Bring Back the Trades summit organizer Amanda Grappone-Osmer, left, presents a map of schools that attended the event to Mike Rowe as Governor-elect Kelly Ayotte looks on. (Photo by Trisha Nail)
In 2001, a TV professional in San Francisco, named Mike, was approached by his mother who told him that his grandfather had turned 90 years old, and she called attention to the fact that he was nearing the end of his life. She told Mike she wanted her dad — a former electrician, plumber, builder, pipe fitter and welder — to be able to “turn on the TV and see you doing something that looks like work.”
Inspired, Mike one day decided to bring a camera crew into the sewers of the Bay Area and hosted an episode of his show, “Evening Magazine,” among the rats, roaches and smells of the tunnels to give an inside look of where waste goes.
That’s how Mike Rowe developed the concept for his hit Discovery Channel series “Dirty Jobs,” he said on a stage adjacent to New Hampshire Governor-elect Kelly Ayotte during the Bringing Back the Trades summit at NHTI.
The popular TV host shared stories from his two decades advocating for the trades, praised the Granite State for its manufacturing outlook and took questions from Ayotte and the public, over 4,000 of whom attended the event on campus and remotely on Nov. 15.
That figure is according to summit brainchild Amanda Grappone-Osmer, who wanted to gather the state’s labor workforce and the next generation of tradespeople in celebration of Grappone Automotive’s company 100th anniversary, working with contractor PROCON and the Community College System of New Hampshire.
Grappone-Osmer’s great-grandparents took out a $2,000 mortgage on their home on Nov. 15, 1924, to open what was originally an automobile service station in downtown Concord, she told Jack Heath, host of radio show “The Pulse of NH,” ahead of the summit’s kickoff that morning. She chronicled the full story in a book she’s published, “Grappone Automotive: The Founding,” first printed a day before the event.
The summit was linked to Concord nonprofit Bring Back the Trades, founded by Rye business owner Steve Turner, which seeks to provide scholarships to Granite State youth in trade school programs. With help from state officials, the summit attracted students from 54 high schools statewide as far north as Stewartstown to the live Q&A between Rowe and Ayotte and a follow-up career fair on the NHTI grounds dubbed Tradeapalooza.
Under a large tent, just over 80 New Hampshire businesses including construction, electrical, energy and plumbing firms mingled with schools and other visitors to give a glimpse of their work and share job openings.
Some students also received a collective $105,000 in scholarships that day, which they were presented in a ceremony after Rowe and Ayotte exited the stage.
“We proclaimed to the United States that New Hampshire is a place that cares about the trades and is doing something about (supporting them),” Grappone-Osmer told NH Business Review the week following the summit, which she said took about 10 months of planning. “I’m hopeful that (Rowe) chooses to come back and keeps up with our progress.”
Mike Rowe chats with Jack Heath, radio host of “The Pulse of NH,” following a public appearance at the Bring Back the Trades summit on Nov. 15 at NHTI. (Photo by Trisha Nail)
She and other event organizers created a map illustrating the schools that turned out the day of the summit, which she presented to Rowe during the live Q&A segment.
“Even though you can’t teach work ethic, you can build a curriculum around these things,” Rowe said on stage after receiving the map. “If things go the way I hope, 54 schools will be 5,400 in a couple of years.”
Rowe, speaking to Ayotte and the audience, said he feels that today’s youth and young adults have grown up with the notion that trade jobs have been minimized and encouraged less in schools than in decades past, instead being routed toward four-year college degrees.
“My generation has done a really great job of hiding opportunities that should not be hidden,” he said. “Sometime in the mid-70s, we took shop class out of high schools. We did that for a lot of reasons that made sense at the time, but that unleashed all kinds of unintended consequences. One of those consequences was that we removed … the optical proof that these jobs actually existed.”
That feeling led Rowe to found the mikeroweWORKS Foundation to motivate today’s generations of emerging adults to enter trade careers, which its website says has granted more than $5 million in scholarships since it was formed in 2008. The foundation also aims to get students in training programs.
“I’ve been working with the United Technical Institute for years, and my foundation has sent probably 300-400 people through their diesel program,” Rowe said.
But the TV personality said efforts are always ongoing. He shared that he recently received a call from one of the leaders of BlueForge Alliance, a Texas-based network of manufacturers that supply the U.S. Navy with submarines.
“This guy says to me, ‘Mike, we need to hire 100,000 skilled tradesmen in the next nine years. Where are they? Can you help us find them?” Rowe recalled, addressing summit listeners.
