During the campaign, one of the continuing narratives (and continuing today) was the lack of jobs for blue collar workers.
Some of the election coverage around Wisconsin talked about lack of blue collar workers in the smaller cites, places like Wausau, where the population no longer supports the needs of local manufacturers. But we know of large areas in the state with high unemployment…one of them particularly urban. So why isn’t there a concerted effort to recruit, relocate and retrain the necessary talent to the factories? Well, we can guess why. But since capital investments are hard to relocate it only makes sense to draw labor from other areas to your jobs.
And during interviews in the Kentucky coal mining region, a welder was complaining that he was laid off because his employer, a mining equipment repair firm, didn’t have work since the mines were closed. For the past year we’ve read on any number of occasions in the local press that Wisconsin manufacturers are having issues finding experienced welders. Why aren’t they recruiting the skilled work force they need from the areas in decline?
This wouldn’t be an unprecedented event. Companies hire and relocate individuals all of the time. And the first 60 years of the 20th Century saw mass migrations of labor from the rural south to the industrial cities of the mid-west or east coast. And dust belt migrants from Oklahoma and Texas to California. Aren’t companies willing to do that anymore? The frackers in the Dakotas seem to get it. Or are people unwilling to move for a job in the 21st Century? That doesn’t seem correct either as we watch millenials move to exciting urban or tech areas after finishing their educations.
So how do we get the blue collar workers to the blue collar jobs that do exist?
Wisconsin does not need to import welders. It needs to pay them. http://urbanmilwaukee.com/2013/06/11/murphys-law-does-wisconsin-really-have-a-skills-gap/
Info is a little old but I assume not much changed in a state intent on pushing right to work laws and killing the prevailing wage.
Thank you for the comment and the link.
You ask, “So how do we get the blue collar workers to the blue collar worker jobs that do exist?”
Simple, as the greed and pollution of the sand mining industry as shown us in western Wisconsin; you move the blue collar job to the blue collar worker’s back yard forgoing all local pollution control and drill, baby, drill.
And Trump has made it even easier with his latest cabinet appointment, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/politics/scott-pruitt-epa-trump.html?_r=0http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/politics/scott-pruitt-epa-trump.html?_r=0
Cough, choke, sneeze, and die just as we got rid of the tobacco assassins.
Why aren’t employers going to disadvantaged areas for workers? They’re afraid it will cost them more money than getting the government to retrain and the individual to spend the money and time to move. Simple greed. We vs. Them.