Jobless Experiences Contradict Political Claims

On Monday, President Obama hosted a video conference to answer questions submitted online and speak directly to a small group of voters and students. During the chat, a Fort Worth, Texas woman named Jennifer Weddel shared her husband’s personal story and used it to challenge the president on the nation’s employment situation. Her husband is a semiconductor engineer and has not been able to find permanent, full-time work in three years.

Weddel evidently recognizes this situation as contradicting the president’s claims about the availability of skilled labor jobs within American companies, but those same claims were precisely the response that Obama offered. He insisted that there is a great deal of demand for positions like those for which Weddel’s husband is qualified, and he reiterated the comments that he had made in the State of the Union Address to the effect that American high-tech companies want to hire American workers but cannot find enough of them with the appropriate skill sets. Furthermore, Obama offered to circulate the unemployed engineer’s resume among the companies that had been giving him that information.

Stories like this are all too familiar to me, and indeed to many of us. They illustrate the often stark, sometimes incredible differences between what private individuals experience and what persons and aggregates of persons claim from a position once-removed. There is clearly tension between Weddel’s story and the president’s claims. In this, it has to be that someone is disingenuous or misinformed.

Anecdotal evidence is unreliable in making general claims, but it is also the foundation for statistical data. Obama’s claims are based on anecdote, as well, provided to him by industry executives rather than low-level workers. At the same time, one surely need not look far to find other stories that parallel Weddel’s. Are those workers struggling because of some spectacular personal failing in their job search strategies? Conversely, are companies failing to connect with these workers because of deficiencies in their recruitment? If either or both of these explanations are entirely at fault, it’s a shame that the entire body of skilled laborers can’t channel their resumes through the White House.

I’m much more inclined to believe, though, that there are further explanations. For instance, perhaps the president’s industry contacts are not completely in earnest when they say that they want to hire American workers but can’t find them. That claim can be taken in different ways, one of which is that companies can’t find engineers whom they can hire for wages low enough to make it economically feasible for them to hire Americans over foreign workers. This might partly account for why according to figures utilized in last year’s Georgetown University study, of college graduates who majored in engineering, only thirty-two percent actually work in engineering. For many of those graduates, it may be economically preferable to take jobs that are outside of or only peripherally related to their field.

It seems to me that the president privileges the most optimistic interpretation of industry claims because he has been one of the most vocal supporters of the uncharacteristically simplistic assertion that whatever our problems are, more formal education will solve them. And the more fundamental assumption behind that thinking is that if one is qualified for a given type of job, he gets it. That too flies in the face of the lived experiences of many of the unemployed and underemployed (and those who, like me, are necessarily self-employed).

The president’s response to Mrs. Weddel could be seen as implying disbelief – a failure to comprehend why someone who purportedly has the skills necessary to be employed in a particular field hasn’t received a suitable offer. And the president should feel confused, because the great mass of citizens who are jostling for frightfully scarce positions feel that way with every resume that vanishes into the ether. But I worry that President Obama will not share in that feeling for long, because when his endorsement secures Weddel’s husband a job, it will be all too easy to believe that the only reason it took so long was because he hadn’t looked in the right place before. But that convenient explanation will do little good for engineer that I met who was working in a local café, or any of the unemployed lawyers and teachers I’ve known, all of whom have been told, frequently and with sincerity, that the jobs are out there.

Shifting the Liability for Job Training

I think President Obama delivered a fine speech last night. I am particularly impressed with his remarks regarding higher education and unemployment. For the past three years, I have tried to be a particularly aggressive and passionate critic of the current administration’s policies and rhetoric regarding education policy. And more than that, for the past five years or so I’ve tried to direct that aggression towards certain common beliefs among American society as a whole. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but it seems to me that President Obama has changed course on the topic overnight, so that he is no longer peddling the easy answers that we’re used to or defending the status quo, but rather offering challenging and innovative alternatives.

After discussing the topics of renewed manufacturing and tax incentives to prevent outsourcing, the president changed direction slightly and said “I also hear from many business leaders who want to hire in the United States but can’t find workers with the right skills.”

Call me jaded, but I’ve never been particularly persuaded by that argument. It seems to me that if a business leader wants to hire within the United States, he can do so. If that is his earnest desire, but his prospective employees lack the necessary skills, it is at least theoretically possible for the business to take it upon itself to provide Americans with the requisite training. To my surprise, that was precisely what the president went on to propose.

He first presented the anecdote of a worker who was laid off, but at a time when a local community college and a new manufacturing plant had formed a partnership whereby the company helped to design the curriculum that would lead directly to the jobs that were now needed, and then paid the tuition for the laid off worker and hired her to operate the plant.

The president continued: “I want every American looking for work to have the same opportunity as Jackie did. Join me in a national commitment to train two million Americans with skills that will lead directly to a job.”

What an extraordinary, and yet extraordinarily simple concept! Prior to this, the only recommendations I’ve ever heard from the administration have been, give students more Pell grants, more Stafford loans, keep down the interests rates – all so that people who have not yet entered the job market have to take on a little bit less of a financial burden before they ever have a shot at being decently employed.

Could this new initiative actually signal the beginning of the end of this current climate, in which training is accepted as exclusively the responsibility of the worker and not the employer? Could this mean that in the near future, young people and laid off laborers won’t be asked to pick a vocation, pay hand over fist for the skills associated with it, and then simply gamble on the possibility that it will be available to them after two-to-four years?

