CINCINNATI — On workdays, Eric Cromer climbs into one of his two American-made trucks by 6:20 a.m.; he likes to be a little early, and he’s been that way since the long-gone days when his GM assembly line shift started promptly at 5:18 a.m. He’s still loyal to General Motors despite what happened; his GMC Sierra bears a sticker on the driver’s side door frame declaring its origin in Indiana, though these days many of those trucks are built in Mexico. His own job at GM — where he’d worked for nearly 16 years, including a stint bolting brackets behind dashboards, and from which he’d be approaching a comfortable retirement right now at age 52 had things gone differently — evaporated, along with thousands of other jobs, when the Moraine, Ohio Assembly plant closed in the 2008 recession. Back then, Cromer — a self-described hillbilly who had a wife, an 11-year-old daughter and a high-school education — found himself looking for a job at a moment and in a place where there were barely any.

Technically, it was a choice, though it didn’t seem like much of one. Either way, he was looking at a pay cut from his roughly $30-an-hour-plus-benefits GM job. His father-in-law was retired from a good job driving semitrucks for UPS, but Cromer didn’t like the idea of so much time on the road away from his family.

Nursing, meanwhile, had never occurred to him. One day back around 2007, on a morning commute, he’d been killing time talking to a GM colleague on the phone, with rumors already circulating that the plant they were both headed to might soon be shutting down. The colleague, Ken Harris — whose dad had worked with Cromer’s father at GM — had mentioned a male cousin who was a nurse, and mused about going into the field himself. “To me it just seemed like the most far-out thing,” Cromer recalled recently. He had never in his adult life worked outside an industrial setting. He didn’t know if he could handle all that blood. Also, he admitted, “it seemed more of like something for females to do.”