Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 24, 2011 18:12:03 GMT -6
This is a great article from the New York Times that highlights the false promise that increase training and retraining improves employment or increases wages.
America's job loss has nothing to do with lack of training or skills. It's the result of lower-paid workers available in other countries, coupled with the upward redistribution of wealth from demand-creating middle class consumers into the hands of the investor class, who've mal-invested this country's economy into the calamity it has become.
from the New York Times:
After Training, Still Scrambling for Employment
July 18, 2010
By PETER S. GOODMAN
"In what was beginning to feel like a previous life, Israel Valle had earned $18 an hour as an executive assistant to a designer at a prominent fashion label. Now, he was jobless and struggling to find work. He decided to invest in upgrading his skills.
It was February 2009, and the city work force center in Downtown Brooklyn was jammed with hundreds of people hungry for paychecks. His caseworker urged him to take advantage of classes financed by the federal government, which had increased money for job training. Upgrade your skills, she counseled. Then she could arrange job interviews.
For 6 weeks, Mr. Valle, 49, absorbed instruction in spreadsheets and word processing. He tinkered with his résumé. But the interviews his caseworker eventually arranged were for low-wage jobs, and they were mobbed by desperate applicants. More than a year later, Mr. Valle remains among the record 6.8 million Americans who have been officially jobless for 6 months or longer. He recently applied for welfare benefits.
“Training was fruitless,” he said. “I’m not seeing the benefits. Training for what? No one’s hiring.”
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have enrolled in federally financed training programs in recent years, only to remain out of work. That has intensified skepticism about training as a cure for unemployment.
Even before the recession created the bleakest job market in more than a quarter-century, job training was already producing disappointing results. A study conducted for the Labor Department tracking the experience of 160,000 laid-off workers in 12 states from mid-2003 to mid-2005 — a time of economic expansion — found that those who went through training wound up earning little more than those who did not, even 3 and 4 years later. “Over all, it appears possible that ultimate gains from participation are small or nonexistent,” the study concluded.
In the last 18 months, the Obama administration has embraced more promising approaches to training focused on faster-growing areas like renewable energy and health care. But most money has been directed at the same sorts of programs that in past years have largely failed to steer laid-off workers toward new careers, say experts, and now the number of job openings is vastly outnumbered by people out of work.
“It’s such an ugly situation that job training can’t solve it,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a job training expert at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research institution in Washington, and a former commissioner of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. “When you have 5 people unemployed for every vacancy, you can train all the people you want and unfortunately only 1/5th of the people will get hired. Training doesn’t create jobs.”....
Most job training is financed through the federal Workforce Investment Act, which was written in 1998 — a time when hiring was extraordinarily robust. Then, simply teaching jobless people how to use computers and write résumés put them on a path to paychecks. Today, even highly skilled people with job experience of 2 decades or more languish among the unemployed. Whole industries are being scaled down by automation, the shifting of work overseas and the recession.
“A lot of the training programs that we have in this country were designed for a kind of quick turnaround economy, as opposed to the entrenched structural challenges of today,” said Carl E. Van Horn, a labor economist and director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. “It’s like attacking a mountain with a toothpick. You take a policy that was designed for the best economy that we had since World War II and you lay it up against the economy that is the worst since World War II. It can’t work.”....
Last year, the number of laid-off workers in job training reached 241,000, up from about 124,000 the year before, according to the Labor Department....
According to the Labor Department, 85% of laid-off workers who received training in 2007 and 2008 gained jobs within a year of completion. But the department does not track what percentage of them gained jobs in their fields of study and so far lacks any data for 2009, the first year of the Obama administration’s expansion.
Experts harbor doubts about the reliability of Labor Department numbers, which are derived from reports by state agencies that collect data from community colleges and employment offices whose training funds are dependent upon reaching benchmarks. Twice the Labor Department had to correct the data it supplied for this article.
“The states play all sorts of games,” said Mr. Eisenbrey, from the Economic Policy Institute.....
A widely admired program begun in Michigan in 2007, No Worker Left Behind, provides up to $10,000 over 2 years for laid-off and underemployed workers who pursue certificates and degrees in areas of significant growth. The program has trained technicians to work on major energy storage projects and aircraft mechanics to service engines at commercial operations that have taken over former Air Force bases.
