 11,500 employees, Ingalls officials said the shipyard talent acquisition team has been spread out across Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana and hosted a hiring event Thursday at the new human resources building.
“We are steadily adding new team members to our growing workforce,” said Ingalls president Kari Wilkinson. “Shipbuilding is a challenging, extremely rewarding and potentially life-changing career and we are excited to offer so many full-time, stable, full-benefits opportunities to our community.”
Ingalls offers competitive pay and health insurance, 12 paid holidays annually, a health care clinic for shipbuilders and their families and more. The shipyard recently completed facilities enhancements, including more than a million square feet of covered work area, improved access to work sites and tool rooms, cool down and hydration stations and a second dining area in the shipyard that features a Chick-fil-A.
No-cost, pre-hire training is available to those without the required skills or work experience. Ingalls is looking to hire ship fitters, electricians, pipefitters, pipe welders and structural welders and seeking applicants with mechanical, hot work or carpentry experience.
“As Mississippi’s largest industrial employer, we remain committed to the long-term viability of our workforce,” said Edmond Hughes, Ingalls vice president of human resources and administration. “We continue to evaluate and enhance the employee experience so that we are able to attract the talent we need to build ships that protect and defend our nation.”
The new contract, meanwhile, with a potential total value of $724 million, is to provide planning yard services to U.S. Navy amphibious ships already in service.
“Ingalls has a 40-year history of providing planning yard services to ships in active service,” Kari Wilkinson said. “We consider this a core competency and a critical part of our mission to support the Navy in meeting fleet commitments around the world.”
Planning yard services provided will be in support of four different classes of amphibious ships -- transport dock, assault, command, and dock landing classes of ships.
The contract includes options over a seven-year period and covers fleet modernization availability planning; engineering, design and logistics support; material procurement; program and configuration data management; and on-site technical support through established homeport and planning yard offices and resources.
Gulf shipyards struggle to find workers amid shipbuilding spree
This story was updated April 25, 2023, at 7:53 p.m. EST with a statement from an Ingalls Shipbuilding spokesperson.
LOCKPORT, La. — A small houseboat floats on Bayou Lafourche in rural Louisiana, housing workers at the family-owned Bollinger Shipyards’ Lockport facility situated roughly 35 miles upstream from the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s one of the temporary living facilities that Bollinger maintains to house nonlocal workers and spare them lengthy commutes — one of the incentives the small yard offers to lure and retain employees from a limited pool of skilled shipbuilding labor in the region. Across the street, several workers in half a dozen fabrication plants are busy welding steel, while electricians wade through a tangle of wires in assembled modules for the U.S. Coast Guard’s fast response cutters.
Bollinger employs about 3,500 people at 14 facilities scattered throughout Louisiana and Mississippi, and CEO Ben Bordelon predicts he will likely have to hire between 500 and 1,000 additional workers within the next two years, excluding subcontractors.
“Engineers right now are tough [to find], and designers,” Bordelon told Defense News in an April interview at the Lockport facility. “I hate to say just the basic stuff, but shipbuilders, welders, electricians, painters; we have a need right now for a lot of different crafts.”
The workforce shortage Bollinger faces is similar to that of other shipyards across the country. Those companies are citing labor shortfalls as one of the most significant factors hampering U.S. shipbuilding capacity, as the Navy scrambles to reach its statutorily required 355-ship fleet.
A November analysis from the Congressional Budget Office found the Navy’s plan will average between $30 billion and $33 billion in spending annually over the next 30 years.
Bollinger recently won a contract to build the Navy’s sixth berthing barge, used to temporarily house military personnel. But the competition for labor is particularly acute in the Gulf, where the company must compete with two nearby behemoths in the industry as well as a bevy of smaller shipyards and the oil and gas sectors.
The company frequently moves workers around its facilities as production needs shift. For instance, its newly acquired facility in Pascagoula, Mississippi, requires an influx of labor to build the Coast Guard’s next polar security cutter. Pascagoula is also home to Ingalls Shipbuilding, the state’s largest employer with approximately 11,500 employees.
Ingalls, whose Navy contracts include the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock, is also expected to go on a hiring spree.
“Workforce development is hard stuff. However, we’re very focused on it and seeing good hiring trends,” Kimberly Aguillard, an Ingalls Shipbuilding spokesperson, told Defense News.
Ingalls Shipbuilding President Kari Wilkinson told reporters in April at the annual Sea-Air-Space conference in Maryland that the company hired “thousands of people in a normal year.”
About 45 miles away from Ingalls, Austal USA’s shipyard in Mobile, Alabama, employs nearly 3,000 people. Even as it wraps up work on assembling the Navy’s last littoral combat ship, the company is trying to increase the size of its workforce by one-third as it opens a new installation exclusively devoted to constructing submarine modules.
“We’re putting a new building in that’s going to be dedicated fully to submarine work,” Larry Ryder, Austal’s vice president for business development and external affairs, told Defense News in an April interview at the shipyard. “It’s going to be about 1,000 jobs of output, supporting the submarine-industrial base.”
The tight labor market and the new hiring efforts give workers greater leverage in salary negotiations. Data aggregated by job site Glassdoor indicates welders in the three states — Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama — typically earn between $27,000 and $58,000 per year, with pay increasing for more specialized skill sets. The annual salary range for electricians in the area is $30,000 to $77,000.
Companies are getting creative with perks they offer to potential workers, and they’re investing in apprenticeship programs to build a future workforce pool meant to benefit the region’s shipbuilding industry.
For instance, Ingalls opened a Chick-fil-A in the middle of its shipyard to give employees an alternative to the relatively bland cafeteria food. Shortly after the restaurant opened, Ingalls had to remove the franchise from Google Maps after fried chicken fans unwittingly drove up to the secure yard for a meal.
Meanwhile, Austal adjusted its shift schedule so its employees work 10-hour days for four days a week. Employees have the option of a three-day weekend or working overtime on Friday. The company also runs a training academy for apprentices, as do its competitors.
“You’ve got to have good safety programs, good benefits, good training — spending money upfront on recruiting the right people,” said Bordelon, the top executive at Bollinger Shipyards. “We offer recruiting bonuses internally.”
Ingalls partners with local schools and universities to recruit unskilled apprentices at the shipyard’s Maritime Training Academy. The facility houses rooms that are each devoted to a component of the craft. In one room, some eight trainees in hard hats and goggles practiced pipefitting with an instructor.
The academy allows trainees to begin working at Ingalls while learning hands-on shipbuilding skills, first in the classroom and then on actual modules in the yard as part of a two- to three-year program. It used to train more than 1,000 students before the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which lowered that number to 400. Ingalls hopes to increase that to 800 by the end of this year, and exceed that next year.
“Ingalls hires on a scale far bigger than us,” said Ryder, the Austal vice president. “Bollinger is hiring. We’re hiring. So it’s a challenge, and we’ve got to think beyond just Mobile. We’ve got to think nationally on how do we draw people to the region.”
Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered U.S. foreign policy, national security, international affairs and politics in Washington since 2014. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.
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