From The Oregonian, “Intel snaps up PCC Rock Creek grads as it feeds record chip demand“:

Intel, feeding record demand for its computer chips, has hired nearly all of the 15 graduates from this June’s class in Portland Community College’s microelectronics program and is looking for more skilled graduates.

The company is enjoying banner sales and is building a new, $3 billion research factory called D1X in Hillsboro. That facility — known as a fab in the chip industry — will employ 1,000 when it opens in 2013.

Intel has 15,000 Oregon workers — more than any other business. And the California-based company plans to add more than 4,000 U.S. jobs this year alone.

Coverage …

• Bizjournals.com, “Intel looks outside Oregon for workers
• Portland Tribune, “Intel warns business alliance: state must value education
• OregonBusiness.com, “On the Scene: Intel exec calls for ed investment”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has chaired a series of hearings by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee to pummel for-profit, private colleges as exploiters of students and the working class. The hearings reinforce the Obama Administration’s regulatory “crack down” on the institutions, which attempts to deny their students access to federal financial aid.

One of the primary documents used to justify these attacks was a report delivered last August to the Senate HELP Committee from the Government Accounting Agency. As Mark Hyman chronicles at The Washington Examiner, the report, which lambasted the colleges’ financial aid practices, proved to so flawed — a “fraud” — that the GAO withdrew it and quietly reissued a new report. Still, the continuing attacks and Obama Administration’s regulations caused the educational companies’ stocks to drop. And now we learn of serious allegations of insider trading at the Department of Education.

As Hyman calls it, it’s “the biggest GAO scandal you never heard about.” (See also Heritage’s Tina Korbe, “Government made major revisions to for-profit colleges report, didn’t tell public.”)

Alarms have been raised about recruiters making misleading pitches and students surprised by the debt they assumed. OK, let’s apply regulation, oversight, enforcement and a renewed sense of caveat emptor to put a stop to the practices.

But we also know that for-profit colleges provide a valuable educational resource for many students, especially adults looking for new career paths or training not immediately available elsewhere. These schools adapt to the needs of the students. Yet these  businesses offering a service to willing buyers are being demonized in the political sphere. (continue reading…)

From The Manufacturing Institute, “The Manufacturing Institute Releases Roadmap for Education Reform for Manufacturing“:

March 31, 2011, Washington, DC—The Manufacturing Institute (the Institute), the non-profit affiliate of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), has released a comprehensive blueprint for education reform designed to develop the 21^st century talent critical to U.S. manufacturing and global competitiveness. 

The Roadmap to Education Reform for Manufacturing lays out six principles for innovative reform, including moving to competency-based education; establishing and expanding industry-education partnerships; infusing technology in education; creating excitement for manufacturing careers; applying manufacturing principles like “lean” to reduce education costs; and, expanding successful youth development programs.

“These principles can and should be readily applied in current federal and state legislative and budget deliberations,” said Emily DeRocco, president, The Manufacturing Institute.  “Building an educated and skilled workforce is one of the most significant actions we can take to ensure U.S. leadership in manufacturing.”

The full report is available here for download.

Workforce training was also a major theme of The FABRICATOR(r)’s Leadership Summit, 6th Annual Metal Matters and FMA’s 15th Annual Toll Processing Conference, held in March in Orlando. From Canadian Industrial Equipment News, “U.S. Manufacturing Can Return to Global Leadership Status, Keynoters Tell FMA Annual Conferences“:

“Major deficits in our education system hamper U.S. competitiveness on the world stage,” DeRocco said. “Our global competitors continue to surpass our education system in producing a high-volume, high-quality technical workforce.”

DeRocco issued a call to action that stressed, “Manufacturers can’t wait for the education system to reform itself.” Instead, she said, the sector must take the lead and expand industry-education partnerships to infuse technology in curricula, apply manufacturing principles in educational institutions and produce industry-based skills certifications

New legislation that seeks to address the serious shortage of skilled workers that hampers U.S. economic growth was introduced in Congress this week, and the bills include a welcome endorsement of national and portable skills certification.

Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) are sponsoring S. 665, the Strengthening Employment Clusters to Organized Regional Success Act, or SECTORS Act. The House version is H.R. 1240, introduced by Reps. David Loebsack (D-IA) and Todd Russell Platts (R-PA).

The bill provides grants to partnerships among institutions of industry, higher education, organized labor, and workforce boards to develop regional plans to strengthen local industries, especially those with high growth potential. These plans would support coordinated workforce training programs meant to to address shortages of skilled workers in those industries.

The bill also supports industry recognized, nationally portable certifications, such as the NAM-Endorsed Manufacturing Skills Certification system, now being put into place in community colleges across 31 states.

While the National Association of Manufacturers has some concerns about specific provisions of this legislation, we generally support the idea of promoting industry sectors and are very pleased with the emphasis on the use of industry portable, nationally recognized certifications. Certification systems give new and transitioning workers a way to gain and demonstrate skills that are marketable in the workplace. Certification also gives employers confidence that they are hiring people who have the skills necessary for advanced manufacturing.

The SECTORS Act represents a good, bipartisan efforts to tackle one of the major issues affecting manufacturers, the shortage of skilled workers. The NAM looks forward to working with legislation’s sponsors to improve the bill to ensure the United States has the best prepared and most competitive workforce in the world.

News releases…

• “Sens. Brown, Snowe Introduce Bill to Spur Clusters-Based Job Growth“
• “Platts Pushes Legislation to Help Job Creators Find Skilled Workers“

Wilma Liebman, chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, makes little pretense these days of being an impartial arbiter of business-labor disputes. Her pro-unionism now extends to be a major participant in a conference at St. John’s University School of Law that embraces the theme: Not only is business greedy, it’s unchristian too.

The conference, which begins today at noon, is entitled, “The Theology of Work and the Dignity of Workers Conference.” The materials embrace the usual “social justice” themes of the Catholic left, i.e., workers are oppressed and government should redistribute wealth. The conference chairman, David L. Gregory, executive director of the Center for Labor and Employment Law, writes in his opening message:

The Dignity of Workers seems self-evident; that is, does anyone seriously argue against the Dignity of Workers? Yet, President Obama says that unions are “under assault.” Wage and hour claims proliferate. Millions of workers are not paid their just wages. Structural underfunded public sector pensions threaten to bankrupt state governments, and to leave public sector workers and retirees bereft. The minimum wage is insufficient, and the living wage initiative has had a fitful contemporary history.

The organizers identify conference themes through a series of quotations from prominent theological thinkers, Pope Leo XIII, Pope Benedict XVI, Mick Jagger and Billy Bragg.

One typical session is “Employers, Employees, Unions – Restoring the Common Good.” Panelists include four labor union officials and five professors of theology or law. Not one employer! (Conference agenda)

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, is the keynote speaker Friday.

That a law school is holding a conference dominated by the social and economic theories of the left is standard fare. (See Walter Olson, “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America.”) This drum-beating is unlikely to help the law students any, but that’s a decision left to administrators and the contributors who pay for the law school’s political agenda.

Our problem is that Chairman Liebman has thrown in with this event, spending her time at an ideologically directed conference instead of maintaining the impartiality and distance required of a quasi-judicial agency like the NLRB. Her major session Saturday is this: (continue reading…)

Walter Olson of the Cato Institute and founder of the original law blog, Overlawyered.com, has a new book out, “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America.” The blurb:

From Barack Obama (Harvard and Chicago) to Bill and Hillary Clinton (Yale), many of our current national leaders emerged from the rarefied air of the nation’s top law schools. The ideas taught there in one generation often shape national policy in the next.