“We need to know that we’re training people in an in-demand growth area today,” said Andrew S. Levin, who oversees the Michigan program.
But forecasting where jobs will be can be tricky. Among those completing training by the end of 2009, 41% were still looking for work as of June, according to Michigan data....
In the suburbs of Philadelphia, Eric Nelson left a job at a credit union call center in late 2004 to enroll at a state college. There, the career services department helped him choose a course of study by consulting job growth projections. The result led to geographic information systems — the mapping of data by place.
“It seemed like the thing to do,” Mr. Nelson recalled, adding that he was assured he would easily land an entry-level job paying $35,000 a year.
But when Mr. Nelson, 42, graduated with his bachelor’s degree in May 2008, facing nearly $50,000 in student loan debt, he was horrified to discover that graduates greatly outnumbered jobs. Only people with 6 or 7 years’ experience were getting hired, he said.
“I’ve had no offers at all,” he said.
He is now living off his wife’s wages as a librarian and contributions from his parents....
The literature is not encouraging.
A 2006 study prepared for the Labor Department found virtually no benefit for 8,000 randomly selected recipients who entered federally financed training programs in 2001 and 2002.
In the year before their training, these people earned about $20,000 a year on average, according to the study. During the 15 months after their training, roughly 80% of these people were employed at some point, but their earnings in that period averaged about $16,000....
Among those unemployed for 6 months or longer at the end of May, nearly 60% were men, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly 39% were in their mid-40s or older — another challenge to training programs whose results have generally been better among younger people....
Bernard Pelzer, 56, has been jobless since the summer of 2009, when he was laid off from his position as a maintenance worker at a Manhattan office building. Since then, he has subsisted on a $260-a-week unemployment check.
Chasing Elusive Work
An African-American man who never completed high school, Mr. Pelzer has suffered a steady erosion of working opportunities. Through the 1970s and 1980s, he earned as much as $12 an hour as a handyman and security guard, enough to rent spacious apartments.
“You could pay your rent and take care of your family,” he said.
But in recent years, he has earned less than he did a quarter-century ago, even as the cost of living has climbed.
Now, with no paycheck, the bills are beyond him — even in a cramped apartment in East New York. He and his wife recently canceled cable television, their lone source of entertainment.
Last fall, Mr. Pelzer enrolled in a federally financed training course to become a certified building technician, following the guidance of a caseworker at a city-run work force center.
“I thought, ‘This is great,’ ” he recalled. “There are certain things you intend to achieve, but you run into blockages. Now, the blockages were going to be removed.”
But as Mr. Pelzer slogged through the muggy streets of Brooklyn last week in a brown dress shirt, carrying his résumé in a laminated sleeve, his training was beginning to feel irrelevant. Despite applying for more than a dozen jobs over the last month, he had yet to gain an interview.
“It’s very bad,” he said. “I haven’t gotten any response.”
Among those who have this year completed training arranged by New York City’s Workforce1 centers, 1/2 have found employment, according to the city.
But not Mr. Valle. As his 50th birthday approaches, he is living with his parents, unable to pay rent on an unemployment check.
Warm and effusive, Mr. Valle grew up in East Harlem, the son of Puerto Rican parents whose trajectory testifies to the potential of job training: His father sold hot dogs before parlaying classes in air conditioning and electrical repair into a career as a maintenance worker. By the 1980s, he was earning $45,000 a year.
Mr. Valle’s modern-day training has produced only frustration.
After he completed classes, the first interview his caseworker arranged was at a Family Dollar store in Brooklyn. It paid $11 an hour [or $29K/year ]. Still, he figured he was in no position to be choosy, so he went, assuming he was the only one being dispatched to the interview. When he got there, nearly 50 people were waiting in a stifling warehouse. Some had been there for more than 2 hours. Some wore pinstripe suits, relics of short-circuited jobs at banks and insurance offices.
He waited an hour, standing because the crowd vastly exceeded the available chairs; because the applicants vastly exceeded the lone job being offered — an equation not altered by his upgraded proficiency in Microsoft Word.
