WBEZ | Jobs

Jobs, Education and the Economy: The Elmhurst College Governmental Forum

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 15:42:00 -0600

On January 30, days after President Barack Obama begins his second term, four of the region’s foremost corporate leaders discussed the economic landscape and how our workforce can succeed in it, during the Sixth Annual Elmhurst College Governmental Forum.

The topic of this year’s Forum was "Jobs, Education and the Economy." Moderating the event was John Engler, a former three-term governor of Michigan and, as president of the Business Roundtable, leader of the foremost CEO association in the country. The key presenters at the Forum were Caterpillar Inc. chairman and CEO Douglas R. Oberhelman, Johnson Publishing CEO Desiree Rogers; and TMX Group CEO Thomas A. Kloet, who also serves on the Elmhurst College Board of Trustees.

Part One

Part Two

Recorded Thursday, January 30, 2013 at Elmhurst College.

U.S. employers add 80,000 jobs as economy struggles

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 10:08:00 -0500

U.S. employers added only 80,000 jobs in June, a third straight month of weak hiring that shows the economy is still struggling three years after the recession ended.

The unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.2 percent, the Labor Department said Friday.

The economy added an average of just 75,000 jobs a month in the April-June quarter — one-third of the pace in the first quarter.

For the first six months of 2012, employers added an average of 150,000 jobs a month. That's fewer than the 161,000 average for the first half of 2011.

Weaker job creation has caused consumers to pull back on spending.

Europe's debt crisis is also weighing on U.S. exports. And the scheduled expiration of tax cuts at year's end has increased uncertainty for U.S. companies, making many hesitant to hire.

Job creation is the fuel for the nation's economic growth. When more people have jobs, more consumers have money to spend — and consumer spending drives about 70 of the economy.

Live call-in: From school to work, the low-literacy problem

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 09:45:00 -0500

Thursday on the Afternoon Shift, host Steve Edwards will talk with experts about our continuing literacy problem. We’ll discuss why it happens and who’s trying to fix it.

Our panel will include Betsy Rubin, an Adult & Family Literacy Specialist at Literacy Works in Chicago. Rubin has over 30 years experience in adult basic education, English as a Second Language and family literacy programming. She is the author and editor of several adult education textbooks.

Jane Fleming started teaching as a middle school math teacher 23 years ago in Washington, D.C. She discovered that many of her students struggled with math because they couldn't read well, so she went back to school and became a reading specialist. Now an associate professor at the Erikson Institute, most of Fleming's work focuses on accelerating literacy learning for children in urban public schools.

Gloria Mwase will also join the conversation. Mwase is the program director for Jobs for our Future, where her work centers on helping low-skilled adults across the nation improve their skills and increase their opportunities for secure employment.

We also want to hear from you during the show.

Tell us why you think we still have a problem of low-literacy. What role does technology play?

How does it affect you? In the store or on the phone with customer service? Working alongside others? And who’s responsible for fixing the problem? Parents? Teachers? Employers? Society?

We'll be on-air today talking about these issues. Join us at 312-923-9239 starting at 2 p.m. Central.

Young, educated and unemployed

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:00:57 -0500

On Friday April 6 the government announced that the unemployment rate had edged down to 8.2% from 8.3%, its lowest rate in three years. Although the percentage of unemployed workers keeps inching downward, a good thing in and of itself, the reality is that more than 12.9 million individuals still don’t have a job.

This pool of unemployed contains a statistical subset that I find quite alarming: According to the Department of Labor and the Wall Street Journal, more than 4.8 million young people with a college degree (or some college experience) are unemployed. And, according to Time Magazine, 54% of all Americans between the ages of 18 to 24 are unemployed.

Unfortunately, this trend of unemployed youth is not unique to America. Today’s distressed global economy is having an international impact on recent college graduates looking to enter the workforce for the first time. In Spain, more than half of all young people are out of work. In Greece, youth unemployment also exceeds 50%. In Italy, a college degree, without connections or helpful relatives, is no guarantee that a full-time job will be available, even if one possesses an advanced degree in law or business. And, recently, many commentators have pointed out that the phenomenon of the “Arab Spring” was, in part, sparked by young people’s rage and anger over the lack of job opportunities.

