Companies from General Electric to yogurt producer Chobani are adding U.S. workers, accelerating a rebound in hiring, as chief executives prepare for greater demand in a strengthening economic recovery.
Boeing is bringing in more than 100 union machinists a week for a 60 percent boost in output by 2014. Nissan will expand in Tennessee with 1,000 people making lithium-ion batteries. And a GE executive was at a Kentucky appliance plant before dawn this month to greet some of the 500 new employees.
“The next few years are going to be a different picture than what we saw in the last few,” said Hamdi Ulukaya, CEO and founder of South Edmeston, N.Y.-based Chobani, which is building a 300-worker plant in Twin Falls, Idaho. “To get ready for this, we need to have our manufacturing capacity in place.”
The hiring reflects optimism among CEOs that the economy will continue to strengthen and more workers will be needed to meet demand. It may signal an end to a lockdown on job growth following the financial crisis that lingered even after the recession ended in June 2009, with economists estimating more new jobs created this year than any time since 2006.
Manufacturing, whether for GE refrigerators or Greenbrier Cos. rail cars, is a bright spot in a labor market still so weak that December’s unemployment rate of 8.5 percent was the lowest in three years. U.S. factory payrolls expanded by 225,000 jobs in 2011, more than double the total from a year earlier.
“The ground seems to be set for a pretty decent near-term outlook for manufacturing,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist for Pierpont Securities in Stamford, Conn. “There’s still room for job growth there if demand continues to pick up.”
That’s a possibility at the U.S. unit of Germany’s Harting Deutschland, a maker of industrial connectors. CEO Rolf Meyer said his business probably will hire 20 more people in 2012, after doubling the workforce to 120 since the recession.
“We have a couple of large orders that we’re negotiating on in the broadcast and medical industries, and these will likely hit in the next five or six months,” said Meyer, who supplies customers such as GE, Siemens and Alstom from operations based in Elgin, Ill.
Boeing, responding to airlines clamoring for more fuel-efficient jets, added 10,000 jobs last year as hiring in the Chicago- based planemaker’s commercial aircraft unit made up for shrinking defense employment.
New employees for Boeing’s Seattle- area plants are piling into orientation sessions held by the planemaker each Friday, said Tommy Wilson, a machinists union official. The six-hour meetings, in an auditorium near Boeing Field, focus on policies from badge usage to parking, benefits and avoiding personal use of Internet access.
“They’ve been hiring like crazy,” said Connie Kelliher, a union spokeswoman in Seattle. “We’ve long since exhausted the people on layoffs, and they’ve been new hires.”
