Amid shortage, Navy recruiting program struggles to keep half first-year shipbuilders: Official

USS Massachusetts (SSN-798), the 25th Virginia-class fast attack submarine. under construction at Newport News Shipyard in Virginia in 2022. (photo courtesy Huntington Ingalls Industries)

WASHINGTON — The Navy’s effort to recruit thousands of new shipyard workers is suffering from more than half of its recruits leaving the industry within their first year of being hired, a senior Navy official told lawmakers.

“We’ve had 16 million hits on [the recruiting website], 2.5 million applications. It’s led to about 9,700 employees hired” in fiscal year 2023, Brett Seidle, the Navy’s acting acquisition executive told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee on Tuesday. “Those folks are coming, and then we’re attriting out way too quick. We probably are seeing 50 to 60 percent attrition in our first-year employees.”

Seidle said the biggest reason for the attrition was down to paychecks and the Navy and industry’s evident inability to compete with other private sector manufacturing and service jobs. The initiative to recruit new shipyard workers from around the country has been a high-profile effort for the Navy over the past two years, with major advertisements at events like Major League Baseball games, NASCAR races and, according to Seidle, this year’s college basketball March Madness.

Navy officials have previously said they set a starting goal of attracting 100,000 workers over a 10-year period and have spent more than $1 billion dollars with a Texas-based non-profit organization, BlueForge Alliance, to do it.

But Seidle’s admission that more than half of new recruits drop out in their first year is a striking reality check on the state of the service’s efforts.

Shipyards, and the second- and third-tier suppliers hiring these recruits, rely on raising a skilled workforce over time. In theory, as the workforce becomes more skilled, they’ll produce ships more efficiently and with fewer errors. That most of these new recruits are dropping out within a year of entering the workforce necessarily means the timeline to build the industrial base the Navy needs will be significantly prolonged — even if the broader recruiting goals are consistently met.

The workforce, or lack thereof, has proven to be a major factor in many of the issues that have plagued the Navy’s premiere shipbuilding programs, according to testimony on Tuesday and earlier this month from representatives of multiple independent government agencies, including the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office.

Difficulties in competing with the service industry wages in particular is a common complaint among shipbuilding executives. “It used to be that there was a big gap between manufacturing wages and other wages in any other industry,” Ingalls’ Shipbuilding President Kari Wilkinson told Breaking Defense in August. “Now you’ve got service industry wages — you can go down and be an attendant at Buc-ees for the same as an entry wage at a shipyard.”

Other problems include affordable and available housing. Sen. Angus King, of Maine, during the hearing said a shipyard in his state had successfully hired workers who then struggled to find housing within commuting distance of the shipyard.

When asked about what effect Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was having on the Navy’s workforce, Seidle and Naval Sea Systems Command chief Vice Adm. James Downey characterized DOGE’s cuts as “manageable.”

Seidle said DOGE’s “deferred resignation” offer resulted in approximately 3 percent of his workforce exiting the Navy. After factoring in personnel who were already eligible for retirement and were likely to leave soon regardless, Seidle said the cut was closer to 1 percent.

Downey said that as NAVSEA chief, he oversees a workforce of 90,000 people — majority of whom are civilians — and that roughly 1,200 accepted the offer for deferred resignation.