Maine’s quest for economic sustainability suffers from the need to wage a two-front campaign. On the one hand, we must continue to fight a rearguard action against the continuous and unavoidable advances of globalization and market dynamics.

The imminent closing of the Madison Paper Industries mill in Madison means the loss of 200 jobs in the mill and probably the full-time equivalent of that number because of the loss of sales on the part of the mill’s vendors and the businesses where its workers shopped. And this is but the latest skirmish in a long campaign that has seen the loss of over 2,300 jobs in the paper industry just since 2011.

To fight this campaign, we must wage first an all-out public relations war against the defeatism that repeats the myth that “manufacturing is dirty, dangerous and dying.” Such shibboleths simply make it more difficult for Maine’s many successful manufacturers to attract the workers they need.

At virtually the same time that Madison announced its plan to close, Cousineau Wood Products, just down the road, announced its need to expand production. Similarly, manufacturers such as Alcom in Winslow, Kennebec Technologies and J.S. McCarthy in Augusta, Hancock Lumber (based in Casco, with other locations around Maine and New Hampshire) and Hussey Seating in North Berwick are all thriving and fully engaged in a process no longer called “human resources” but “talent acquisition.”

In helping those who have lost jobs to changing technologies and market dynamics, this is indeed a rearguard action. But in terms of helping workers transition to new opportunities, it must be an all-out effort to restructure the way we deliver the education and training services to today’s growing manufacturers.

Our other front is less about the dynamics of product markets and more about demographics and the dynamics (or lack thereof) of the labor market.

Maine today has about 143,000 workers, across all industries, in the 55-to-64 age bracket. They constitute about 66 percent of our entire population in that age bracket. In contrast, the 52,000 workers in the 65-plus age bracket constitute about 21 percent of the entire Maine population age 65 and older.

In other words, the death of retirement has been greatly exaggerated. The 21 percent of our seniors who work is way, way up from the 13 percent who worked in 2000.

But even 21 percent, even 30 percent, is way, way below the 66 percent of the 55-to-64 age bracket. Each year for at least the next decade, tens of thousands of Maine workers will choose not to work – or at least to work less than they do today. These numbers of “lost jobs” make the 200 jobs lost in Madison – and even the 2,300 jobs lost in the entire paper industry since 2011 – look like a drop in a bucket.

The forward-looking campaign to replace our older workers looks even more daunting, given the declining employment engagement of our youngest cohorts of workers.

In 2000, 33,000 Mainers aged 16 to 19 held jobs. They represented nearly half of the state’s entire population of 16- to 19-year-olds. Many, if not most, of the jobs these young people held were part time, but they did represent engagement in the labor market. In 2015, the number of Maine workers aged 16 to 19 had fallen to 22,000, and the share of the cohort working had fallen from 50 percent to 37 percent.

The sheer number of this drop is the result of an absolute drop in the numbers in this age cohort, our aging population, declining birth rate and emigration. And much of the decline in work involvement is attributable to higher and longer degrees of school attendance. But such excuses are less useful in explaining the similar patterns of disengagement from the labor force that hold true for the 20-to-24, 25-to-34 and even the 35-to-44 age cohorts.

At a time when the very survival, much less prosperity, of Maine’s businesses (all of Maine’s businesses) depends on engaging younger workers and preparing them to replace those moving out of or diminishing their efforts in the workforce, we are seeing declining proportions of our younger age cohorts holding and advancing in the careers our economy needs to continue to exist.

Both campaigns – the rearguard product market transformation campaign, and the forward-looking demographic campaign– demand a fundamental restructuring of the school-to-work transition and, even more fundamentally, a rethinking of the very meaning of learning and working.

Charles Lawton is chief economist for Planning Decisions, Inc. He can be contacted at:

clawton@planningdecisions.com

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