The trouble is, Walter Olson reveals in Schools for Misrule, our elite law schools keep churning out ideas that are catastrophically bad for America. From class action lawsuits that promote the right to sue anyone over anything, to court orders mandating the mass release of prison inmates; from the movement for slavery reparations, to court takeovers of school funding—all of these appalling ideas were hatched in legal academia. And the worst is yet to come. A fast-rising movement in law schools demands that sovereignty over U.S. legal disputes be handed over to international law and transnational courts.

It is not by coincidence, Olson argues, that these bad ideas all tend to confer more power on the law schools’ own graduates. In the overlawyered society that results, they are the ones who become the real rulers.

The Manhattan Institute’s Minding the Campus website excerpts the book here. (continue reading…)

President Obama talked persuasively about the importance of workforce training during the White House’s “Winning the Future” forum in Cleveland Tuesday. His remarks came in response to a comment from Roy in Temecula, Calif., which we take to be Roy Paulson of Paulson Manufacturing, a manufacturer of safety equipment and a member of the National Association of Manufacturers’ Board of Directors. From the transcript:

MS. [Sarah] BERNARD: We had a lot of questions come in about — or comments and thoughts about preparing the next-generation workforce. Roy in Temeculah, California, noted: The economy develops in pockets and clusters. Why don’t we match this with our workforce development for the best results? We all know that people have many different jobs over their lifetime, and we need to retrain where and when it’s needed — keep it simple, buy it quickly, keep it local. The local aspect allows easy access for the people that need the training, and it’s tailored to the local environment and conditions.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the answer is in the question. I think that question is spot on. What you find as you travel around the country is that there’s certain regions that are starting to gain expertise in biotech, or they’re starting to gain expertise in advanced battery manufacturing, or they’re starting to gain expertise in a particular industry which requires a particular skill set. And if we can get businesses to partner with local community colleges or local universities and have them help to design the training process for the jobs that already exist, it’s a win-win.

For the businesses, it means that all their workforce training costs are absorbed somewhere else, which is obviously good for their bottom line.

For the students, what it means is that if you actually go through this program, you know that there’s going to be a job at the end of the day because the employers have actually helped to design the program. And so Skills for America’s Future is a program that we’ve been trying to implement that gets those partnerships between businesses and colleges and universities. (continue reading…)

Marketwatch, “Manufacturing strength is focus of investors“: “WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — If the smoldering U.S. economy is going to catch fire, the manufacturing sector is probably going to have to provide the spark….As a result, economists and investors will be paying even closer attention to the monthly report on durable-goods orders, whose latest figures for January will be issued Thursday. Durable goods are items that last at least three years.”

Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus-Leader, “Poll: Bring in more manufacturing jobs” “[Despite] credit cards’ rich imprint on Sioux Falls during almost three decades here, few residents want the city to encourage expansion of the industry, according to a new poll commissioned for the Argus Leader. Residents were asked to choose the industry the city should encourage the most to expand in Sioux Falls, and 41 percent said manufacturing. Almost a third said health care, and only 3 percent said the credit card industry.”
 

Mike Boyer, Cincinnati.com, “Manufacturing jobs on rise“: “Manufacturing jobs are making a comeback across Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky as the region produces everything from auto parts and micro-machinery to burial caskets and copper wire. After losing nearly 37,000 jobs over the past decade, manufacturing employment in the region increased 5 percent last year over 2009 – adding 4,800 jobs and encouraging the fragile economic recovery.”

Oregon Business Report, “Where jobs are growing, shrinking in Oregon“: “If you want to which jobs are hiring and which are firing in Oregon, take a look at the graph below by the Oregon Employment Department.   There appears to be lots of hiring in information jobs, mining and leisure/hospitality sections.   Those jobs that are not hiring but firing would be manufacturing and financial services.” The chart for November 2009 to November 2010 shows a 0.3 percent drop in manufacturing jobs, totalling 500, putting Oregon in 33rd place in the country.”\

Oregon Business Report, “Kitzhaber visits the shipyard to promote ideas for boosting jobs“: “Gov. John Kitzhaber picked gritty, growing Vigor Industrial on Wednesday as the place to talk about boosting the state’s manufacturing sector and creating high paying jobs. Supporting those aims, he discussed a new bill to preserve state industrial areas and a proposal to provide capital gains tax relief to those who invest in job-producing companies. The press portion of the event at Swan Island was canned, but the timing and setting were nonetheless salient symbols of progress for a sector that was troubled even before the recession — since 2004, Oregon has lost 13.4% of its manufacturing jobs.”

