A child of sharecroppers helps MATC train workers
Dorothy Walker’s boss called across the factory floor: “Hey, Useless! Come over here.”
The only female welder at the Koehring Company in 1977, Walker responded to the demeaning nickname and did as he asked.
This man would not force her to quit the job that supported her family — a job she did well.
No, when she left the company someday, she would leave on her own terms. She would leave for something better.
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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. Paul Ryan, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a Janesville Republican, called Foxconn’s decision to open a plant in Wisconsin “a game-changer.”
“It means more good-paying jobs and opportunities for hard-working Wisconsinites,” Ryan wrote in a Journal Sentinel opinion piece in August, shortly after the deal was announced. “And it shows the rest of the country — and the world — that our area truly is a manufacturing powerhouse.”
But for those goals to be realized, the community and the company will need to solve one of Southeast Wisconsin’s most stubborn dilemmas: 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 donned a straw hat and picked cotton from sunrise to sunset.
Although some landowners wanted the children to work long days yearround, Walker’s mother — who left school after seventh grade — insisted Walker and her siblings get an education. So they took the yellow bus to an all-black, two-room schoolhouse.
The family grew fruit and vegetables and raised animals for meat. If chicken was on the menu, the children would chase the birds until they caught one and deliver it to their mother. They stored salted meat in a smokehouse and used a washboard to clean their clothes.
“We were poor, but we didn’t realize it,” Walker said.
The children also didn’t realize, until later, that there were parts of the country where black children weren’t routinely called names at the bus stop and where they could order ice cream inside the shop instead of at the window marked “colored.”
On Sundays, the Walker children piled onto each other’s laps in the back seat of the car and went to church or to visit her mother’s relatives about 30 miles away.
Coming home from one of those trips on a narrow, two-lane road, headlights pierced the darkness. Walker’s father swerved to avoid the car speeding toward them, which ended up in the ditch.
“Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything,” their mother shushed as two drunken white men approached the car.
They dragged her father out, berating him as he apologized for something that wasn’t his fault and made up explanations: The sun was in his eyes; the children were distracting him.
The men let Walker’s father go without harming him, but the children knew what could have happened.
“That really let us realize how the South was,” Walker said. “We’re thinking, ‘Are we going to continue to stay here as we grow up?’ ”
After graduating from high school, Walker joined the Great Migration, coming north among millions of AfricanAmericans seeking family-supporting jobs and equal treatment.
She landed in Chicago in the mid-1960s, working in a warehouse and as a nanny before joining her eldest brother in Elkhart, Ind. He had a job at Versail Manufacturing Company, which made RVs.
Walker was hired there, too, starting on the assembly line.
She soon discovered that the welders were the highest-paid employees in the factory. She started spending her lunch breaks with one of them.
“What do you do over there?” she asked him. “Is it hard to learn that?” He said no and offered to teach her. On their breaks, he showed her how to set up the equipment for welding aluminum door frames, how to listen for the crackling sound that meant she hadn’t done it right.
“I learned everything on the job,” she said.
The next time a welding job came open, Walker got it. She spent seven years at Versail.
Then the factory closed.
By then, Walker was the single mother of a young daughter.
She moved to Milwaukee in 1974 after her brother’s ex-wife — who had grown up with the Walker children back in Tennessee — told her about all the jobs available here.
Walker didn’t qualify for many of them because she couldn’t read blueprints. And because she had welded only for RVs, she didn’t know how to set up the equipment to produce other things.
She worked at a book bindery for a time, but the pay wasn’t enough to support herself, her daughter and her niece, whom she was also raising. When welders at Harley-Davidson went on strike while negotiating a contract, she crossed the picket lines to work there. That job lasted less than six months, until the union workers came back.
When her former sister-in-law told her about public assistance, Walker made the difficult choice to apply. Unlike today, people who received the benefits then could go to school, rather than being required to spend their days putting in applications.
She enrolled at MATC, where she improved her welding skills and learned to read blueprints. While a student there, she learned of an opportunity with Koehring Company, which manufactured cranes. The company had received a federal contract that required it to hire female and minority workers. Walker’s instructors figured that as a good student with welding experience and a black woman, she would have a good chance.
Walker got the job — the first woman to be hired as a welder there since 1946, when women filled in for men who left to fight in World War II.
“So, I wasn’t Rosie the Riveter, I was Dorothy the Welder,” she has said.