“It was crazy,” he said. “I got so fed up that I walked out.”"
America's job loss has nothing to do with lack of training or skills. It's the result of lower-paid workers available in other countries, coupled with the upward redistribution of wealth from demand-creating middle class consumers into the hands of the investor class, who've mal-invested this country's economy into the calamity it has become.
from the New York Times:
After Training, Still Scrambling for Employment
July 18, 2010
By PETER S. GOODMAN
"In what was beginning to feel like a previous life, Israel Valle had earned $18 an hour as an executive assistant to a designer at a prominent fashion label. Now, he was jobless and struggling to find work. He decided to invest in upgrading his skills.
It was February 2009, and the city work force center in Downtown Brooklyn was jammed with hundreds of people hungry for paychecks. His caseworker urged him to take advantage of classes financed by the federal government, which had increased money for job training. Upgrade your skills, she counseled. Then she could arrange job interviews.
For 6 weeks, Mr. Valle, 49, absorbed instruction in spreadsheets and word processing. He tinkered with his résumé. But the interviews his caseworker eventually arranged were for low-wage jobs, and they were mobbed by desperate applicants. More than a year later, Mr. Valle remains among the record 6.8 million Americans who have been officially jobless for 6 months or longer. He recently applied for welfare benefits.
“Training was fruitless,” he said. “I’m not seeing the benefits. Training for what? No one’s hiring.”
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have enrolled in federally financed training programs in recent years, only to remain out of work. That has intensified skepticism about training as a cure for unemployment.
Even before the recession created the bleakest job market in more than a quarter-century, job training was already producing disappointing results. A study conducted for the Labor Department tracking the experience of 160,000 laid-off workers in 12 states from mid-2003 to mid-2005 — a time of economic expansion — found that those who went through training wound up earning little more than those who did not, even 3 and 4 years later. “Over all, it appears possible that ultimate gains from participation are small or nonexistent,” the study concluded.
In the last 18 months, the Obama administration has embraced more promising approaches to training focused on faster-growing areas like renewable energy and health care. But most money has been directed at the same sorts of programs that in past years have largely failed to steer laid-off workers toward new careers, say experts, and now the number of job openings is vastly outnumbered by people out of work.
“It’s such an ugly situation that job training can’t solve it,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a job training expert at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research institution in Washington, and a former commissioner of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. “When you have 5 people unemployed for every vacancy, you can train all the people you want and unfortunately only 1/5th of the people will get hired. Training doesn’t create jobs.”....
Most job training is financed through the federal Workforce Investment Act, which was written in 1998 — a time when hiring was extraordinarily robust. Then, simply teaching jobless people how to use computers and write résumés put them on a path to paychecks. Today, even highly skilled people with job experience of 2 decades or more languish among the unemployed. Whole industries are being scaled down by automation, the shifting of work overseas and the recession.
“A lot of the training programs that we have in this country were designed for a kind of quick turnaround economy, as opposed to the entrenched structural challenges of today,” said Carl E. Van Horn, a labor economist and director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. “It’s like attacking a mountain with a toothpick. You take a policy that was designed for the best economy that we had since World War II and you lay it up against the economy that is the worst since World War II. It can’t work.”....
Last year, the number of laid-off workers in job training reached 241,000, up from about 124,000 the year before, according to the Labor Department....
According to the Labor Department, 85% of laid-off workers who received training in 2007 and 2008 gained jobs within a year of completion. But the department does not track what percentage of them gained jobs in their fields of study and so far lacks any data for 2009, the first year of the Obama administration’s expansion.
Experts harbor doubts about the reliability of Labor Department numbers, which are derived from reports by state agencies that collect data from community colleges and employment offices whose training funds are dependent upon reaching benchmarks. Twice the Labor Department had to correct the data it supplied for this article.
“The states play all sorts of games,” said Mr. Eisenbrey, from the Economic Policy Institute.....
A widely admired program begun in Michigan in 2007, No Worker Left Behind, provides up to $10,000 over 2 years for laid-off and underemployed workers who pursue certificates and degrees in areas of significant growth. The program has trained technicians to work on major energy storage projects and aircraft mechanics to service engines at commercial operations that have taken over former Air Force bases.
