Summer Jobs

We picked up a couple of summer interns at my company this week. They came to us through a government program that is part of the Obama stimulus package. Basically, the government pays their wages and picks up their benefits (worker’s comp, FICA taxes), put they actually work for us.

Free labor. What’s not to like, right?

Actually, it is kind of a tricky prospect, trying to get useful output out of these guys. Business was slower earlier in the year when we signed on for this program, and we were working reduced hours. I had a concern that our regular workforce would perceive the summer workers as competing with them for work.

Fortunately, business has picked up from the low point last winter. But these guys (let’s call them Frick and Frack) know nothing about working in an industrial facility. Zip, zilch, nada. So to get any more output out of them than pushing a broom, they will have to be trained. I can’t even let them mop the floor after they’ve swept it without proper training. Oily mop water from an industrial facility has to be properly disposed of.

It is the classic investment problem. I have to invest resources into training Frick and Frack in order to turn them into usable resources in their own right (or, as I like to call them, interchangeable worker units). To train them I have to take my regular folks off their jobs to do the OJT. Too much training, and I can’t get my money back out of them by increased productivity, especially since they’re only here for the summer. Also, I have to keep regular work going while they are being trained.

Still, I want them to get more out of their summer job than just pushing a broom. So I’m looking for that balance point where we teach them enough for them to say they have learned something, but at the same time keep the training short enough to get some payback off the investment in training.

In a larger sense, I want Frick and Frack to come out of this experience with more skills than they went in because they aren’t really free labor. After all, the government is picking up the check. Spending money just to create make-work jobs is a terrible use of the government’s limited resources. Spending the same money to help develop the next generation workforce makes a lot more sense to me.

After all, it’s my tax dollars at work.