NPR, Morning Edition, “Jobs Office Retrains Itself To Focus On Hiring“: When Larry Benders started as head of Cleveland’s federally funded jobs office in mid-2008, helping people find work usually meant paying for job training….Last year, Benders decided his office was approaching the problem backward: Instead of focusing on the jobless, the agency needed to be zeroing in on the people doing the hiring. “So we said, ‘Wait a minute, let’s go and talk to the employers and say how many welders do you need? And what sort of welders do you need? And what does a successful welder in your organization look like?’ ” he says. “Then, take that information back and then try to do matches for welders in our system that fit the profile of the specific employer.”

Tennesssean.com, op-ed by state Rep. Jim Gotto (R-Nashville), “Plants like Nissan’s show UAW how it should work“: “All Tennesseans should be concerned by the recent news story regarding the United Auto Workers’ renewed campaign to recruit employees at various U.S. plants….[While] Detroit and its UAW members work on cobbling the American auto market back together, global auto manufacturers with operations in Tennessee have been quietly supplying vital manufacturing jobs for American workers and investing in our communities.”

Heck of a day in Hillsboro. With President Obama on hand, Intel CEO Paul Otellini made some news, “President Obama Visits Intel’s Oregon Research and Manufacturing Site, Highlights Education, Jobs and Innovation.” Highlights:

• Intel hosts President Obama at its world-class semiconductor research and manufacturing site in Hillsboro, Ore.
• President discusses jobs and competitiveness in the global economy.
• Intel CEO Paul Otellini announces plans to build a new $5 billion-plus factory in Arizona.
• Otellini also reveals plans to hire 4,000 new U.S. employees this year.
• Education showcased as the President meets with science and math students.

From Otellini’s remarks, the portion describing the new plant going up at Intel’s Ronler Acres site in Hillsboro.

This new factory will play a central role extending Intel’s unquestioned leadership in semiconductor
manufacturing. The transistors and chips it will produce will be the most dynamic platform for innovation
that our company has ever created. Together they will enable more capable computers, the most
advanced consumer electronics and mobile devices, the brains inside the next generation of robotics, and
thousands of other applications that have yet to be invented…. (continue reading…)

From The White House, “Background on the President’s Trip to Intel and Investments in Education“:

This Friday, the President will travel to Hillsboro, Oregon and visit Intel Corporation where he will tour the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturing facility with Intel CEO Paul Otellini. The President will also learn more about Intel’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education programs and Intel’s efforts to better prepare people to compete for high-tech jobs and be the minds behind the next great inventions.  He will then make remarks about the importance of out-educating the competition in order to win the future…

Companies like Intel are helping us achieve these important education and innovation goals. They know that government and industry must work together so that America can out-educate, out-build, and out-innovate the rest of world.   Over the past decade, Intel and the Intel Foundation have invested more than $1 billion toward improving education.  In 2010, in conjunction with President Obama’s Educate to Innovate campaign, Intel announced a 10-year, $200 million commitment to advance education in math and science in the U.S. Intel is also one of four founding companies of Change the Equation, a CEO-led initiative designed to answer the president’s call to move the U.S. to the top in science and math education over the next decade.

The President’s remarks will be webcast at WhiteHouse.gov starting at 2:35 p.m. Eastern time, which is 11:35 a.m. Hillsboro time. 

There’s more detail on the President’s schedule today here. He’s flying into Portland International Airport, on the east side of PDX. (The Hillsboro airport is a good-size operation and less than a half-mile from the Intel plant. Must still be too small.)