Unite has reached an agreement with the owner, Ineos, which will guarantee the future of skilled and well-paid work at Grangemouth well into the future.
But then everyone loved Joe Cole at the time: he was our crush, our weakness, an advance glimpse of a brilliant future, irresistibly skilled, hyper-modern, supremely fun.
If we are successful, then the 17-year-old code developer of today, as much as the new graduate fast-streamer, will embody the civil servant of the future: highly skilled, fluent in both public sector and private sector practices, and trained and supported to deliver an exceptional service for Britain.
So what's the broader lesson here for the future of skilled work?
AI and computer technologies are becoming a very real part of the global economy and this has important implications for how we think about the future of skilled labor.
The current shortage is no surprise, however, as it was predicted as far back as 1990, when the National Center on Education and the Economy issued a workforce report discussing future high-skilled labor needs.
Skills shortages were said to be the biggest threat to competitiveness, with over half of those polled concerned about future access to skilled migrant workers.
The report released last week by Citizenship and Immigration Canada called foreign students a "future source of skilled labor" and added that graduates could be eligible for residency.
The government has called on Prof Sir Adrian Smith, vice chancellor of London University and former president of the Royal Statistical Society, to assess the feasibility of the initiative, which aims to ensure "the future workforce is skilled and competitive".
