Preventing obsolescence in the tube and pipe industry

As haunting as the demise of newspapers is, their fate doesn’t have to be shared by anyone, even a tube and pipe industry struggling to find and retain workers. NewSaetiew / iStock / Getty Images Plus

Obsolescence is like a car wreck. You don’t think about it until you’re upside down in the ditch, hoping someone will help.

I got a grim reminder of that the one night while walking near Michigan Avenue in Chicago during FABTECH.

The reminder was an empty box—one that used to burst with fresh copies of the many print publications that once competed feverishly for readers across Chicagoland. The Tribune, the Sun-Times, the Chicago Reader, the South Side Weekly, and many others—no more, at least not there.

Sadly, that ghostly wreck of a newsstand pretty well sums up the obsolescence of the newspaper business as we knew it, punctuated not too long ago by the New York Times publishing its final sports section ever (after purchasing The Athletic for more than half a billion dollars).

Think about that: After 100-plus years of chronicling Babe Ruth’s Yankees and Phil Simms’ Giants and countless other stories, the Gray Lady has nothing left to offer millions of New York sports fans but an arrow pointing them elsewhere.

On a personal note, September also marked 30 years since I published my very first professional article—a sports story, thank you—in the Stevens Point (Wis.) Journal. I remember burning the midnight oil at the Journal offices, thrilled to be writing on a real newsroom computer and the ubiquitous smell of ink from the press in the basement. That aroma sticks in my memory as firmly as the joy of seeing my byline in print the next day.

Alas, those days are gone, as obsolete as those old monochrome computers, the press that cranked out that first article, everything. The question clanging in my mind, as loudly as that old press churning full speed, is: How does the tube and pipe industry make itself obsolescence-proof? How can it ensure that it ends up in a better place than that empty shell rusting in downtown Chicago?

One answer, I think, came at the TPA Advisory Board roundtable: Push education about the business to the next generation of industry professionals as early as we can, and keep pushing. It’s working for welding and sheet metal fabrication; it could work for tube- and pipemaking too.

“The schools are teaching more fabrication now than they used to,” said Lisa Wertzbaugher, a columnist for this magazine and co-owner of a fabrication business she runs with her husband in Liberty, Iowa. “You can notice the difference because there are more kids now pursuing a welding career or some sort of industrial tech because it’s there in middle and high school.”

The question Wertzbaugher posits is, how can tube and pipe businesses create or encourage curriculum that replicates the success of the welding and fabrication programs cropping up around the nation?

Of course, the same technology revolution that doomed newspapers to the unprofitable desert of the internet has created positive opportunities for all things metal fabrication, including automation, easier-to-use controls, and collaborative robots that didn’t exist even 10 years ago. If tube and pipe businesses can follow their industry brethren and use that technology to hook younger, more tech-savvy employees, they might be able to push obsolescence that much further down the road.