PASCAGOULA, Miss. – The first shift at Ingalls Shipbuilding starts two hours before dawn in the summer. Around 4 a.m. workers begin to arrive at the 800-acre shipyard – an incongruous white square in the middle of brown-green Mississippi swampland. Welders, pipefitters, machinists and painters hustle to work on ships that tower skyscraper-high over the concrete of the shipyard.
Temperatures in Pascagoula routinely hit triple digits in August and keeping a tropical schedule – borrowed from the U.S. Navy in the Pacific – that ends the day before the late afternoon heat makes the work more bearable.
Giant movable shades cover open spaces. The shipyard has made an effort to improve the available creature comforts. Ingalls has just wrapped a multi-year $1 billion capital investment that includes efficiency and work quality improvements for its 11,300 workers.
“Shipbuilding is hard work. It’s never going to be easy. We’re trying to make it as not-hard as it can be,” Ingalls president Kari Wilkinson told USNI News during a late August tour of the yard.
Keeping workers happy is a major concern not only for Wilkinson but also for shipyards across the Gulf Coast.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the retirements of older shipbuilders. Shipyards are doing whatever they can to recruit and train a younger workforce and retain them once they’re in the yard. Retention for entry-level hull and pipe workers has seen positive trends, Wilkinson said.
“We haven’t made material improvements in retention over the last couple of years. We’ve gotten some stabilization, but it’s not where it was before the pandemic,” she said.
Holding on to the workforce is about to get harder.
In the last 18 months, Ingalls has secured additional ship orders that will take the yard well into the 2030s with two multi-year Navy deals that require more shipbuilders.
Between Ingalls, nearby naval shipbuilder Austal USA and a Navy-backed private equity submarine outsourcing yard in Mobile, Ala.,, the Gulf Coast region needs more than 5,000 new shipyard workers for the ships under construction at Ingalls and Austal USA. The Navy also wants submarine modules built outside of the two East Coast nuclear shipyards.
How many workers the region can produce is still an open question.
A 2022 report on Gulf Coast labor issues commissioned by the Navy found that the workforce had significantly shrunk since peaking in 2016. The report found numerous causes for the decline in the number of shipyard workers.
“Changing patterns in U.S. military ship buying, new trends in the domestic and global commercial ship market, social and cultural perceptions favoring non-vocational training, and economic downturns have combined to exert significant strain on the shipbuilding industrial base labor force. Conditions have been further exacerbated due to the damage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic,” reads the report. “The potential imbalance in labor supply and demand projected over the next five years for two of the four trades assessed could result in construction delays for ship classes built on the Gulf Coast.”
The study found that machinists, metal fabricators and shipfitters are in the shortest supply.
And there’s an additional wrinkle: Not only will the shipbuilders compete with each other, but also with other industries that have closed the wage gap with shipbuilding.
“There’s fierce competition on the Gulf Coast,” Matthew Paxton, president of the Shipbuilders Council of America, told USNI News in an interview last month.
“Years before … you weren’t competing with wages at Walmart. Usually, the shipyards were a little bit more competitive, but, because of all the things going on in our economy right now, tight labor markets, the competition is not only amongst those shipyards, it’s amongst other competing industries.”
Ingalls Shipbuilding
The Mississippi yard is building four classes of ships for the Navy and Coast Guard with a smattering of major repair and modernization work thrown in.
Ingalls’ order book is now full, thanks to a multi-year guided-missile destroyer ordered in 2023 and a multi-year amphibious ship award. While the Navy always planned to buy more destroyers, there was some doubt that the service would order more amphibs.
As part of its Fiscal Year 2023 budget submission, the Pentagon proposed ending the San Antonio-class amphibious warship line, shrinking the Navy’s amphibious lift capacity overall. Over two years, Marines and their allies in Congress mounted a sustained campaign that pushed through a new multi-year deal and ended a “strategic pause” on amphibious shipbuilding ordered by Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro.
After the Navy stalled its decision to build new amphibious warships for more than a year, the service inked a $9.6 billion deal with Ingalls to keep the San Antonio line alive and replace the aging amphibious fleet. The new deal buys three San Antonio-class amphibious ships and the America-class big deck assault ship Helmand Province (LHD-10).
The amphibious ship contracts follow an award last year for six Flight III Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers. Since the Navy is sticking with that destroyer class for now, that firms up the yard’s long-term order book. The start of the service’s next large surface combatant, DDG(X), has been pushed out well into the 2030s.
Ingalls delivered the first Flight III destroyer, USS Jack H. Lucas (DDG-125), last year. Jack H. Lucas is the first destroyer to feature the AN/SPY-6 integrated air and missile defense radar, which demanded an updated power and cooling system. The hull has grown since the Flight IIA Arleigh Burke.
During USNI News’ visit to the yard, Flight III Ted Stevens (DDG-128) was fitting out in the water while Jeremiah Denton (DDG-129) was in primer white paint ahead of launching.
Along with the Burkes, San Antonios and Americas, Ingalls is also finishing up the Legend-class line of National Security Cutters for the U.S. Coast Guard. The yard began construction on the 11th NSC Freidman (WMSL-760) in 2021, but the vessel was not visible during USNI News’ tour of the yard. HII referred questions on the program to the Coast Guard. Questions left with a Coast Guard spokesperson were not immediately answered.