“I said I don’t know, maybe, but I’ll tell you where they are: They’re in the eighth grade, and some are in this room.”
Rowe says the right marketing can get prospective tradespeople into those positions. During an interview with NH Business Review, he said everyone needs different methods of receiving the same message — one campaign won’t resonate the same with every young person.
“There’s only one way to do it, and that is to tell the true stories of real people in people in those industries that have prospered as a result of mastering that skill,” Rowe said. “Kids today, their BS meter is highly tuned, so you’ve got to fish where the fish are. You’re going to have to go on Reels, on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube.”
Samantha Patjane, standing with mic, asks Mike Rowe if he’s involved with programs that recruit automotive technicians at the Bring Back the Trades summit at NHTI Nov. 15. (Photo by Trisha Nail)
From Rowe’s standpoint, messaging shouldn’t just come from employers but also from states. He expressed concern that companies may not always best pitch their work in job postings, but it’s when job seekers see examples of that work in their area — like projects with state entities — that employers have something to show. He’s seen this in states like South Dakota and Alabama, whose governments have led trade campaigns to stimulate the workforce for major manufacturers.
“On a true statewide level, you need public-private partnerships,” Rowe said. “You need governors who are absolutely on board, and you need the big skilled trade companies in play, like big construction and electric companies.”
In New Hampshire, Rowe said he’s witnessed the enthusiasm for trade employment and it’s up to the state to harness it. The state’s next governor being his fellow speaker at the event made for a fortuitous discussion, though Grappone-Osmer told NHBR that Ayotte’s appearance was intended to be nonpolitical and determined before the incoming governor announced her campaign in July 2023.
“She’s a friend of the trades, and she’s done work on that when she was a senator,” Grappone-Osmer said. “So we thought she was a good, recognizable person at that point.”
Ayotte herself referenced this work, sharing that she and Rowe had first met during her U.S. Senate term when Rowe testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on a similar topic of inadequate trade education.
Rowe and the audience didn’t waste the opportunity to acknowledge Ayotte’s new job and sway her into continuing support for the trades as she reenters the statehouse, shaping the Granite State to be a role model for others.
“Far be it for me to tell you what to do in your term, but you could be a real annoyance to a lot of other governors simply by saying, ‘What are you guys waiting for?’” Rowe told Ayotte, to which she responded affirmatively.
One audience member asked Ayotte if she is considering pushing for a state education curriculum around accessible career-tech education (CTE) courses and principles in the S.W.E.A.T. Pledge, a list of 12 statements of lessons Rowe developed to galvanize workers (standing for “Skill & Work Ethic Aren’t Taboo”).
“I think this is so important,” Ayotte said. “It means getting the CTE programs into the schools with guidance counselors, but also the S.W.E.A.T. Pledge is phenomenal — an ethos for how you live your life. It’s also thinking innovatively (about) bringing the private sector to the table. The already a number of those efforts underway in New Hampshire; we need to build on them.”
As two examples, Ayotte referenced a microelectronics boot camp at Nashua Community College, and an accelerated welding training program at Manchester Community College to support submarine shipbuilding in New England. NCC’s boot camp was co-created by BAE Systems, and MCC’s program is partnered with Granite State Manufacturing and defense contractor alliance SENEDIA.
A commemorative logo recognizes Grappone Automotive’s founding centennial at the Bring Back the Trades Tradeapalooza career fair. The event was the brainchild of Grappone family member Amanda Grappone-Osmer. (Photo by Trisha Nail)
“The word has to get out there,” she said. “I’d love to brag to the other governors about this because what this will do for our state is grow our economy, (and) it’ll keep our young people here.”
Fields like microelectronics fall into a grouping of disciplines many might call STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), but Rowe said he finds the acronym “problematic” because it disregards the creative value of such trades. He said this consideration is also important to keeping young people in such work and New Hampshire.
“I think it should be STEAM; I think the A should stand for art,” he told an NHBR editor. “Because when you take the art of labor, you diminish it. You begin to reduce a job to nothing but its various component parts.”
In the wake of the summit, that’s also the thinking on Grappone-Osmer’s mind, whose family established the Gregory J. Grappone Humanities Institute at Saint Anselm College in 2018. Looking forward, she said she’s seeking ways of “braiding together the work the Grappone Humanities Insitute does with all the work we’re about to do in the skilled trades.”
“The gap between what’s perceived as academia and blue-collar work, I really feel that’s just a false narrative, that you have to be one or the other,” Grappone-Osmer said.
