Navajo unemployment is 22 percent, more than four times the rate of Arizona as a whole, and roughly three times that of Alaska, the state with the highest unemployment. The poverty rate in the Navajo Nation is 42 percent, more than double that of Mississippi, the worst among the 50 states. “This is probably the first three years in my career I haven’t gone through a layoff,” he said.īut earlier this year, Marks’ future was thrown into upheaval again. Not only would the job put him closer to where he grew up and near his siblings, he thought it might be the last time he would have to look for new work. When he was offered a maintenance planning position at Navajo Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant outside Page, Arizona, in 2014, Marks took it. “I wanted to get into something that was more stable.” “There’s a lot of ups and downs,” Marks said of aerospace manufacturing. But after almost three decades, Marks had grown tired of the hiring and layoff cycles every few years as federal contracts were awarded and expired. The work was a good fit for Marks, who’d left the Navajo Nation to study design engineering technology at Brigham Young University in the 1980s. For 27 years, Erwin Marks helped design military aircraft, missiles, drones and even solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle.
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