The HIRE Center is a consortium of the Private Industry Council/ Workforce Development Board, the Milwaukee Area Technical College, the AFL-CIO Labor Education and Training Center, the Milwaukee County Labor Council, United Way and the Wisconsin Job Service. It functions as a satellite One Stop for dislocated workers in Milwaukee.

The program has provided a 16 to 19 week, 600 hour bilingual training with supplemental VESL instruction in Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining for laid-off workers. A part-time, 212-hour program for incumbent workers in Industrial Maintenance Mechanics (IMM) was also offered after work hours. The first iteration of the project, which ended in 2001, provided 28 dislocated Latino workers (with or without previous manufacturing experience) with CNC training. They achieved a training-related placement rate of 79% with an average wage of $10.40 per hour. (That wage rate was 105% of these workers’ previous average wage—an unusually high outcome for dislocated worker programs.)

An extension of this program provided CNC and IMM training for both dislocated and incumbent manufacturing workers. For dislocated workers in the second program (21 completers), the training-related placement rate was 86%, with an average wage of $11.01 per hour (approximately a 90% wage replacement rate). For incumbent workers (48 completers), 96% retained employment in manufacturing at a time when Milwaukee was facing major layoffs in the sector and 67% raised their previous pay rates to wages ranging from $12.54 to $13.57 per hour.