Books. The Job Training Charade

Citation

(2003), "Books. The Job Training Charade", Education + Training, Vol. 45 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/et.2003.00445fad.001

Books. The Job Training Charade

The Job Training Charade

Gordon LaferCornell University Press2002ISBN: 0801439647

Training, like motherhood and apple-pie, is incontestably a "good thing". Right? Well, not exactly, according to the author of this thoughtful and thought-provoking text. When Tony Blair outlined his three main priorities for a new Labour Government in the run-up to the 1997 UK general election as "education, education, education", he was voicing what had been received wisdom in western liberal democracies for more than a decade – that workers must improve the skills and education they bring to the labour market, if they are successfully to compete with low-wage workers in developing nations. Lafer provides a critique of the history, track record and assumptions underlying this view.

In the context of the USA, he focuses on two questions. How was job training transformed from a minor aspect of federal employment policy to becoming the government's main labour-market policy for improving the employment prospects and earnings of low-income Americans? And why has job training retained such broad political popularity despite widespread evidence of its economic failure?

In particular, Lafer challenges three fundamental assumptions that have underlain job-training policy in the USA. First, that there are enough decently paying jobs in the economy, if everyone were adequately trained to fill them. Second, that the wages workers earn are mainly determined by the skills they bring to the job. And finally, that both the cause of poverty and its solution are non-political, as the root of income inequality lies in the progress of technology. He believes that between 1984 and 1996 – throughout the height of the presumed skill shortage – the number of people in need of work exceeded the total number of job openings in the USA by an average of five to one.

While education and skills play a role in determining wages, their effect is quite limited, accounting for less than a third of the overall distribution of wages. Explains Lafer: "The earnings of non-professional workers appear to be primarily determined by legal, institutional and political factors such as gender, race, unionization, wage laws and regulations governing international trade." When asked precisely what skills job applicants lack, employers most often focus on workers' discipline, punctuality, loyalty and "work ethic", which are more like acquired habits than skills. Given this evidence, Lafer explains that it is hardly surprising that the US Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) has largely failed to improve the employment and earnings of its participants. Indeed, he claims, for those aged 16-21 the programme actually had negative effects, with JTPA trainees earning less than a control group. The author argues that the JTPA was adopted for political rather than economic reasons. "It was the product of a compromise between the radical free-market orientation of the early Reagan administration and its political need to fashion some response to the unemployment crisis of the early 1980s". It was based on the idea that workers must look inside themselves – rather than to the government or corporations – for the solution to economic difficulties.

Lafer highlights one particularly Orwellian example of how training programmes have been used to avert attention from corporate restructuring. While Chrysler was laying off tens of thousands of car workers, it announced the establishment of a robotics-training programme. The local media hailed this as crucial to the hopes of the region, "despite the fact", says Lafer, "that the express purpose of robotics is to make more and more workers redundant". Welfare to work fares little better. The author explains: "For the most part, welfare-to-work programmes have abandoned all pretence of training participants in any identifiable skills whatsoever, Instead, the programmes assume that participants will benefit – in unspecified and unmeasured ways – from simply being required to show up on time and perform whatever menial tasks they are assigned."

Lafer concludes: "This, then, is the character of job-training policy: the crisis of under-employment has largely been met by a series of symbolic and token policies – failed programmes that no one tries to reform, highly publicized initiatives that serve less than 5 per cent of the population in need, and an endless series of 'demonstration' and 'pilot' programmes that never turn into systematic policies."