Now, I’m sure I may seem glib in that I seem to be advocating for saving workers from the fruitless sacrifice of money and time by asking employers to do exactly the same. Some manufacturers can afford the risk, but not all can. In the latest issue of the Atlantic, Adam Davidson writes an article on American manufacturing, using Standard Motor Products in Greenville, S.C. as a case study. He explains that industrial profit margins in general, and Standard’s in particular, are remarkably slim, meaning that hiring more unskilled workers or paying them higher wages can put the entire business at legitimate risk. Furthermore, in order to be a Level 2 worker at a Standard plant, one needs to know programming languages and high-level mathematics. Consequently, “the gap between Level 1 and Level 2 is so wide that it doesn’t make financial sense for Standard to spend years training someone who might not be able to pick up the skills or might take that training to a competing factory.”

Given that reality, it certainly seems unfair to ask a company to bite the bullet and risk its own survival on doing the right thing for American workers. But it’s no less unfair to demand an untenable investment from a company than it is to demand if from an individual worker. They too risk their economic survival in taking out loans or removing themselves from the workforce for a period of years in order to acquire skills that, while necessary, may or may not actually lead to employment. No matter how lean its profit margins are, a company with stock valued at $400 million has more financial resources than a twenty-two year-old single mother working as an unskilled laborer.

There are ways around the sever risk involved in both providing and acquiring high-level training. Companies must first recognize that as their operations become more complex, training costs escalate as an element of initial overhead. It is unreasonable to expect that with greater automation and output, workers will be more and more capable to perform their functions before they even arrive at your door. Worker skills are an investment in the future of the company and the industry. Of course, they are also an investment in the future of the worker, but no man should be asked to make a substantial financial investment before he has even held a job.

So how about treating collegiate level training as an initial expense by the company, and a retroactive financial obligation for the worker? That is, a company can promise to hire from a pool of young applicants, then send pay their tuition upfront to the associated university, and subsequently deduct the cost of the education from each such worker’s pay over the course of their employment. Some might be averse to such an arrangement because it sounds like indentured servitude. But that’s the system that we already have; the only difference would be that the worker would be indentured to an employer rather than a bank. Also, for some there would be the added difference of actually being employed under the proposed system, as opposed to highly trained and still out of work.

The interests of both employer and employee can be protected. If a worker wishes to take their new skills to another plant, they can remain under contract to repay the cost of their training to their initial employer. By contrast, if a company fires the employee without cause, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to necessitate that they release the worker from that financial obligation in whole or in part.

Sacrifice is often necessary if one is to make it in this world, but there is no cause for one person or one organization to have to take on unbearable strain for the mere privilege of being employed or employing another. That has been the situation for too long – with people at every level of society, from government, to business, to private citizenry insisting that each new job seeker simply get an education whatever the expense and then hope for the best. It is high time that we rediscover what it means to share the burden. For the first time that I can remember, I think that with regard to education there may actually be some support within the government for that noble idea.

Learn to Be Better at the Job You Don't Have

I will be posting a much more in-depth commentary on a related topic later on, but I've just heard about some news related to labor policy, which I'd like to address first. President Obama announced today that a new initiative in "winning the future" will be to invest in providing college students with training for manufacturing jobs. That spurs me to ask one question as loudly and vociferously as possible: Why college students?

If we believe that manufacturing jobs will help to turn the recession around, what benefit is to be gained from drawing candidates for those new jobs from among a pool of college-educated workers? Doesn't that background specifically make them differently qualified? Having formal education in the fields of physics or mechanical engineering might help you to better understand the processes and machinery involved in making industrial or consumer goods, but I don't see how it helps you to actually do a better job of working on the line, assembling those products, and running that machinery. Neither do I see how saddling future manufacturing laborers with student loan debt will help to ease their financial burden once those jobs come to contribute to an economic recovery.

Frankly, even if the government's investment was channeled into trade schools rather than community colleges, how does that actually help? This constant, unquestioned emphasis on both job training and college education relies on what is to me an obviously false premise: that the problems facing nine to twenty percent of American workers today is not a lack of available jobs, but a lack of qualifications among the labor force. The government seems to believe, against evidence and common sense, that increasing training and education will cause jobs befitting those qualifications to appear out of the ether.

Why does labor policy consistently place the burden of future recovery on the worker rather than the industry, those who are struggling rather than those who merely have reduced profit margins, the individual rather than the economy as a whole?

The Department of Labor recently reported that manufacturing jobs were cut in May. In light of that, on what is the government basing the assertion that increased manufacturing will spur the economy in coming months and years? What are they doing to make that happen, other than telling people "Get ready - we promise this is what you're going to be doing after you graduate"?

Manufacturing jobs, if I'm not mistaken, tend to be blue collar labor. And like much blue collar labor, and indeed like many jobs in sales and office work and other traditionally white collar positions, the ability to do the job effectively relies largely on on-the-job training. No degree program can teach you the exact skill set you'll need for a specific job, and unless in-depth background knowledge is essential for a particular career path, acquiring a degree is often just a waste of time and money.

But again, Obama and the government as a whole seem to think the reason there are so few manufacturing jobs is not that the industries are failing in the U.S. or outsourcing their labor to cheap foreign workers, but because employers are sitting in their offices, pouting that nobody in America has the training to do the jobs that they'd so desperately like to fill. But what I think is that if those jobs existed in greater numbers, and if there were incentives for employers to keep them in the United States, manufacturers would hire whomever demonstrated the overall competence and trainability to be able to perform the needed tasks.

As a matter of fact, that seems obvious to me. But I don't see labor policy ever developing to reflect that. I think we'll go on delaying people's entry into the labor market by pushing them through higher levels of education while waiting either for the economy to turn around on its own or for a greater collapse to drive us to a breaking point.