Actor John Ratzenberger is best known for playing roles like Cliff Clavin on “Cheers” or voicing “Hamm” the piggy bank in “Toy Story,” but his current passion is talking about skilled labor jobs and making sure people, especially younger generations, still have the ability to fix and build things.
The actor spoke to Fox News Digital this week about the importance of trade jobs and skilled laborers in society, which he says are not as valued in the public eye as they used to be.
“I’m trying to save civilization because civilization was built by people,” Ratzenberger said about the importance of speaking up about the need for these manufacturing jobs or these labor skills in the U.S.
He warned that society is currently raising people that don’t know how to use tools, change a tire, or “know how to fix your screen door,” which he said will have dire consequences for civilization.
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The current lack of manufacturing and skilled labor jobs in America has reached a critical point, especially in the years post-COVID-19.
According to a 2024 report by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute (MI), as many as 3.8 million additional employees will be needed in the manufacturing sector between 2024 and 2033 as current workers retire or change careers and new roles in the industry are created. However, only a fraction of that need may be met.
The report predicts that as many as half, or 1.9 million jobs, could remain unfilled if manufacturers aren’t able to address the skills and applicant gaps. Failing to fill those jobs could dim the prospects for companies to achieve future growth plans and hurt the U.S. manufacturing industry’s global competitiveness.
Ratzenberger, who was a carpenter before he became an actor, told Fox he has been warning about this shortage of labor skills.
“For the last 20 years,” he said. “I’ve been going around the country giving speeches and talks to anybody that’ll listen: really big organizations, I’ve gone to Congress twice, you know, to blow my clarion call, to say, ‘Folks, we’ve got to wake up.’”
“But that’s my fear, that the civilization will grind again, and can grind to a halt, because we’ve neglected to teach our children how to use tools,” he continued, saying, “We used to do it – middle school, seventh, eighth grade – we’d go to shop class and that was a blessing.”
The actor, who grew up around skilled workers in the factory town of Bridgeport, Connecticut, described when he noticed the cultural attitudes about skilled labor shift in the country.
He described seeing how people “in the 60s turned it all around and started looking down our nose at people who worked with their hands,” and noted that “more and more people were surprised and shocked” that he had carpentry skills or new how to build things.
“And it’s even gotten more severe now. There are people, believe it or not, who are 30, 40 years old who don’t know how to hang a picture on a wall. I’ve seen it,” he said.
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Ratzenberger explained why he thought this shift happened, chalking it up to how life has simply become more convenient.
“Well, everything’s gotten easier. I mean, you know, I’ve just made myself a cup of tea and I always, you know, marvel at the fact that I can just turn this little knob and clean water comes out. Alright. There was a time when there were probably people still alive who remember that didn’t happen. You know, you’ve got to go fetch the water and there’s a well or creek or – and there was a lot of intense labor that went into everything.”
Mentioning seeing cowboys in western movies, he added, “I always marvel at the fact that every person back then had to have a lot of skills. You had to know about horses, you had to know about raising animals, best chicken feed, working with leather, a blacksmith. You know, all the skills that person had was necessary for survival.”
“So, the easier things got, and the less people need to do those things, the less things we learned,” he explained, adding that “there’s certainly a lot of helpless people wandering around today.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Ratzenberger told Fox that the dignity of skilled laborers should be “elevated” in society because of the necessary work that they do.
“I avoid the term blue collar worker and just use essential worker,” the actor said.
“They’re essential… All the upper echelon elites couldn’t function without the essential workers. You know, I mean, the subway. You’ve got people inspecting and repairing the tracks. But you know those potholes that open up every now and swallow cars and houses? [those] come from the water systems [which] are over 100 years old and are springing leaks.”
“And there’s nobody in that system that knows how to fix it,” he said, adding, “There might be three or four, but there should be three or 400, right?”
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As part of his advocacy for more labor skills, Ratzenberger told Fox that he urges universities to start classes to teach people how to fix things, like an automotive repair class, for example.
“Everybody drives a car, so why not have one class on the functioning or the basis of a car? How does it work? How was the internal combustion engine work? What are pistons? What do they do? What’s the spark plug? Where? How does – where’d it come from? It didn’t fall out of a tree. Somebody put some time and effort into inventing it.”
For individuals looking to boost their labor skills, he recommended going out and finding one of these classes. He personally recommended a “boat building class” because it teaches people a wide variety of manufacturing skills, from working the wood to setting up the electrical wiring that supplies lighting on the boat.
He urged people to take “a class at your local high school, or go to a manual arts college or a high school.”
“Just learn how to do things. It’s not hard. It’s just muscle memory,” he declared.
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