The shipyard is also replacing the 155 mm advanced gun systems on the Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyers with missile tubes for hypersonic weapons. During a late August visit to the yard, USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) was up on “the hill,” the shorthand that Ingalls workers use to refer to the working surface of the shipyard. Wilkinson said the ship should be back in the water by the end of the year. Nearby, Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002) was getting its combat system activated after leaving General Dynamics Bath Iron Works in 2022. Johnson will be converted to launch hypersonic weapons after the Zumwalt is complete.
The yard’s ability to pull ships out of the water and position them on shore keeps the dry dock free and makes modernization work easier to keep on schedule.
Earlier this month, the yard used the system to launch the first Flight II San Antonio-class amphib Harrisburg (LPD-30).
With a healthy order book, the emphasis is on building the workforce to support the ships under construction. Ingalls has built an extensive three- to four-year training and apprenticeship program for the next generation of shipbuilders. The school currently has 600 students enrolled.
Shipbuilding across the region is struggling with inflation and a spike in wages for all private employers in the country. According to federal wage data, the average hourly earnings of private company employees have risen by almost 19 percent.
“We also are very mindful, as we increase wages, it makes our products less affordable for our customer,” Wilkinson said.
Workers are reminded that their talent is in demand when they drive to the Ingalls shipyard. Right off the exit from Interstate 10 sits a large billboard advertising a nearby competitor.
“Come to work at Bollinger,” it reads.
Austal USA’s Lucky 13
Forty minutes east, Austal USA is busier than at any time in its history.
The company’s Australian parent built a business on high-speed aluminum ferries and used that know-how to build the angular Independence-class Littoral Combat Ships and Spearhead-class Expeditionary Fast Transport (EPF).
Following the planned end of the Indys and the winding down of the Spearhead-line, Austal USA retooled its yard to take on steel construction as part of an overall $500 million investment.
In August, the brightness of the aluminum manufacturing line visible in 2022 has given way to a darker interior. Hunks of raw steel were lit by the sparks of welders joining plates together. Giant sections of the Navy’s Auxiliary Floating Dry Dock Medium 15 (AFDM), which began fabrication in 2023, dominated the modular manufacturing facility amid pieces of new LCU landing craft utility vessels. During the USNI visit, Austal held a ceremony launching construction on the yard’s first Coast Guard’s Offshore Patrol Cutter.
Nearby an unfinished Saildrone autonomous craft was nestled between three two-story-tall aluminum elevators for Ford-class aircraft carriers at HII’s Newport News shipbuilding. Sections of the new Navajo-class salvage and towing ship Solomon Atkinson (T-ATS-12) were shaping up, while the first steel ship built at Austal, the Billy Frank Jr. (T-ATS-11), is fully assembled and nearing launch. In the nearby fitting-out basin, the last Independence-class ship, Pierre (LCS-38), is nearing completion.
All told, Austal USA is involved in 13 programs, including three Navy LCU-1700 next-generation landing craft, Auxiliary General Ocean Surveillance (T-AGOS) ships and the large unmanned surface vessel prototype Vanguard (USV-3).
The shipyard is also building a $250 million steel surface ship production facility that will add 192,000 square feet of construction space for work on the Offshore Patrol Cutter. In September, it won a $450 million award from prime contractor General Dynamics Electric Boat for a submarine module facility to aid production of Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines.
That means Austal needs a larger workforce in Mobile.“We’re about 3,000 folks now and once both of the buildings are up and running, we want to be at about 5,000 folks,” Larry Ryder, Austal USA’s vice president of business development and external affairs, told USNI News.
When Austal was in serial production of the Indys and the Spearheads, the yard had a largely stable workforce without relying on major training programs or heavy recruiting.
“Now we’re ramping all that back up – reengaging with our recruiting program, workforce development, engaging with local schools and trade schools. We’ve just had to restart all of it,” Ryder said.
The character of naval shipbuilding in the Gulf Coast is shifting to meet the demands of U.S. submarine construction. The partnership between Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. commitment to supply Canberra with nuclear attack submarines has pressurized the submarine industrial base to increase its rate of construction of Virginia-class attack boats from 1.3 a year to 2.3 in plus delivering a Columbia-class boomer a year.
EB and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding construct the Virginia and Columbia boats in a team arrangement. Newport News builds the bow and stern of the ships while EB builds the central barrel of the submarine, including installing the reactor and, in the case of the Columbia class, the missile tubes.
The Navy’s program executive officer for submarines is pushing strategic outsourcing for submarine construction. The idea is to build the most critical components at the two nuclear yards and move less complex work to outside manufacturing facilities.
Austal USA and a nearby private equity venture, the Mobile Naval Yard backed by the Navy, are set to make Mobile the country’s largest submarine outsourcing nexus and could add 4,000 jobs to the region.
Submarine module work has already begun at Austal USA. A colony of Electric Boat workers oversees the fabrication and assembly of modules for the Virginia and Columbia classes in a 45,000-square-foot bay at the shipyard. The current modules contain components like electronic warfare or communications packages that are assembled in the bay, then shrink-wrapped and sent to EB. There, the modules are incorporated into larger sections for insertion into new submarines at EB or Newport News.
Announced last month, the new $450 million facility in Mobile will allow Austal USA to build more complex modules than the sleds at the current EB outpost with an expanded Austal workforce.
“It’s going to be 1,100 jobs building fairly sizable components. It’s going to generate some meaningful revenue,” Ryder told USNI News.