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Manufacturing is on an upturn in Oregon. Vigor Industrial and Oregon Iron Works, an Oregon business icon, have merged. A huge, world-class drydock is now in Portland. Companies like Erickson Air Crane are building heavy lift helicopters in Oregon. In Redmond a company has set up an operation to build aerial tankers to help deal with the forest fire problem. Precision Castparts is on a roll and Greenbrier has a great backlog. There are many other great stories as well.

These companies are building real, tangible items – things you can touch and see. But they are experiencing a labor problem: insufficient skilled Oregonians who can do the work. So, in some cases they end up training employees in the basic skills required of metal workers and other trades. That is a drag not only on their bottom line, but also their production.

It seems that our public schools are not taking this game-changing shift in the Oregon economy to heart. Vocational programs are still getting short shrift.

Recently, a Portland Public Schools high school set up a vocational program for the culinary arts. Three hundred students signed up, but they needed to raise their own money to make it work.

The local public education industry seems to be bent on preparing kids only for further institutional education at costs that must be borne by the individual. But as we are now finding out, these costs are not sustainable. Students are voting with their feet, and young Oregonians are not obtaining completion certificates.

When the construction industry determined that more skill building was needed, professionals first went to public education, but were turned down. As a result they set up their own academy. Even a dismal graduation rate does not seem to be enough to redirect the inertia on North Dixon Street.

All Oregonians lose. Those who do graduate from high school cannot get jobs without additional training because they have no real job skills. Many don’t see that through and end up at minimum wage jobs or worse and become part of the social welfare bureaucracy.

But aside from refocusing public schools on educating our young people with job skills, Oregon needs to rediscover manufacturing jobs. It is clear that the economy is there to support this attitude. Oregon needs to convince its young people that these jobs are good jobs and a great way to launch a career. Life is not all about peering into a computer screen.

Oregon also must hustle and invest in its infrastructure to meet this manufacturing uptick. In this year’s legislative session HB 4111 set up a commission to look at new strategies for developing infrastructure. The first meeting has yet to take place.

Business is beginning to feel the constraints of this second-class infrastructure, be it delays receiving raw materials, delays delivering to customers or delayed employee arrivals to workplaces.

We no longer build the world’s greatest projects; they are in China or elsewhere. This, however, might just be the moment that a critical mass comes to Oregon’s infrastructure table.

Christian Steinbrecher is president of Columbia River Port Engineers Inc. and the immediate past president of the Oregon Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He is the editor of ASCE Oregon’s Report Card on Oregon’s Infrastructure. Contact him at cfs@[email protected].