Lack of work, lack of prospects and lack of overall progress in the global economy is making the youth of the world angry and anxious. And, the reality is, when unemployment persists, people become desperate and despondent, perhaps even dangerous to themselves and others.

In America, work has always been seen as a promise, a sacred contract, a passport to the achievement of a good life. As a people, we have long believed that if you worked hard and played by the rules you would be rewarded. But when we cannot offer the youth of America and the world the promise of work, then, I think, we are all in danger, both politically and economically.

Is college worth the cost?

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:00:00 -0600

With tuition hikes, compounding student loans, and scarce entry-level jobs, an increasing concern for high school graduates is whether college is worth the cost.

The value of college, however, runs deeper than potential post-graduation employment. Colleges and universities were designed for more than job training programs: They were designed to produce educated and informed citizens:

Al Gini is a professor of business ethics and chair of the department of management at Loyola University Chicago. He is also the co-founder and associate editor of Business Ethics Quarterly, and the author of several books, including My Job, My Self and Seeking the Truth of Things: Confessions of a (catholic) Philosopher.

Illinois struggles to improve unemployment figures

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:03:00 -0600

November saw a slight dip in national unemployment levels, which dropped from 9 to 8.6 percent. Analysts have been debating whether that change was significant.

However, here in Illinois, the scenario looked a little bleaker: Illinois’ unemployment rate is 10.1 percent.

Job growth seemed to be happening in fits and starts locally: Financial services added 400 jobs here but manufacturing lost 600 there. Then, last week the Illinois House rejected legislation that would provide tax relief to businesses throughout the Prairie State. That legislation was aimed at keeping big companies in Illinois, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Sears. As more companies rumbled about the situation in Illinois, David Greising joined Eight Forty-Eight for a look at how the state is doing and whether the business scenario is greener elsewhere. Greising is a reporter with the Chicago News Cooperative.

Music Button: Shark Quest, "Blake Carrington", from the album Battle of the Loons, (Merge)

After accident, woman reinvents work for herself and her community

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:00:00 -0600

Perhaps no city in America has been hit as hard, or for as long, as Detroit. We’ve been hearing about unemployment, vacant lots and poverty coming out of the motor city for decades. So it might come as a surprise to hear that Detroiters are creating new and innovative ways of living and working in their city.

After an accident at an auto plant, Gloria Lowe became one such visionary, reinventing the way she approaches work and her community. Lowe spoke to producer Zak Rosen. The tape was edited by Rosen and transcribed below, with minor changes for clarity.

I worked in an automotive plant. I understand what it means to not be able to think. What that takes away from a person. Because, it took it away from me. They said just do the job, don’t think about the job.

I could not even give suggestions to building something. I’m the one who’s working there. I could not understand why you felt that I didn’t have valuable input for building this automobile that people like myself would buy. And it seems like such a small thing. But it really isn’t. Not when you’re building something.

I was a final line inspector. My job was to drive the cars outside the plant and park them in a certain area so then transportation would pick them up and load them on the trucks. This particular day, I had driven the car out and was walking back into the building and just as I was up under the automatic door, the bushing fell. The door came down, right on my end.

There was so much pain. Couldn’t sleep. Didn’t eat much. Delayed speech. Problems with my vision. Ringing in my ears. My body would go into contortions. On a lot of medication. The neurologist that I saw told me that I had left side nerve damage from the top of my brain down through my feet.

It took about two, two-and-a-half years for me to come back around. I felt so blessed to have been given an opportunity to live again. But I was told by my doctors that I would never work again, that all of that was complete in my life. I was only 50 years old. I didn’t know what it meant not to work.

I do remember that there was an awakening that happened inside of my soul that when I came up out of this, I no longer had the same concerns. I understood what love was unconditionally because it had been given to me. And all I could do was return it.

