Maine: The Way Life Could Be 10/4/22: Jobs

Producers/Hosts: Jim Campbell and Amy Browne
This series is made possible in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission

Maine: The Way Life Could Be, a series in which we look at challenges and opportunities facing Maine in the lifetimes of people alive today.

This episode:
At the outset of this series, we invited anyone interested to participate in a Zoom call to help us gather information on what folks saw as major challenges facing Maine people during the lifetime of those alive today. One of those challenges involves how we’ll be able to make our livings in the Maine of the near future as traditional industries wane, and as our population grows older.

On today’s program, we’ll be talking with three experts who have studied these questions from a variety of perspectives.

Guests:

Charles Colgan, Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Management in the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine, and senior fellow at the Center for the Blue Economy in Monterey, California. Colgan served as Chair of the State of Maine Consensus Economic Forecasting Commission from 1992-2010. Prior to his work at USM, he served in the Maine State Planning Office under three governors.

James Myall, an Economic Policy Analyst at the Maine Center for Economic Policy. and author of the Center’s State of Working Maine 2021 report. We began by asking him to describe the purpose of the report and how it was put together.

Andy O’Brien, a longtime Maine journalist who currently serves as Communications Director of the Maine AFL-CIO.

About the hosts:

Jim Campbell has a longstanding interest in the intersection of digital technology, law, and public policy and how they affect our daily lives in our increasingly digital world. He has banged around non-commercial radio for decades and, in the little known facts department (that should probably stay that way), he was one of the readers voicing Richard Nixon’s words when NPR broadcast the entire transcript of the Watergate tapes. Like several other current WERU volunteers, he was at the station’s sign-on party on May 1, 1988 and has been a volunteer ever since doing an early stint as a Morning Maine host, and later producing WERU program series including Northern Lights, Conversations on Science and Society, Sound Portrait of the Artist, Selections from the Camden Conference, others that will probably come to him after this is is posted, and, of course, Notes from the Electronic Cottage.

Amy Browne started out at WERU as a volunteer news & public affairs producer in 2000, co-hosting/co-producing RadioActive with Meredith DeFrancesco. She joined the team of Voices producers a few years later, and has been WERU’s News & Public Affairs Manager since January, 2006. In addition to RadioActive, Voices, Maine Currents and Maine: The Way Life Could Be, Amy also produced and hosted the WERU News Report for several years. She has produced segments for national programs including Free Speech Radio News, This Way Out, Making Contact, Workers Independent News, Pacifica PeaceWatch, and Live Wire News, and has contributed to Democracy Now and the WBAI News Report. She is the recipient of the 2014 Excellence in Environmental Journalism Award from the Sierra Club of Maine, and Maine Association of Broadcasters awards for her work in 2017 and 2021.