70 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • OCTOBER 2017 70 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 70 LONGISLANDPRESS.CO M • SEPTEMBER 201-----------TUTU111
BUSINESS
Grumman F-4 Wildcat fuselages await additional work at the company’s Bethpage plant.
LI @ Work
Regaining Long Island’s regional pride
By ROSALIE DRAGO
Many people define who they are
by their work. What they produce,
what they contribute, what they’re
known for.
While concerns about cost of
living, transit hubs and walkable
downtowns are real, the primary
reason so many local jobs go
unfilled, so many brains drained,
is because Long Island has for too
long clung to its former might as a
defense capital or tried to fill its loss
with a single thing.
Simple fact: Pride in our region is
what drew and kept talent here.
If we recapture that, we’ll fuel the
next generation of success.
There are two truths we need to
embrace to regain our regional
pride. First, that we were never just
a one-industry place. Second, that
the pluck and innovation and resilience
that built the Hellcat and the
Lunar Module are still here today.
In 1927, Robert Moses, New York’s
master builder, spoke to a pair of
Long Island business associations,
delivering pretty much the same
sermon: Long Island, he said, was
to be a recreational retreat for city
dwellers and “not a commercial
community.”
Leroy Grumman, of course, didn’t
get the word. His firm, founded just
two years after Moses’ speeches,
would become one of the nation’s
premier defense manufacturers,
sustaining thousands of Long
Island families and serving as a
source of national pride.
But when the company was acquired
and the jobs left, faith in
Long Island went with them. The
idea that there were no jobs or
industry on Long Island got passed
from dining room to dining room
and from generation to generation.
People eventually began to assume
you needed to look elsewhere for a
career. And they have.
But our industry is different, not
dead. Where one company once
employed 20,000, today 3,000
smaller manufacturers have jobs
for more than 70,000. Long Island
manufacturers, in fact, posted
8,600 jobs last year alone.
We still make parts for NASA and
the Department of Defense, but
we also make most of the drugs in
your medicine cabinet, parts for the
worlds’ largest telescope, medical
devices and cures. We are players
in the global marketplace.
Long Islands industries with
projected job growth and career
opportunities include healthcare,
hospitality and tourism, manufacturing
and information technology.
Over the past 12 months
they collectively posted 40,000
positions with education requirements
varying from high school
diploma to doctorate. Many of
these jobs go unfilled, in large
part because people don’t realize
they exist.
With a chemistry degree you could
be making wine on the East End,
overseeing quality engineering in
a pharmaceutical manufacturing
company or developing DNA for
supply chain security and earning
between $70,000 and $140,000 a
year.
If you like music, math and technology
you could be designing the
music industry’s premier guitar
strings. If you like physics, design
and 3-D printing you could be
making parts for the most sophisticated
scientific equipment for the
world’s largest telescope.
In our co-working spaces Long
Island entrepreneurs are making
their first million – and some, their
fifth – incubating and operating
businesses that share only the geography
with Long Island’s fabled
past.
But they are very much the future,
the next big thing that is not one
thing, but many.
Join me here each month as we
explore, and celebrate, their stories.
Drago is Long Island regional director
of the Workforce Development
Institute. You may reach her via
rdrago@wdiny.org.