A new day

I’m usually up at 6:30, 7:00 a.m., stop at the Tim Horton’s, always get me one coffee, oftentimes with a bagel. And I do the Michigan turnaround and enter Belle Isle. Belle Isle is the blessing we have in Detroit, an island that is attached to us that separates the United States from Canada. And it’s surrounded by all this beautiful water and boats, which I love. And I go there and I meditate and I think.

I woke up this morning with this thought about language. In the news you hear, ‘the poverty stricken, citizens of Detroit, oh the devastated communities, it’s so desolate and homelessness is everywhere and despair.’ That was enough to make you feel bad. What if it read, ‘the spiritually rich citizens of Detroit, experiencing abandoned homes, have now decided to embrace, with love and hope their communities and rebuild for a future’. That sounds different.

Spiritually it’s said that nothing positive can come out of a negative. If we embrace transformation, I’m not sure that’s true. The ability to recreate is always with us.

The ability to recreate

I’m founder of “We Want Green, Too.” Our mission is to re-educate, retrain and rebuild a 21st century, sustainable Detroit. We are looking to construct various teams in the basic skills: dry walling, painting, floor repair.

Right now we’re working out of shelters and the Detroit Veterans Administration building, a connection we have with homeless vets. We work with young people who are underemployed, people who have overcome their substance abuse, as well as those who have been incarcerated.

We have very good housing stock in the city. And these houses, many of them date back to the early 1900s and late 1800s, it would cost you a fortune to try and build a house today with the same quality of material. So we know that the greenest house is the house that’s already there. All you do is take the time to rebuild it.

Every house in Detroit has a foundation. So where you have people who are challenged, they don’t have jobs. Why not make their jobs restructuring their own communities?

I don’t think that prior to my accident I would have understood the value of working from our hearts through our minds, through our hands. What it does in terms of helping to recreate a humanity that’s been taken away from us.

The work I’m doing now, it’s phenomenal. There’s not a price tag I could hang on it. And I know that ‘cause I’ve been on the other side.

Empty Places: New life for historic GM complex

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:22:00 -0600

FLINT — There may be no better example of how the industrial Midwest is changing than the site of the old Fisher Body Plant No. 1 in Flint, Mich. It’s one of the factories sit-down strikers occupied in the 1930s. The plant made tanks during World War II. It was later closed, gutted and reborn as a GM design center. But GM abandoned the site after bankruptcy and the new occupants don’t make cars. They sell very expensive prescription drugs.

There’s one group of experts who can always tell you the history and significance of an old factory. They’re the guys at the bar across the street.

Dan Wright is still a regular at The Caboose Lounge. He worked at Fisher Body No. 1 briefly in the 1970s.

“The bars were always full and restaurants were always full and stores were always full,” he says. “And all these stores, bars and restaurants you go to now, there’s nobody there. And it’s sad that Flint died the way it did.”

Now Michigan’s governor says there’s a financial emergency in Flint, the once prosperous birthplace of GM. In fact, seven thousand people worked at Fisher Body No. 1 when workers sat down in late 1936, demanding recognition for the United Auto Workers.

Strikers at Fisher Plant No. 1 wanted recognition for the nascent UAW.

“We’re actually standing in the area, very close right now, where the 1937 sit down strike was,” says Phil Hagerman, president and CEO of Diplomat Specialty Pharmacy.

Diplomat moved in earlier this year. The company specializes in drugs that target complex medical conditions like cancer, hemophilia, MS and HIV/AIDS. Many produce side effects, so nurses here call patients to make sure they stick to their treatment plans.

The old GM complex is now home to Diplomat Specialty Pharmacy's headquarters.

“Specialty pharmacy is the fastest growing component in the pharmacy industry,” says Hagerman. “Traditional pharmacy is growing at two to five percent a year. Specialty pharmacy is growing at 15 to 25 percent a year.”

Diplomat hired more than two hundred people this year. Phil Hagerman says the company is on track to top a billion dollars in sales next year.

“We’re distributing as many as two thousand or more prescriptions a day around the country, shipping to every state every day from this building,” he says.

The building highlights the transformation of the industrial Midwest. GM shuttered the sprawling Fisher Body No. 1 plant in the 80s and much of it was demolished. The footprint of the complex shrank dramatically. But the steel and concrete of this building’s main structure were retrofitted into an engineering and design center for GM, housed in the Great Lakes Technology Center.

