Southwest Indiana's Workforce Pipeline Just Got Thinner, Ohio Is Spending $82 Million on the Other End

The Southwest Indiana Workforce Board launched its 2026 Teacher Manufacturing Bootcamp on June 8th, 16 educators across five Evansville-area facilities, including post-merger Amcor. At the same time, Jobs for America's Graduates contracted from 250 to 30 statewide programs after losing funding in 2025. Those 16 teachers are now the primary career-awareness lever for anchor employers across Region 11. Meanwhile, Ohio is deploying $82 million in federal and state funding to build a polymer-cluster training and research hub in Akron. That spending doesn't pull workers across the state line tomorrow, it starts orienting mid-career engineers and the universities feeding them toward Akron's gravity well over the next five years. If your plant does not have a direct, structured relationship with K-12 schools in your county right now, that five-year clock has already started.

Dana Robinson Closure: The ICE-Parts Pattern Indiana Tier 2 Suppliers Need to Track

Dana Incorporated is eliminating 81 Victor Reinz gasket jobs in Robinson, IL starting June 15th. Dana, First Brands, and Tenneco are each contracting domestic ICE-parts capacity, for distinct reasons: EV transition, post-acquisition restructuring, and financial pressure, respectively. Three different mechanisms, one outcome: reduced domestic ICE-parts availability running through the Illinois-Indiana corridor. Audit your Tier 2 supplier base for ICE-platform concentration across those three companies and identify your fallback source before the next closure.