Her starting pay was $6.10 per hour — more than $30 per hour in today’s dollars and nearly three times what she’d earned at the book bindery.
There were no women’s restrooms in the welders’ building; the only one was across the street in the offices, for the secretaries.
Walker requested third shift so she could be home during the day with her daughter and her niece. A sitter stayed at the house overnight while Walker worked, and she slept while the girls were at school.
Walker believes her gender bothered her co-workers more than her race.
“It didn’t matter that I was an AfricanAmerican woman, it was that I was a woman, period,” she recalled. “The first thing they thought about was: ‘What are you doing here? Where did you come from? What do you know about welding?’”
“That was a big adjustment for them. They didn’t believe I knew what I was doing.”
The men’s name-calling didn’t faze her — she’d been called far worse in the South.
She says she was never physically harmed or threatened by her co-workers, but they did try to make her job more difficult.
One time, the guys on the floor attached her safety helmet to a crane and ran it up to the ceiling and all the way to the other end of the factory.
She didn’t get it back until a friend of hers came on shift.
Another time, they poked holes in a piece of cardboard and slid it between the panels of the helmet that protected her eyes, creating an optical illusion that made her think she’d ruined every piece she welded.
She didn’t figure it out until she’d spent hours re-doing work that was perfectly fine to start with.
And then there was the married man who hovered over her every night, prodding her to join him for a drink or a rendezvous.
He didn’t stop until she suggested she might walk him to the parking lot and speak with his wife, who was picking him up from work.
A casual observer might guess Walker endured all this because she loved her job.
That guess would be wrong. “Remember, it’s not about liking it. It’s about economics,” she said. “It’s not about whether you like the job or not. That was not even my focus. It was the fact that I had to have a job that paid money that would support my family.”
Walker ultimately did leave her job at Koehring Company for something better: a job teaching welding at MATC.
While continuing her own education, she worked her way up from welding instructor to apprenticeship coordinator and then to assistant and associate dean. In 2011, she was appointed interim dean of the college’s technology and applied sciences division — a position she still holds.
Now 71, Walker is sad to realize that her daughter’s generation has not turned out to be more prosperous than her own.
Changing that trajectory will require cooperation from potential workers, educational institutions and companies, she said.
“With our generation, we said if we leave the South, we can get a job, make more money, provide for our kids,” she said.
In the short term, when high-paying jobs were plentiful, the move north was both a social and a financial improvement for African-Americans, she said. But the disappearance of family-supporting factory jobs began a downward trend that continues, and the standard of living has declined with each successive generation.
In the Milwaukee metro area, more than 85% of black men between 25 and 54 had jobs in 1970, according to an analysis of census data by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Marc Levine. By 2010, that number had dropped to fewer than 53%.
“Part of the situation is that people within the City of Milwaukee are in kind of a hopeless stage. They don’t see people going to work every day,” Walker said. “When I first came here, in the African-American community, you saw people going to work every day in the city, because all the companies were in the city.”
Walker’s parents taught her this: If you do a good day’s work, people will learn to respect you.
For her, it was true. But for those who came after her, faced with minimumwage service jobs, it wasn’t. As a result, their children were never inspired to try.
“We have a couple generations out there who have never worked,” Walker said. “How do we get them back in and engaged to say just because you’ve never worked doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to work, that you can’t learn a skill to get a job?”
Teaching people they can do those things falls not only to colleges but also to employers.
One key to that cooperation is for schools such as MATC to develop programs tailored toward the open Foxconn jobs, she said. That effort has already begun. So far, Gov. Scott Walker and lawmakers have approved $20 million for tech schools for Foxconn job training.
Federal, state and local governments could work to expand workforce development programs. A return to one of Wisconsin’s previous models for public assistance, in which people could go to school instead of being required to apply for a certain number of jobs, also could help, she said.
Once people acquire basic skills, she would like to see them move into paid internship or apprenticeship programs.
A better future for the city and the people in it also depends on a change in attitude, in Dorothy Walker’s view.
Too many people in Generation X and those after them are focused on finding careers they enjoy rather than on which fields hold the most opportunity, she said.
“I didn’t choose welding,” she said. “Welding was something I learned and then I realized what the opportunities were in welding. That’s the awareness that has to be given to people. We have to teach people, to educate them to make better choices.”