New York City's Small Business Manufacturers Encounter Dearth of Skilled Employees - by Elaine Rivera, WNYC, NY
REPORTER: Connell also says that traditional highly skilled apprenticeship programs used to be run by unions. They kept a steady stream of skilled workers moving into these small companies. But in order to get the job, many times you needed to know someone which meant that most employees came from almost exclusively male, tightly knit ethnic groups.
Today there are fewer union-run apprenticeships. Increasingly, more trades are becoming non-unionized as companies choose workers from the growing immigrant labor pool which is skilled and willing to work for less.