Wealth & Poverty from Marketplace APM

Steelworkers boosting tech skills to get back to work


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President-elect Donald Trump has promised to bring back manufacturing jobs, but many of those who’ve been laid off in recent years find themselves lacking the qualifications for jobs that are already coming back.That was the problem for 61-year-old Martin Oliver of Granite City, Illinois. He worked as a machinist at the U.S. Steel mill in the city for more than two decades, then was laid off just before Christmas last year. After a few months looking for another job, he decided to go back to school.  Now he’s learning how to program the very machines that were developed to replace him.[[{"fid":"307571","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Martin Oliver worked in the steel mill in Granite City, Illinois for 22 years before he was laid off last year. Now he's training to use computer-driven machine he hopes will make him competitive in the job market again.","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_description[und][0][value]":"","field_description[und][0][format]":"full_html","field_byline_text[und][0][value]":"Kimberly Adams/Marketplace","field_migration_notes[und][0][value]":""},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Martin Oliver worked in the steel mill in Granite City, Illinois for 22 years before he was laid off last year. Now he's training to use computer-driven machine he hopes will make him competitive in the job market again.","height":742,"width":1113,"class":"media-element file-default"}}]]“[It’s] kind of a polar opposite of the way things were as just a journeyman machinist doing manual work,” said Oliver of the car-sized machines he’s learning to program. “What used to take me five hours to do that can do in about 15 minutes.”Workers like Oliver are what University of Illinois at Chicago economics professor Lawrence Officer calls the “structurally unemployed.”“They're not unemployed because there's a recession or an anemic recovery,” said Officer of this group. “Structurally, their i...
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Wealth & Poverty from Marketplace APMBy American Public Media

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