MILWAUKEE – Dorothy Walker's boss called across the factory floor: "Hey, Useless! Come over here."
Walker, the only female welder at the Koehring Co. in 1977, responded to the demeaning nickname and did as he asked. She had determined that this man would not force her to quit the job that supported her family — a job she did well.
Walker was born to sharecropper parents in the Jim Crow South in 1946. Today, she is a top administrator at Milwaukee Area Technical College, one of the institutions trying to help Foxconn Technology Group build a workforce for its huge new manufacturing facility in Racine County.
The company will need people with technical skills to fill a planned 13,000 jobs by the end of 2022. Company officials estimated the average salary of those workers will be $54,000.
Construction on the 20 million square-foot plant is set to begin next year. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., called Foxconn's decision to open a plant in Wisconsin "a game-changer."
But for those goals to be realized, the community and the company will need to solve one of Southeast Wisconsin's most stubborn problems: thousands of people desperate for work don't have the skills to do the available jobs. As a result, the poor and unemployed stay that way, and the growth of businesses is stymied.
It's a problem Dorothy Walker solved in her own life, and she has some ideas about how to help others follow in her footsteps.
Growing up on Tennessee farms owned by white men, Walker was the second of seven children. From an early age, she picked cotton from sunrise to sunset.