Map Courtesy EasterdayConstruction.com

Right to Work laws prohibit unions from collecting dues in a workplace, even when they represent its workers. Earlier this winter, Indiana became the first state in the Great Lakes to adopt a Right to Work, and the 23rd in the nation to do so.

Now, unions and other Right to Work opponents are vowing to go directly tio voters to plead their cause. Here’s a look at their strategy: 

Minnesota: The Republican-controlled legislature has begun considering an amendment to the state constitution that would add Right to Work provisions. The step is taking place over the objections of the state’s Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton.

On Monday, Right To Work opponents staged a protest at the capitol, filling hallways outside a committee hearing where the initial work took place. Regardless, a state Senate committee approved the measure, sending it on to a second committee.

It must still pass there, win Senate approval and go on to the House. A similar measure has been stalled in the lower chamber, and it isn’t clear whether the bill could pass. But because the measure would amend the constitution, it requires a referendum in November, so the legislature would not have the final say.

Ohio:The same group that fought Ohio’s law restricting public employee bargaining rights has vowed to take on the Right to Work issue. Our partner station ideastream reported on the efforts by We Are Ohio to keep a Right to Work law from taking effect in the state.

Meanwhile, in Indiana, Gov. Mitch Daniels contends the state’s new Right to Work law is already show results. Daniels told reporters on Monday that three companies have already decided to locate or expand in Indiana since the law was passed. Another 31 companies have expressed interest in coming to the state.

“I probably underestimated how important an addition to our already excellent business climate [right-to-work] was going to be,” Daniels said.

Turns out, the Midwest didn’t do so hot. No Midwestern states were in the top 10, and Illinois had one of the lowest scores of all states. But buried deep in the data, we noticed that opinions of states varied hugely depending on who was being polled. And, since we spend a lot of time in the Midwest talking about how to attract young people, we wondered how the poll results would be different if you just looked at people aged 18-29. So we put together some charts. As you can see, the results are a little surprising. Tennessee? Really?

My parents emigrated from South Korea to Iowa in the early 1960s. My mother struggled with the dualities of raising children the American-born way and being the wife of a traditional Korean man. Every night, she would cook two dinners: a Korean meal for my father, and an American one for us girls.

Over time, as my tastes expanded, I grew to truly appreciate Korean food.

One tradition in particular really epitomizes this shift. Growing up, my mother would make traditional Korean potstickers (mandu) once a year. It was a huge ordeal—everything was made by hand. We’d sit down and make mandu for hours.

Being the last of 3 daughters, I eventually found myself facing this daunting task alone. I’d come home from high school to see the big mandu bowl and be filled with dread—it was like a bad Chinese movie: Night of Three Million Eggrolls. I’d sit at the kitchen counter, hand stuffing each mandu by myself and thinking wearily of the unfair plight handed to Sister Number 3.

Eventually, though, as I went away to college and moved out of the house, my mother turned the mandu-making into a special event. Since we all came home for Christmas, she decided we would make it for the holidays.

To top it off, my Buddhist-born mother—now a converted Catholic—went out and bought Santa hats, which she forced us each to wear as we made mandu.

Over the years, our Christmas making mandu tradition has expanded, and we now invite close friends to participate in the event, open a bottle or two of wine, and make merry.

It’s actually become a fun tradition that I look forward to, and this year, I found myself rearranging my holiday schedule so I could get home and be there to make mandu.

At least one worker was bewildered by the reaction.

Photo by Slobodan Stojkovic via Flickr.

“I could not understand why there were cheering for the last vehicle,” Mike Montie, who worked at the Twin Cities Assembly Plant for 28 years, told the Associated Press. “You cheer for the first one, not the last one. I was like, ‘What the hell?’ I didn’t want it to end, you know?”

He was one of 800 employees who lost their jobs when the Twin Cities Assembly Plant closed Friday. The plant, located along the banks of the Mississippi River, has produced more than 6 million cars during an 86-year history. But sales of the Ranger have slackened since the 1990s, and Ford decided to concentrate on larger, more profitable pickups.

