It's all about getting, keeping good jobs
 | Rob Crowe
Columnist
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Despite all the moaning and groaning from Corporate America that there is a shortage of trained engineers and technical people, I've personally found the opposite to be true. Leaving college with an engineering degree, I thought that the time and effort I had put into learning things like integrals and regression analysis would somehow be valuable to someone.
Boy, was I ever in for a big disappointment. Aside from having one job offer from a small company with obvious problems of its own, opportunities in this area are scant and have been for the 13 or so years since leaving college.
I ended up taking a job with a company in Grand Rapids, working in production at a plant that made Oriented Strand Board. When I entered the selection process, the HR guy assured me that the company advanced people from within, that my having an engineering degree would be a good asset, so I took all the tests and was selected for one of the available openings.
The job would have been a decent job except that I had the expectation that I would be able to advance. I began to suspect that I was dealing with some pretty backward ways of thinking when visiting with the plant manager. I told him I had an Industrial Engineering degree and he got a blank look on his face and said, "What's that?" Things went downward from there. I volunteered to work on every initiative possible. I applied for every in-plant opening that seemed to fit my qualifications with no success. After seeing the company hire an outside applicant for the nth time, I visited with the HR guy who had assured me that they advanced their people. I asked him what was going on and he said that their policy was to hire people with lots of experience from other companies. He said that because Grand Rapids was in northern Minnesota, they figured they could get people to move up here and work for much less than they would in the Cities.
In one of my rare flashes of brilliance, I said, "What you're telling me is that, in order to get one of these jobs I qualify for at this company, I've got to quit, go to the Cities, find a job there for lots more money than I make now, work there several years, then apply back here for a job to work for much less money?" Without batting an eye, the guy said, "Well ... yeah!"
Needless to say, my tenure there was not long. I stayed five years until my pension (not much) was vested. My degree would not even qualify me for a backup supervisor position.
Incidentally, that company, which at one time had two paper mills, a sawmill and three OSB plants in Minnesota, has since sold most of its plants, in the process putting many people out of work. Most of the OSB plants have been shut down by the new owners, stymied by the federal government taking thousands of acres of forest land off the timber market and driving stumpage prices to an untenable level.
With nearly every other area in the country experiencing job growth and a surging economy, the local area is experiencing something quite different. Grand Rapids has lost several hundred jobs since 2002 when the paper company shut down two lines, these were jobs paying $20 and more per hour. Even though these jobs were 54 miles from Aitkin city, many of these workers live in Aitkin County. The same is true for the OSB plant layoffs.
To add insult to injury, every time a company wants to build anything in the Grand Rapids area, the NIMBY folks gear up and do their misinformation campaign. This has been in evidence recently when Excelsior Energy started the process of getting permits to construct a state-of-the-art 500 MW Coal Gasification Power Plant, one with emissions far below current allowable levels. If one were to believe the NIMBY's, everyone in the area would fall over dead if it were constructed. This is laughable since for 25 years, the people of the area have been living under the plume of a conventional Coal Fired Power Plant putting out far more pollutants, though within EPA regulations, into the air with no visible or invisible effect.
Between companies with backwards HR practices, a federal government in the pocket of the Sierra Club and residents willing to tell any lie to stop beneficial projects, this area is well on its way to committing job suicide. If this continues, soon the only ones able to live here will be retirees from elsewhere.
Rob Crowe chairs the Aitkin County Republicans and raises kids and cows on a farm near Hill City.
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