Diplomat later bought about half the space and it’s still enormous: 550,000 square feet. That’s more than one thousand square feet for each of the 450 employees here. The other half of the complex is now a biomedical campus, run by the company IINN.

Last year Diplomat filled more than 600,000 prescriptions

“How often do normal business rules allow a company to have a ten year growth footprint?” Diplomat’s Phil Hagerman asks. “It just doesn’t happen. ‘Cause the cost of the building is so great. But because we acquired this from an auction process at a very, very low cost, we have a building that we know we can grow into for about ten years.”

So, that’s one advantage of acquiring property discarded by industrial giants. Advantage #2: 1700 cubicles left behind. Advantage #3: Random industrial signs that read: ‘Caution: Pedestrian traffic. Sound horn’. And advantage #4: The government loves you, especially if you’re a high-tech or medical company. In fact, Diplomat won’t pay property taxes here for almost 15 years, and it got a 62 million dollar tax break from the state. In return, CEO Phil Hagerman says he’ll hire four thousand people in the next two decades.

But thousands of people used to stream across the street to local businesses every week. At The Caboose Lounge, waitress Janet Anderson says the new workers at Diplomat don’t come in yet, but she’s hopeful.

“I do good breakfasts,” she says. “Real good breakfasts. You can ask anybody in here.”

And these days, hope itself might be a welcome sign of change in Flint.

Community college partners with private business to fill jobs

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:05:00 -0600

As the Great Lakes region continues to face high rates of unemployment, many manufacturing workers find themselves laid off and lacking credentials to find new work. State-funded agencies are teaming up with community colleges and private businesses to help get workers back into jobs. The strategy is called public-private partnership and has support from several governors in the region and even President Obama.

In Marshall, Mich., Deidre Hosek is a big fan of the approach. It threw her a lifeline when she was laid off in 2007.

Meet Deidre Hosek

Hosek is a regular at the Riverside bar, just a few blocks off the main street of Marshall. It’s an easy to miss location. The smoky gray wooden façade has no outward facing windows, but step inside and two TVs and a jukebox light up the room. Hosek sits alongside six others sipping Miller Lite. She’s about 5'5" with long brown hair, solid confidence, and a bold, raspy laugh.

This is her place to unwind. She remembers growing up in Marshall with big ideas about what it would mean to be an adult and work a regular job.

“I remember when I was a kid, I wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer, a singing star,” Hosek said, adding that at Riverside bar she gets to be a singer now and then, “that’s why I try and come down here. One of my neighborhood buddies runs the open mic.”

Hosek raised two kids in Marshall and, like many of her neighbors and friends, she worked for the auto industry. In her case, it was as a prototype technician working with vinyl, plastics, and leathers at the Lear Corporation. It was a solid living wage but when times got tough the company downsized and moved operations out of state, Hosek was left in a lurch.

“If I wanted to move out of state, I could have gone to another Lear plant,” she said. “But all of my family is here, and I have no desire to leave my family."

Living unemployed

Instead of leaving, Hosek and her family lived off her 401(k) for two years. Eventually, she found a gig working overnight at the Shell gas station convenience store. A customer there tipped her off that the state-funded agency Michigan Works was interviewing candidates for factory work in town. She raced over to apply.

Never welded before

Fast-forward four years and Deidre Hosek is a welder at Tenneco, an international auto-parts manufacturer. In Marshall, they make mufflers. The first thing she needed to learn was how to fuse two pieces of metal together to make a bead.

“I’d never run a bead before in my life,” Hosek said, laughing. “The closest I’d come to running a bead was a caulk around my sink."

Even with her lack of experience, Michigan Works was confident she could succeed. Hosek became one of thousands of people in Michigan to benefit from public-private programs to help the workers find jobs locally.

How it works, the private side

A company like Tenneco needs highly skilled welders. The plant manager at Tenneco in Marshall, Randy Rial, says it’s not that easy to find them.