A multimillion dollar cleanup of the 122-acre site will begin early next year.

Local officials are hopeful the site can be repurposed. According to the St. Paul Star Tribune, locals are considering a lot of possibilities, including a green manufacturing complex, a densely populated transit village, a park, an office campus and a middle-class neighborhood.

A study conducted by the Center for Automotive Research released last week showed that nearly 49 percent of the 263 auto plants that have closed over the past three decades have found a new purpose. The study from the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based research center also noted the rate of repurposing has accelerated in the past three years.

“It’s a premier piece of land,” Cecile Bedor, the city’s planning director, tells the newspaper. “There’s  nothing like it anywhere in the region. It is an incredible opportunity for the city, but it does come on the heels of devastating news for many families.”

Plant manager Jeff Hansen says Mesabi Nugget is a pioneer

The industrial Midwest might not be the industrial Midwest if it weren’t for the iron-rich regions of northern Minnesota and Michigan. These iron ranges have long supplied domestic steelmakers, depleting the highest quality ore along the way. Now, a plant in Minnesota is testing a process to dramatically upgrade the low-grade ore that remains.

To understand why this matters, keep in mind how steelmaking has changed.  The old recipe for steel calls for iron ore, coke and a blast furnace.  But now, more than half of American steel is made in electric arc furnaces, which use electricity to melt scrap steel into new steel.

You can find those ingredients in your own kitchen or garage.

Kate Davidson

Most American steel starts in places like this

“Anything from bicycles to barbeque pits, refrigerators, washing machines,” says David Guz, listing the kinds of scrap metal his customers bring in.

Guz runs a scrap yard called H &H Metals in Inkster, Michigan.  There’s a mountain of metal out back.  Dan Letinski parks beneath it and starts tossing out junk.

Kate Davidson

Dan Letinski and Ken Causley drop off scrap to recycle

“There’s a sink, there’s shock absorbers, there’s engine blocks, there’s crank shafts,” he says.  “I have an automotive shop and this is a lot of scrap that we just have no use for anymore.”

The US produces lots of scrap.  It’s actually one of the country’s big exports.

But scrap contains impurities.  So to make high quality steel, electric furnace steelmakers often add clean iron to the mix.  That’s meant relying on imported pig iron from countries like Brazil.

Kate Davidson

Cranes move mountains of scrap at H &H Metals

American companies like Steel Dynamics don’t like that.  So way up in the woods of Minnesota, they’re trying something new.  It’s called Mesabi Nugget.

“We’re the only facility in the world that does what we do, so we’re pioneers of sorts,” says plant manager Jeff Hansen.

This plant cost more than 300 million dollars and took years of development with Kobe Steel of Japan.  All to produce a tiny nugget of iron.

“It’s very dense, it’s very heavy,” Hansen says.  “If you were to look at it you’d say it very closely resembles a Junior Mint.”

A Junior Mint that’s 96 percent iron.  Remember, this started as low-grade ore.  That ore is usually upgraded into pellets that are about 65 percent iron.  The pellets work in traditional mills but don’t serve the growing electric market.

Nuggets do.  They’re pure enough and metallic enough to mix with scrap.

Jeff Hansen’s face glows orange as he peers into the plant’s vast furnace.  He says it’s the largest of its kind in the world.

“We bring the temperatures up to 2400, 2500, upwards of 2800 degrees Fahrenheit,” he says.  “As you look inside the furnace, you’re gonna see the pellets giving off volatiles and actually giving off some fire.”

Kate Davidson

These pellets are about to be transformed into almost pure iron

Pellets float by almost like lava, on their way to becoming pure metallic iron.  Mesabi Nugget produced about 200,000 tons of nuggets over its first two years.  The goal is 500,000 tons a year.

Still, nuggets are already helping change the rules of the game.  Steel Dynamics has stopped importing pig iron for use in its electric furnaces, because of the nuggets made in Minnesota as well as other domestic efforts.  It acquired its own scrap company as well.

