WASHINGTON — Both the Navy and its contractors must ensure the workers building its ships receive “competitive” pay if the maritime industrial base is going to grow to an acceptable size for outfitting the future fleet, according to a Navy official.
“When the Navy goes and industry goes and [negotiates] contracts with the shipbuilders … we have got to ensure those folks who are pricing those components — of course, we want to be competitive — but we have got to reflect prices that can allow us to have the labor pool that we need for the long term,” said the official, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity.
The official also said that the nature of shipbuilding programs means cost is driven up by schedule delays. “Getting a workforce that is sustained, that is retained, that gets trained … and stays. That’s the best, cost model we can have … If that’s a short-term adjustment in what our labor rates look like and how they reflect against the service industry growth that’s happened in the nation, then we’ve got to adjust.”
The issue of pay for shipyard workers — especially the kind of entry-level ones the service is anxious to see join the workforce in the coming decade — has been a pervasive problem for both the Pentagon and industry. As shipbuilding executives often put it, over the years, food service, retail and other industries have slowly increased their respective entry-level wages to be competitive, or even better, than the pay a first-year shipyard worker could expect.
“People can go do far less difficult things for just about the same money from an entry wage standpoint,” Kari Wilkinson, an executive at HII, the United States’s largest military shipbuilder, told Breaking Defense last year. “I will say though that within a year-and-a-half to two years, you can double your salary as a shipbuilder.”
Despite the promise of better pay in the future, the workforce attrition numbers speak for themselves. Brett Seidle, a senior Navy civilian, told lawmakers in March that “50 to 60 percent” of new industrial base workers, recruited through the Navy’s ongoing campaigns, quit within their first year on the job. “Those folks are coming, and then we’re attriting out way too quick,” he said at the time.
HII, General Dynamics Electric Boat and senior Navy leadership have lobbied Congress and two different administrations to move forward with the Shipyard Accountability and Workforce Support plan that would, among other things, increase wages for various shipyard workers. That bill, colloquially known as SAWS, has appeared to stagnate on Capitol Hill in the aftermath of numerous lawmakers calling out the Navy for a “lack of transparency” on its funding requests.
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“It’s incredibly frustrating to know how important building a submarine [or] building a destroyer is, and to hear often that there’s a story of, ‘Well, I’ll go to Chick-Fil-A’ or ‘I’ll go to,’ you fill in the blank,” the official said. “We must overcome that as an enterprise.”
Updated 9/19/2025 at 6:25 p.m. Subsequent to publication, the Navy clarified its statements. The story has been updated to reflect that.