“Many people can weld but when the people come in here and say I can weld anything, but this is different. We work very fast at very high heat,” Rial explained. “They come in here and it’s very difficult to learn.”

In 2007 the company started welding with a new, very thin, very expensive metal. Their welders failed, over and over. It cost the company a lot of money. Rial remembers that was a time when many other factories were closing their doors.

“Eaton closed down, Lear closed down, a lot of other plants closed down,” Rial remembered. “We have to do everything we can do to be competitive in the global market.”

How it works, the public side

Training specialized welders is difficult and expensive so the public side of the partnership plays a big role. George Bauer is a representative of the state-funded Michigan Works Association. He's been on the front lines of the recession.

“Michigan was in it before everyone else and we’re hoping we won't be the last to come out of it,” Bauer said.

Bauer’s witnessed the bloodletting-- with 40, 50, 100 local workers laid-off at one time. He talks to workers to prepare them for inevitably hard times ahead, but if he can, Bauer prefers to step in before a company downsizes or leaves town. When Bauer learned about the challenges at Tenneco, he called a meeting right away and made the company an offer.

“Our deal with the company was that if we’re paying for the training, you’ll guarantee to hire them at the end,” Bauer said.

Tenneco agreed to hire new welders. To do the actual training, Michigan Works tapped Kellogg Community College in the nearby town of Battle Creek.

The flexibility of community colleges

Dennis Bona is the president of Kellogg Community College. He’s learned the key to the succeeding with the business world is flexibility.

“We tailor instruction to fit what employer needs. We know there are no careers we train once for,” Bona explained. “Tenneco came to us and said we need 60 welders trained and we need them soon.”

So Bona and Kellogg Community College worked with Tenneco to design and supply a quick 8-week program with something called open-exit, open-entry. That meant students didn’t have to wait for a new semester for classes to begin. And that responsiveness meant Tenneco saved money.

In the end Tenneco hired over 60 welders, and the relationship between the college and the company continued. Bona said Kellogg has trained and educated about 1000 Tenneco employees. They work with 150 other companies across southern Michigan.

Deidre Hosek turns into a welder

The partnership between Michigan Works, Kellogg, and Tenneco gave the company some additional support to stay in town and hire in town. In 2007, that was a godsend for Deidre Hosek. She was struggling to find well-paid work.

“There was nothing," Hosek said. "I didn’t think finding a job would be that difficult.”

She didn’t have a college degree or other technical training to lean on, but with the public-private education plan in place she was able to jump right in and start something completely new.

“I had no idea I would go back to school, but it was just boom boom boom,” she said of the training. “We had the classroom time and the actual hands-on welding time...that was fun.”

Staying in the community

With a steady paycheck now in her pocket, Deidre Hosek can afford to stop by Riverside for open-mic night and unwind with her longtime friends.

“I like being where everybody knows your name," she said. "You’re not just a number.”

Eight-weeks (the length of her training course) and four years later, Hosek is proud to be a welder. But at the Riverside bar, standing in the spotlight with her neighborhood buddies cheering her on, belting out Marshall Tucker lyrics during the open-mic night, sometimes she still feels a little like a singing star.

A correction has been made to this story. An earlier version misspelled the Lear Corporation.

Great Lakes' workers faring better on Canadian side of the border

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:30:00 -0600

Front and Center continues this week with a look across the Canada-U.S. border. One of the questions being asked is why communities on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes region seemed to be faring so much better economically than cities and workers on the U.S. side. Unemployment on the Canadian side of the lakes was around 8 percent in Ontario and 7.7 percent in Quebec; governors of U.S. states in the Great Lakes region would probably kill for those rates. In fact, Ontario and Quebec actually added jobs during the recession.

Furthermore, workers who did end up losing their positions could expect to be out of work for only half as long as their American counterparts.

Follow Brian Mann’s road trip:

Brian Mann is with North Country Public Radio in New York and he will join Eight Forty-Eight this week to talk about business on both sides of the border. He will be traveling from the St. Lawrence River in the east all the way to Detroit in the west. Brian was in Kingston, Ontario Monday and he was next headed to Toronto.