Kate Davidson

Jeff Hansen says other companies are watching what happens at Mesabi Nugget

John Anton is a steel analyst with IHS Global Insight.  He says Steel Dynamics isn’t the only company that wants to supply its own raw materials and buffer itself from the market.

“Raw material costs – and iron ore and scrap are key here – used to be very steady,” he says.  “In the past seven or eight years they have become incredibly volatile.  They’re one of the most volatile things in the entire commodities, more volatile than oil.”

Now the major iron ore producer Cliffs Natural Resources is considering opening a nugget plant in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  That idea is still in the feasibility study phase.

Michael Locker is president of the business consulting firm Locker Associates.  He says the new nugget technology means the Minnesota Iron Range can now supply the growing part of the steel industry.

“It will mean employment.  It will mean the mines are gonna work again.  It will mean transportation and it’ll strengthen the steel industry of the United States,” he says.

There’s a ways to go before the Mesabi Nugget plant is pronounced a success.  If it is, the hope is it could attract more electric furnace steelmakers to the region.

That’s good and bad news, according to analysts. The distinction could mean the Midwest has done the best job retaining strong community ties with native residents. It can also mean the area, overall, has struggled to lure employees from other states.

William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer, tells Governing, which compiled state-by-state data on residents living in the state of their births, that “you have a very rooted population in some of the Midwestern middle of the country,” while the western U.S. is “still filling in.”

Louisiana ranked highest in the data with an overall homegrown population of 78.8 percent, but Midwestern states took the next four spots: Michigan (76.6 percent), Ohio (75.1 percent), Pennsylvania (74.0 percent) and Wisconsin (72.1 percent).

Looking at the homegrown population ages 25 and up, the results are similar. The top five are:  Louisiana (75.0 percent), Michigan (71.9 percent), Pennsylvania (71.4), West Virginia (70.7) and Ohio (70.2).

Nationwide, slightly less than half residents age 25 and above live in the state of their birth, according to Governing.

Across the Midwest, the six states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Minnesota averaged 71.3 percent of homegrown residents. The Deep South ranked second, with the five states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina averaging 66.9 percent.

Here are state-specific results across for homegrown populations across the Midwest:

Midwest overall
Michigan 76.6 percent
Ohio 75.1 percent
Wisconsin 72.1 percent
Minnesota 68.8 percent
Indiana 68.3 percent
Illinois 67.1 percent

Midwest percentage homegrown, age 25 and above
Michigan 71.9 percent
Ohio 70.2 percent
Wisconsin 68.4 percent
Minnesota 63.8 percent
Indiana 63.2 percent
Illinois 59.3 percent

Curious about the rest of the country? Here’s an interactive map at Governing that has state-by-state data.

With one notable exception, states across the Midwest reflected the national trend.

Illinois lost 6,400 tech jobs, approximately 3 percent of its high-tech workforce. It was the fifth-biggest decline in the U.S. and the state slipped to eighth place in the country in terms of overall technology jobs. Minnesota lost 2,900 jobs, Wisconsin lost 1,900 tech jobs, Ohio 1,400 and Indiana shed 300.

Michigan, on the other hand, trended in an upward direction.

After eight years of declining numbers, it added more tech workers than any state in the country, according to the report. Michigan added 2,700 high-tech jobs and ranks 15^th nationwide in total technology employment.

“The fact that Michigan added more tech jobs in 2010 than any other state may surprise people, including people within the state,” said Ed Longanecker, the executive director of TechAmerica. “But job gains in key sectors like software and research and development have helped the state recover from hard economic times.”

That recovery is, by no means, complete. In 2001, Michigan had 201,800 high-tech jobs according to the report. Even with this year’s growth, Michigan currently employs 155,100 high-tech workers.

Overall, the U.S. high-tech industry employs 5.75 million workers, according to the report. While 115,800 total jobs were lost across the country, the decline was less than half of the 249,500 jobs lost in 2009.

Despite its losses, Illinois still employs more tech workers than any other Midwest state. Here’s how they stack up:

Illinois: 201,436
Minnesota: 120,800
Ohio: 162,900
Michigan: 155,100
Wisconsin: 81,300
Indiana: 70,300