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Tag: job training
What Can We Do About America’s Skilled Labor Shortage?

What Can We Do About America’s Skilled Labor Shortage?

As the new decade begins, America is facing a difficult situation when it comes to employment and jobs. While more people than ever are graduating from higher education, they’re facing difficulty when seeking employment. Meanwhile, the nation faces an increasing lack of skilled labor, with trade professions having difficulty in staffing. With more people seeking employment after college, there’s increasingly a lack of people taking jobs in skilled trades, creating an employment gap based on education and training.

The Call Of Higher Education

With college education being more expensive than ever, why are more students attending when there are plenty of available jobs that don’t require a college degree? As a college education becomes more common, there’s increasing pressure from previous generations to pursue higher education. Often, attending college is now seen as the inevitable next step after high school. Public school systems tend to perpetuate this assumption. Half of the public school workforce consists of teachers. The other 50% are guidance counselors, nurses, speech therapists, etc. Regardless of staff status, many public school workers and teachers push their students to seek a college education, even when doing so is financially unwise.

Stigma Against Skilled Labor

In addition to the pressure to attend higher education, many Americans pursue college due to the seemingly prevalent stigma against careers in skilled labor. Trade professions, such as carpentry, plumbing, and repairs, often are seen as being “below” office work. This pushes many recent college graduates into part-time temporary or contract positions in an office environment. More than three million temporary and contract employees work for America’s staffing companies during an average week.

However, these skilled trade professions can actually pay more than the standard office job by a wide margin. Many skilled labor careers offer a high income, better hours, and better long-term prospects than college graduates will be able to find in other fields. Many capable individuals are, unfortunately, missing out on excellent careers due to widespread stigma against skilled labor.

Economic Impacts

The skilled labor shortage isn’t only impacting individuals’ career prospects; it also comes with a significant disadvantage for the nation’s economy. Current estimates suggest that the skilled labor shortage could cost as much as $2.5 trillion, with up to 2.4 million positions unfilled between 2018 and 2028. Additionally, the stigma against trade skills and the pressure to pursue higher education may worsen America’s existing student debt problems. Many students are forced to take out expensive loans to afford college tuition, pushing them into severe lifelong debt. This debt impacts all aspects of individual and national economics, with ripple effects as far-reaching as the settlement of life insurance payments. Approximately 86 percent of life insurance policies lapse without any benefit ever paid. With student debts climbing and more unfilled positions in certain industries, it’s clear that the nation will need to find solutions.

Fixing The Problems

Encouraging more people to pursue careers in skilled labor won’t happen overnight. Major cultural and structural shifts will need to occur for changes to take place long-term. During schooling, more students need to be made aware that there are acceptable career choices within skilled labor that pay well and don’t require a college degree. Not all of these careers require so-called “hard labor” either; according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are an estimated 7,880 tailors, dressmakers, and custom sewers across the nation. Informing current students about their options ensures that a larger percentage of them will move into these positions in the future.

But what can be done for positions that are currently vacant? Is waiting for students to graduate from high school first necessary? There are several more immediate intervention options available, and almost all of them rely on educating and retraining unemployed or underemployed individuals. It’s technically possible for people to educate themselves for entry into these careers. There are over 119,000 libraries in the United States. Most have resources or learning materials available to help with retraining.

However, many of these careers require some degree of training through trade schools. Directing funds towards training and retraining could help, and in many cases, it already has. Several veteran programs allow veterans to gain an education that can help them enter into well-paying skilled trade jobs. Veterans of the Armed Services can apply for G.I. Bill benefits online, making it easier than ever to receive the necessary financial support for education.

As 2020 begins, the skilled labor shortage continues to pose problems for the nation’s employment and economy. However, with increased resources and promotion of skilled labor careers at earlier ages, it may be possible to combat the shortage and avoid continued employment gaps over time.

What Hillary Said About Paid Leave, Child Care, Inequality — Yesterday And 20 Years Ago

What Hillary Said About Paid Leave, Child Care, Inequality — Yesterday And 20 Years Ago

Following Hillary Clinton’s first major campaign speech on Saturday, purveyors of conventional wisdom have assured us again that she is tacking toward the left to deflect her challengers and mollify her party’s liberal base. Such assertions usually hint that Clinton is not progressive herself, but merely swayed that way by polls and consultants.

On the evening before her big event in Four Freedoms Park, New York’s memorial to its favorite son, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I picked up a copy of her 1996 bestseller, It Takes A Village. (While many journalists once thumbed through it, few seem to remember its contents.) Published during an era when the nation showed few signs of turning leftward, Clinton’s first book offered pithy arguments for the same priorities she is emphasizing now. Consider the views she expressed on family leave — and, in particular, the limitations of the law signed by her husband in 1993:

 As I have mentioned, the Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees unpaid leave to employees in firms with more than fifty workers. That is a good beginning. Many parents, however, cannot afford to forgo pay for even a few weeks, and very few employers in America offer paid maternity and paternity leave….

