- 23 Jun 2024 15:45
#15319078
I'm not the least bit surprised. I was very skeptical about this.
(This is in the U.S.)
Even in the 1990s, at the peak of free-trade fever in Washington, Congress knew that globalization would be rough on some folks. Opening the economy up to cheap imports from Canada, Mexico, and China was bound to undercut domestic industries and cost many American workers their jobs. On top of that, welfare reform eliminated or sharply cut benefits for many families. To soften the blow, Congress offered one of its favorite solutions: federally funded job training to help laid-off workers and destitute parents find a new source of income.
It made sense in theory. Manufacturing workers would "re-skill" for the Information Age economy--perhaps moving from the factory floor to an exciting career in, say, computer science--and impoverished moms would get a hand up instead of a handout.
In practice, it was a failure.
A 2017 study by Mathematica Research compared people who had received job training under the 1998 law, now known as the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, with a randomly selected control group. Thirty months later, the training had zero effect on earnings.
In 2022, the U.S. Department of Labor published a comprehensive study of the WIOA and a host of similarly structured federal job-training initiatives. The programs did manage to put a lot of people through training, the researchers found. And many of those people were then hired in so-called in-demand jobs. But in the first three years after training, their wages increased only 6 percent compared with those of similar workers who didn't receive training--from an average of about $16,300 to $17,300 a year--and the effect didn’t last. In the long term, their relative wages didn’t increase at all.
According to the opinion of the article: the programs fail because they're designed with potential employers rather than employees in mind. In the case of the WIOA, the local workforce boards that decide which jobs qualify as "in-demand", and therefore which are eligible for federal funding, are dominated by business interests--and what business wants is a steady stream of low-wage workers trained by someone else.
Some point to seemingly successful programs that train "certified nursing aides" in as little as six weeks. Certified nursing aide does sound like the entry point to a solid middle-class health-care profession. It's not. Only 6 percent of low-income people who went through a federally funded CNA training program from 2015 to 2021 advanced up the nursing career ladder, according to an Urban Institute study. Many earn near-poverty wages.
The Problem With 'In-Demand' Jobs Opinion, by Kevin Carey, The Atlantic, June 23, 2024
(temporary link to free article here)
Government is just looking for simple cheap easy fixes to the problem.
But the solution is not so simple. If there were tons of great jobs out there, don't you think all these people who lost their jobs would be seeking those jobs on their own, and pursuing training to get those jobs?
Maybe big employers would start training workers if they felt there was enough pressure to fill empty positions? That's how it used to work in older times.
And it could even be seen as another example of how government bureaucrats often do not know better than the market. Similar to why Communism-type Planned Economies often are not very efficient.
(This is in the U.S.)
Even in the 1990s, at the peak of free-trade fever in Washington, Congress knew that globalization would be rough on some folks. Opening the economy up to cheap imports from Canada, Mexico, and China was bound to undercut domestic industries and cost many American workers their jobs. On top of that, welfare reform eliminated or sharply cut benefits for many families. To soften the blow, Congress offered one of its favorite solutions: federally funded job training to help laid-off workers and destitute parents find a new source of income.
It made sense in theory. Manufacturing workers would "re-skill" for the Information Age economy--perhaps moving from the factory floor to an exciting career in, say, computer science--and impoverished moms would get a hand up instead of a handout.
In practice, it was a failure.
A 2017 study by Mathematica Research compared people who had received job training under the 1998 law, now known as the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, with a randomly selected control group. Thirty months later, the training had zero effect on earnings.
In 2022, the U.S. Department of Labor published a comprehensive study of the WIOA and a host of similarly structured federal job-training initiatives. The programs did manage to put a lot of people through training, the researchers found. And many of those people were then hired in so-called in-demand jobs. But in the first three years after training, their wages increased only 6 percent compared with those of similar workers who didn't receive training--from an average of about $16,300 to $17,300 a year--and the effect didn’t last. In the long term, their relative wages didn’t increase at all.
According to the opinion of the article: the programs fail because they're designed with potential employers rather than employees in mind. In the case of the WIOA, the local workforce boards that decide which jobs qualify as "in-demand", and therefore which are eligible for federal funding, are dominated by business interests--and what business wants is a steady stream of low-wage workers trained by someone else.
Some point to seemingly successful programs that train "certified nursing aides" in as little as six weeks. Certified nursing aide does sound like the entry point to a solid middle-class health-care profession. It's not. Only 6 percent of low-income people who went through a federally funded CNA training program from 2015 to 2021 advanced up the nursing career ladder, according to an Urban Institute study. Many earn near-poverty wages.
The Problem With 'In-Demand' Jobs Opinion, by Kevin Carey, The Atlantic, June 23, 2024
(temporary link to free article here)
Government is just looking for simple cheap easy fixes to the problem.
But the solution is not so simple. If there were tons of great jobs out there, don't you think all these people who lost their jobs would be seeking those jobs on their own, and pursuing training to get those jobs?
Maybe big employers would start training workers if they felt there was enough pressure to fill empty positions? That's how it used to work in older times.
And it could even be seen as another example of how government bureaucrats often do not know better than the market. Similar to why Communism-type Planned Economies often are not very efficient.
- By Pants-of-dog
- By Hakeer