“We need to know that we’re training people in an in-demand growth area today,” said Andrew S. Levin, who oversees the Michigan program.
But forecasting where jobs will be can be tricky. Among those completing training by the end of 2009, 41% were still looking for work as of June, according to Michigan data....
In the suburbs of Philadelphia, Eric Nelson left a job at a credit union call center in late 2004 to enroll at a state college. There, the career services department helped him choose a course of study by consulting job growth projections. The result led to geographic information systems — the mapping of data by place.
“It seemed like the thing to do,” Mr. Nelson recalled, adding that he was assured he would easily land an entry-level job paying $35,000 a year.
But when Mr. Nelson, 42, graduated with his bachelor’s degree in May 2008, facing nearly $50,000 in student loan debt, he was horrified to discover that graduates greatly outnumbered jobs. Only people with 6 or 7 years’ experience were getting hired, he said.
“I’ve had no offers at all,” he said.
He is now living off his wife’s wages as a librarian and contributions from his parents....
The literature is not encouraging.
A 2006 study prepared for the Labor Department found virtually no benefit for 8,000 randomly selected recipients who entered federally financed training programs in 2001 and 2002.
In the year before their training, these people earned about $20,000 a year on average, according to the study. During the 15 months after their training, roughly 80% of these people were employed at some point, but their earnings in that period averaged about $16,000....
Among those unemployed for 6 months or longer at the end of May, nearly 60% were men, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly 39% were in their mid-40s or older — another challenge to training programs whose results have generally been better among younger people....
Bernard Pelzer, 56, has been jobless since the summer of 2009, when he was laid off from his position as a maintenance worker at a Manhattan office building. Since then, he has subsisted on a $260-a-week unemployment check.
Chasing Elusive Work
An African-American man who never completed high school, Mr. Pelzer has suffered a steady erosion of working opportunities. Through the 1970s and 1980s, he earned as much as $12 an hour as a handyman and security guard, enough to rent spacious apartments.
“You could pay your rent and take care of your family,” he said.
But in recent years, he has earned less than he did a quarter-century ago, even as the cost of living has climbed.
Now, with no paycheck, the bills are beyond him — even in a cramped apartment in East New York. He and his wife recently canceled cable television, their lone source of entertainment.
Last fall, Mr. Pelzer enrolled in a federally financed training course to become a certified building technician, following the guidance of a caseworker at a city-run work force center.
“I thought, ‘This is great,’ ” he recalled. “There are certain things you intend to achieve, but you run into blockages. Now, the blockages were going to be removed.”
But as Mr. Pelzer slogged through the muggy streets of Brooklyn last week in a brown dress shirt, carrying his résumé in a laminated sleeve, his training was beginning to feel irrelevant. Despite applying for more than a dozen jobs over the last month, he had yet to gain an interview.
“It’s very bad,” he said. “I haven’t gotten any response.”
Among those who have this year completed training arranged by New York City’s Workforce1 centers, 1/2 have found employment, according to the city.
But not Mr. Valle. As his 50th birthday approaches, he is living with his parents, unable to pay rent on an unemployment check.
Warm and effusive, Mr. Valle grew up in East Harlem, the son of Puerto Rican parents whose trajectory testifies to the potential of job training: His father sold hot dogs before parlaying classes in air conditioning and electrical repair into a career as a maintenance worker. By the 1980s, he was earning $45,000 a year.
Mr. Valle’s modern-day training has produced only frustration.
After he completed classes, the first interview his caseworker arranged was at a Family Dollar store in Brooklyn. It paid $11 an hour [or $29K/year ]. Still, he figured he was in no position to be choosy, so he went, assuming he was the only one being dispatched to the interview. When he got there, nearly 50 people were waiting in a stifling warehouse. Some had been there for more than 2 hours. Some wore pinstripe suits, relics of short-circuited jobs at banks and insurance offices.
He waited an hour, standing because the crowd vastly exceeded the available chairs; because the applicants vastly exceeded the lone job being offered — an equation not altered by his upgraded proficiency in Microsoft Word.
“It was crazy,” he said. “I got so fed up that I walked out.”"