With demand for welders outstripping supply, manufacturers, road and bridge builders, and other construction company owners
are all hurting. Despite a willingness to increase hourly wages and even offer signing bonuses, the search for welders is
getting more desperate.
Fortville-based Genesis Manufacturing makes helmet pads for U.S. troops through Colorado-based Skydex Technologies, which
won a contract this fall with the U.S. Air Force for 120,000 helmet pad kits. Most of the helmets have wound up in Iraq, where
the military has discovered soldiers need something more than Kevlar-lined helmets to survive roadside mines and exploding
Toyotas.
Little known in this market less than a year ago, Lucas Oil Products is roaring into town with its first brick-and-mortar operation. Founder Forrest Lucas has set up a sister company, Lucas Cycles, to make fancy, fuel-injected motorcycles.
Little more than six months after Theodore M. “Tim” Solso took the CEO reins at Columbus, Ind.-based Cummins Inc. from James Henderson in January 2000, Cummins was slammed by “the deepest and longest recession in the history of the company.” Those days are ancient history.
