(upbeat music) - My name is Tommy O'Donnell.

I'm a council representative for the Eastern Millwright Regional Council, specifically local union 443.

(upbeat music) What is a millwright?

A general description of a millwright would be an industrial mechanic.

What we do is we work on pretty much any piece of manufacturing equipment that rotates.

We also work in the power generation sector.

So we work on wind turbines.

So we work at nuclear facilities and then your general manufacturing.

We work anywhere from Proctor & Gamble to Hershey, distribution facilities such as an Amazon or a UPS or FedEx.

(whooshing) First day on a job, you pull up, you unload all your tools and then you get your job assignment.

You go through your safety training and you roll with it.

Every day, you could do something different.

One day you can be welding, one day you can be doing preventative maintenance.

You can be doing a new installation.

You can be modifying equipment (upbeat music) - Jason Heffelfinger, I'm one of the council reps that work here with the Eastern Millwright Regional Council.

So the kind of people we're looking for are people that curious about how things work.

They like taking things apart.

They like seeing how it works and putting the things back together.

People that have strong math skills.

Math is something that we use a lot with our precision tooling.

We use a lot of math skills to do the kind of work that we do.

I don't wanna scare anybody and say that if you're lacking math skills that this isn't for you, cuz at our training course, we will teach you the fundamentals on how to be a millwright, and how to apply math into what it is we do.

(whooshing) - As a first year apprentice, we start roughly in the $22 to $23 an hour range.

You get a pension, a defined benefit pension, and then you get a defined contribution annuity.

So basically you have two retirement accounts, healthcare, vision, dental, the whole nine.

And that is all paid for by the employer.

None of the money for that comes out of your paycheck.

- If you want to travel more and you want to be able to be going on more jobs, you can have, you can easily clear six figures making in this line of work.

If you're somebody that doesn't wanna travel too far outta the area, or if you can't for whatever reason, you can make anywhere from $40 to $70,000 a year.

And it, it really is up to you on how much you want to make in this.

I have guys that are happy making $50,000 a year.

And I have guys that are making 150 plus in the same year, but they're taking more opportunities.

(upbeat music) I'm an avid outdoorsman.

I like to hunt, fish.

I play a lot of golf.

I've been doing that since high school.

I like to wrench on things, I like to get out in the garage and tinker around with some stuff out in the garage.

When I first got into this I was 26 years old and already making $60,000 a year.

I was able to pursue the things that I enjoyed because obviously I had the means to do it.

I bought a house at an early age.

I was traveling in the summertime and enjoying life basically because of the freedom I had.

But also I had the amount of money that I was making to afford that freedom, and that was huge.

- Me outside of work, I have a little two-and-a-half year old maniac named Poppy, which keeps me very busy.

Mom and I have fun with that.

I like to cook, I like to work on cars.

I love building things.

I'm currently building my own garage.

I always say with enough time and money, I can build you anything.

(upbeat music) Millwrights are important because we keep American industry going, we keep the lights on.

We're the ones that do all the maintenance on all the power generation turbines.

Without us you wouldn't have electricity.

Anything that moves or rotates has a wear point.

So as it wears, you have to take it apart and maintain it.

Something can't spin forever and not fail without maintenance, and that's where we come in.

Millwrights are industry and there's always gonna be millwright work.

There's always gonna be a need for millwrights.

(upbeat music)