Manufacturing Month Special edition of the
Thursday, Oct. 4, 2018
‘I won’t have to struggle anymore’
A welding degree is a ticket to a better life for three area women By David Dolmage Newton Daily News While the image of “Rosie the Riveter” may have been a staple of World War II era propaganda, women are still a distinct minority in the welding industry. According to a 2013 study completed by the United States Department of Labor, female welders make up less than two percent of welders nationwide. That’s a number Jared Kingery, the welding instructor at DMACC’s Newton campus, would like to change. According to Kingery, who cited research that shows women often have better hand eye coordination than their male counterparts, women often make better welders. “We’ve got to get the women interested, we just don’t have enough
guys doing this,” Kingery said. Why welding? Kingery rattles of the statistics one by one, pointing out the nationwide shortage of welders, estimated as high as 300,000 as well the opportunity to make a good living. On a daily basis, Kingery said he gets calls from employers who are looking for welders to hire. After a career working on an assembly line at Maytag Kingery said he knows firsthand how lucky his students are. “We’re getting it out in front of them now. We didn’t have this when I went to high school,” Kingery said. “That’s why I went to work at Maytag. I needed to pay the bills.” In Newton, DMACC offers students two pathways towards earning a welding degree: high school students in Jasper County can enroll in the
community college’s Career Academy Program, as well as starting the welding program after they’ve graduated. High school students who start the program their junior year can easily obtain a two-year degree from DMACC less than a year after graduation, Kingery said. Students who complete both years at the Career Academy will have earned 21 college credits, only 15 credits shy of the 36 credits needed for a welding diploma from DMACC. Once they’ve graduated from the program, there’s a constantly growing job market for welders. Kingery said he’s had many local businesses reach out to him, some companies are offering a starting salary of more than $45,000 per year for a certified welder. WELDING | 4C
David Dolmage/Daily News Autumn Sutton of Newton, practices welding with an oxy-acetylene torch in the welding lab at Newton’s Des Moines Area Community College campus.
Lifelong Labor: Brad Holloway reflects on 42 years at Thombert By P.M. Brannock Newton Daily News If you’ve ever seen a combine slice through rows of corn or watched a forklift rearrange a warehouse, you probably weren’t looking at the system of wheels, tires and belts that keep the machinery chugging along tirelessly. If you had examined the wheels and tires when the machines stopped, you probably would have noticed a serial number beginning with a “T.” The “T” stands for “Thombert, Inc.,” the 72-year-old manufacturing company in Newton that leads the market in polyurethane tires and wheels for forklift equipment and rubber-tracked agricultural mid rollers. The products begin with the heavy metal castings around which machine operators pour a brightly colored or shiny black polyurethane elastomer called Dyalon to create the wheels and tires. Burly men and a few intrepid women in T-shirts, work pants and thick-treaded boots push the product through the process. They measure and correct for concentricity with robots that look like Disney-Pixar creations. They hang castings coated with Smurf-blue adhesive to dry on racks Millennials use for displaying doughnuts at parties. A few zip from task to task aboard Segways on steroids. Rock music from the genre’s golden
age thumps from retro box speakers. Lathes trim excess polyurethane from wheels, and synthetic curlicue ribbons fly through the air. The heat from curing ovens tuned to precise temperatures and overwhelming noise that reverberates from the worn concrete floor to the cacophonous ceiling might render this a young man’s job, but a handful of employees on Thombert’s production floor have watched the company grow for over four decades. Brad Holloway’s gnarled knuckles tell the story of someone who has seen the evolution of ergonomic mechanization within the facility: Someone who packed thousands of boxes and loaded and unloaded hundreds of semi-trucks manually before increased mechanization lifted some of the manual burden. He’s Thombert’s longest-tenured production worker. Forty-two years ago, Holloway stepped through Thombert’s doors for an initial interview. A few days later, Bob Smith, a partner in the company, called him back. “I had been working in the restaurant business for six years, and he asked me why I was getting out of the restaurant business,” Holloway says. “I told him that I wanted to make more money.” The answer must have satisfied
Smith because a supervisor called Holloway in for a third interview. At 19 years old, Holloway began working at Thombert as a janitor. “I was the youngest one here. Everybody else was around 40, so that was very intimidating but once I got to know the guys and stuff, I fit right in.” He still spends weekends fishing with friends he has made throughout his time with the company. Over the decades, Holloway moved through jobs in almost every aspect of Thombert’s production process. He’s poured Dyalon around castings. He’s shaved ribbons of polyurethane off rubber tires to even their sides. For 35
years, he filled orders to ship across the country. Holloway can remember a Thombert before the trappings of technology breathed life into what had been only futuristic ideas: Wall-E-esque robotics and Star Trek like computers. In his early years, Holloway hopped into Bob Smith’s El Camino and drove the truck, HOLLOWAY | 3C
P.M. Brannock/Daily News Brad Holloway takes a break from work to pose outside Thombert, Inc., in Newton.