At Ingalls, plenty of space for shipbuilding but ramping up workforce will be the challenge

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.

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.”