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.
 
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.

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, D-Wis., 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 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel opinion piece in August, soon 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 realised, 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 donned a straw hat and picked cotton from sunrise to sunset.

Although some landowners wanted the children to work long days year-round, Walker’s mother - who left school after seventh grade - insisted that Walker and her siblings get an education. So they attended an all-black school.

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 realise it,” Walker said.

The children also didn’t realise, 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 “coloured.”

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 realise 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 African-Americans 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.

On their breaks, he showed her how to set up the equipment for welding aluminium 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.

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, 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 African-American woman, it was that I was a woman, period,” she said. “The first thing they thought about was: ‘What are you doing here? Where did you come from? What do you know about welding?’”