I had to wade through a lot of prologue in this piece at RealClearPolicy before I finally reached what Livia Lam and Thomas Showalter actually want to do. Here it is:
First, the K-12, higher education, and workforce development ecosystem must all have successful preparation for the 21st century workplace as a common goal. This includes middle and high schools making sure students receive work-based learning experiences before graduation. Adult education programs should bake in foundational college and career readiness skills, such as digital literacy and core capabilities.
Next, it’s high time we guaranteed all workers basic protections, including paid leave, predictable scheduling, and comprehensive health care and retirement benefits. Rather than an activity that’s undertaken pre-work, employer-sponsored training should be a part of any good job.
Workplace safety education and worker voice must also come with any job. Labor-management partnerships and portable benefit funds are promising solutions for standardizing a range of these job protections. The pandemic underlines the gulf between the work-from-home workforce and those who must report to the workplace, with or without protective protocols and equipment.
To tackle yawning racial and gender gaps in hiring, especially the overrepresentation of marginalized groups of workers in certain jobs, workforce policies can build on the tenets of equal employment opportunity and drive equitable and inclusive workplace practices. Among a suite of workforce redesign features, establishing incentives for job creators to take up equitable hiring practices, including adopting fair chance hiring, targeted hire standards, and apprenticeship utilization requirements, will equip them to innovate and address systemic inequalities.
I know what they’re against (Trump). The quoted portion is what they’re for. I’m not sure any of the things they list would be my first priority. For one thing is workforce “preparation for the 21st century workplace” an actionable item? More than 15% of the U. S. labor force was educated somewhere other than the U. S. Additionally, the on time graduation rate in Chicago public schools is 83%. In New York City it’s 76%. In Los Angeles it’s 77%. How do the schools address the employment problems of people who won’t attend school?
I’m in broad agreement with the proposition that employers have some responsibility for training. That’s pretty hard to enforce in an environment in which employers can hire to fit, frequently reaching out to staff augmentation or outsourcing companies like Tata, Infosys, and Accenture or just offshore the activity.
While I think that it’s easy enough to impose mandates on employers, it’s a lot more difficult to make employees worth hiring when you take the cost of the mandates into account.
IMO there isn’t much wrong with the U. S. labor market that can’t be cured by tightening the labor market. To that end we need to have much more strictly tailored and enforced immigration and guest worker programs.
I also think that we need a lot more primary production in the U. S. and if it takes subsidies to accomplish that so be it. That, along with a tighter labor market, would go a long way to putting more Americans to work.
“I’m in broad agreement with the proposition that employers have some responsibility for training.”
Imagine a company that interviews high school kids, and their parents, to establish a candidate pool who want to learn a valuable trade, provides paid internships throughout their high school days, pays tuition if they attend local tech community college and more internships, and does same if they want to go on to engineering school.
Imagine that you then hand pick about 85% of those candidates as the ones you want to become full time employees upon graduation.
Imagine the quality of that workforce – skills and attitude and character. Imagine their performance. Imagine the retention rate.
You are imagining one of our portfolio companies.
The biggest source of our unequal outcomes problem are s**ty primary and secondary schools. They are crappy because they are overwhelmingly located in s**ty areas with a lot of violent crime. Violent crime doesn’t always cause poverty, but it sure as hell keeps an area impoverished and undesirable to live or work in. Therefore the first priority should be to suppress violent crime.
A secondary problem is returning the curriculum to actual education instead of indoctrination and restricting or eliminating failed teaching methods such as Whole Word (useful for dyslexics but not the general population) and New Math (I ran into that in High School). The New York City schools were once renowned for the education they provided to an enormous number of students of all walks of life. Use what works.
My alma mater has an engineering co-op program. In that program companies agree to take co-op students for one quarter per year while the student attended classes two quarters a year and graduated in five years rather than four. Such programs could be expanded beyond engineering.
Conditional agreement. It depends on what is meant by “s**ty primary and secondary schools”. Sadly, that or similar analyses can be euphemisms for “schools that have black kids in them”. There are other problems. For example, for some black kids being a good student and working hard are socially ostracized (or worse) for “acting white”. In many cases there’s a lack of family support for learning.
Oddly, I was part of the experimental pilot program that became New Math. It started out as one guy’s doctoral dissertation. It worked for me. I was doing calculus in what would have been middle school—I was years ahead of most of the guys in high school.
It’s actually somewhat difficult to to pull off a program like the one I described. There are subtleties and the owners taught us a few of them. Two things we discovered are that you do need to interview the parents to understand upbringing and desire. Also it is best to have those with aptitude and desire, but not a necessarily a desire to Go to college, self identify.
As I wisecracked to the Investment Committee in describing most of these late teens: “they looked more like the kids on the debating team than [Metalworking factory workers.]â€.
We invest a lot of time in training since we think it is important. We have agreements with a couple of truing programs and have started our own. We dont get paid for any of this and it takes up a lot of time but it means that we get to choose the best of the trainees and our retention rate is very high, but then our field is different than others. As much as I am sometimes critical of businesses for not investing in training much anymore it certainly seems like people move from job to jobs much more than in the past. Not sure of cause and effect for that but given that is now things now work I could certainly understand a business not wanting to invest a lot in training if they think workers are going to leave.
Steve
My alma mater is primarily a co-op school. Most students (engineering, math, science, accounting, architecture, optometry, actuarial science, social work) do 4 months job placement; 4 months school; for 5 years.
Cannot recommend co-op enough. Reduces debt; and teaches “work†— in a way no classroom can.
Exactly. Some of my classmates in the co-op program had some fascinating experiences. One in particular’s co-op employers was NASA. He spent one quarter at the South Pole. Eventually he became Chief Project Engineer on one of the space shuttles.
Co-op programs
No help at all if you or your guidance counselor has never heard of them.
As usual, it’s family and social connections that give you a shot.
Most high schools encourage minority kids to go to college but don’t even know what coursework prepares them and they typically drop out after two Years and 30 grand in the hole.
The thread is interesting, but I caution people. There is a difference between these programs in the professions like 4 year engineering or accounting, as cited, which have been around for years (certainly since I was an undergrad), and those for welders, press brake operators, machinists etc.
If you don’t understand the differences and nuances, you actually don’t understand.
Our guys don’t aspire, or perhaps or are not capable, of the professions, but they don’t have long hair and scruffy beards, aren’t druggies, don’t have tatoos etc. No gang members. No slugs. They come from different backgrounds and means; but they are fine people. That’s why this kind of program is limited in applicability. The population of candidates is limited in any given geography. BTW – Antifa and BLM, with their useless liberal arts degrees, need not apply; they are unemployable.
Antifa and BLM members are not unemployed. These are becoming multinational organizations with multi-million dollar budgets.
I’m thinking of good kids with no connections and limited options.
If you ignore them then the smart ones will turn to crime because it’s what they see being successful in their daily lives.
http://abc6onyourside.com/news/nation-world/as-black-lives-matter-donations-surge-some-want-to-know-where-the-money-goes
Ive heard that BLM has actually been capitalized to the tune of $150MM.
BLM has somehow become the symbol of inclusion for the beautiful people.
The cause celebre, the badge of honor, the place to be seen . And I’m talking about White people. It’s beyond my understanding. Portland:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CC32y_wlRmr/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=embed_video_watch_again