Other countries have figured out that honoring the family by giving it adequate time for caregiving is not only right for the family and smart for society but good for employers, who reap the benefits of workers’ increased loyalty and peace of mind. The Germans, for example, guarantee working mothers fourteen weeks’ maternity leave (six weeks before and eight weeks after delivery) at full salary…

Other European countries provide similarly generous leave, some of them to fathers as well as mothers. In Sweden, for example, couples receive fifteen months of job-guaranteed, paid leave to share between them…

As First Lady, Clinton obviously was in no position to demand that her husband’s administration (or the Republican-dominated Congress) institute paid family leave, but her own opinion was clear enough. So was her view of early childhood education, another current issue that she highlighted on Saturday:

Imagine a country in which nearly all children between the ages of three and five attend preschool in sparkling classrooms, with teachers recruited and trained as child care professionals. Imagine a country that conceives of child care as a program to “welcome” children into the larger community and “awaken” their potential for learning and growing.

It may sound too good to be true, but it’s not….More than 90 percent of French children between ages three and five attend free or inexpensive preschools called écoles maternelles…

While I was in France, I had conversations with a number of political leaders, from Socialists to Conservatives. “How,” I asked, “can you transcend your political differences and come to an agreement on the issue of government-subsidized child care?” One after another of them looked at me in astonishment. “How can you not invest in children and expect to have a healthy country?” was the reply I heard over and over again.

Finally, Clinton drew sharp attention to the social instabilities of the post-industrial American economy and the role of government in redressing what she called a “crisis.” Observing that “long-established expectations about doing business have given way under the pressures of the modern economy,” she warned bluntly:

Too many companies, especially large ones, are driven more and more narrowly by the need to ensure that investors get good quarterly returns and to justify executives’ high salaries. Too often, this means that they view most employees as costs, not investments, and that they expend less and less concern on job training, employee profit sharing, family-friendly policies…or even fair pay raises that share with workers – not to mention their families and communities – gains from productivity and profits…

Despite record profits for many companies, the gap in income between top executives and the average worker has widened dramatically….This growing inequality of incomes has serious implications for our children.

She went on to again praise Germany, where “there is a general consensus that government and business should play a role in evening out inequities in the free market system” — and where higher base wages, universal health care, and superb job training guaranteed “a distribution of income that is not so skewed as ours is.”

Writing 20 years ago, when President Clinton was running for re-election against the odds, Hillary hedged her message — and yet she was prescient in addressing the harms of an increasingly unfair economy. What she said then undergirds what she is still saying, more and more forcefully, in this campaign.

Obama, Biden Tout Job-Training Grants

Obama, Biden Tout Job-Training Grants

By Kathleen Hennessey, Tribune Washington Bureau

 

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama promoted his latest attempt to help U.S. workers compete in the global “skills race,” announcing $600 million in grants for job-training programs focused on industry partnerships and apprenticeships.

Speaking at a community college near Pittsburgh, Obama warned Wednesday that other countries have done more to train workers and that the United States is in danger of slipping behind as it tries to rebuild its battered manufacturing sector.

“We can’t stop technology. And you’ve got a global economy now where we’ve got to compete. We live in a 21st-century global economy. Jobs know no borders,” Obama said.

“Other countries know this. Countries like Germany, China, India — they’re working every day to out-educate our kids so they can out-compete our businesses,” he said. “And each year, frankly, it shows that they’re making more progress than we are. We’re still ahead, we’ve still got the best cards, but they’re making some good decisions. We’ve got to make those same decisions.”

Earlier this year, Obama gave Vice President Joe Biden the task of evaluating and improving the tangle of federal job-training programs, many of which a Government Accountability Office report in 2011 called duplicative. Obama and Biden both made the trip to the Community College of Allegheny County in Oakdale to tout the results of that work.

Obama announced $500 million in competitive grants, the fourth installment of $2 billion already allocated for job training. This set of grants will give priority to programs that include direct partnerships between national industry groups and community colleges in an effort to ensure schools are offering training in the skills most in demand.

The money also will pay for programs that try to standardize certification programs or encourage better collection of data on the workforce at the state level, according to senior administration officials, who asked not be named.

An additional $100 million will be directed toward apprenticeship programs. Administration officials said that such training is not used enough and that 87 percent of workers who complete an apprenticeship are hired by the employers and earn an average of $50,000.

“You get an apprenticeship, you’re there, you’re learning on the job. People see that you’re serious about working,” Obama said. “The bottom line is, if you’re willing to put in the work to get a job or earn a promotion in today’s economy, America’s job-training system should give you every possible chance.”

Obama’s latest effort uses existing federal money and, like much of what the president does these days, does not require approval from Congress. The apprenticeship program will be funded by fees collected from companies when they apply for visas for high-skilled workers. The money is designated for job training.

Republicans in Congress also have proposed changes to job-training programs. House Republicans said their Skills Act would streamline programs and improve accountability for federal- and state-funded programs.

“When it comes to skills training, our first priority should be reforming our current, outdated maze of programs so that they make sense for people in today’s dynamic economy,” said Brendan Buck, spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-OH).

Obama’s day trip — “a guys’ trip,” he joked — gave the president and the vice president a chance to tout an economic initiative in familiar territory for Biden. Noting his Pennsylvania credentials, Scranton-born Biden was upbeat about where the United States stands in the global competition for jobs.

“You go around, you hear people talking down the economy. America is better positioned than any country in the world to lead the world in the 21st century. The rest of the country — the rest of the world doesn’t have, as we used to say up in Scranton, in my neighborhood, not a patch on our jeans, I tell you,” he said.

©afp.com / Chip Somodevilla