Volume
3, No. 2, April 2003
New Economy Information Service E-Bulletin
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In this issue:
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Public opinion polls show that the U.S. military enjoys great respect today, despite the anti-government temper that prevails in so much of our politics. Watching televised interviews from Iraq with both officers and the ranks helps explain why. Over and over one hears about professionalism, "doing my job," and the pride the troops take in the skills and training they have received. As authors David King and Zachary Karabell put it," "The military has come to be defined by high levels of skill, dedication, and discipline."1
A headline in last Sunday's New York Times asserts that, while the socio-economic group it draws from may be out of fashion in our politics, never-the-less, our "Military Mirrors Working-Class America." As the accompanying story explains, "America's 1.4 million-strong military seems to resemble the makeup of a two-year commuter or trade school outside Birmingham or Biloxi far more than that of a ghetto or barrio or four-year university in Boston." 2
But just because military recruits are not the most troubled slum kids does not mean they lack diversity. Only some 60 per cent of enlisted men and women are white, while 22 per cent are black -- the rest being other minorities. The paradox is that an institution with what is usually considered a somewhat conservative temper today looks more like the ideal society of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Hubert Humphrey than any Ivy League university.
To some observers, the successes of the military in this field represents a success of affirmative action. Because the University of Michigan affirmative action case is now before the Supreme Court, the experience of the military is likely to become the focus of much discussion. It in fact has been the policy of the military to recruit and promote members of minority groups for leadership positions. But affirmative action in the military is not based on a rigid quota system, and steps are taken to assure that candidates for advancement meet high standards. There is no dumbing down for the sake of diversity. To quote University of Maryland scholar William Galston:
Are there lessons for the American economy in the experience of the U.S. military? One may be that you can fashion a world class corps out of young people who may not always be stellar academic performers. But that takes a lot of education and training -- more than seems likely to be available the economic sphere unless a broad political consensus drives and shapes it.
Notes:
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White-Collar Jobs: Going The manufacturing sector has seen jobs migrate offshore for years. Since the late 1970s manufacturing jobs as a percentage of total private non-farm payrolls have been halved, falling from 30 percent in 1975 to 15 percent in 2002. Both the number of jobs within a given service sector and the number of service sectors affected by overseas outsourcing are on the rise. At first customer service call-centers moved to developing countries, but today overseas radiologists interpret CT scans for U.S. hospitals, foreign accountants evaluate U.S. loan applications and U.S. architectural projects are designed overseas. Jobs in the information technology sector, one of America's best-paying industries, are also going overseas, or to foreign workers, often underpaid, who are brought into the United States through the H1-B visa program. Over the next 15 years, 3.3 million U.S. service industry jobs and $136 billion in wages will move offshore, according to a report by Forrester Research Inc. Of the 145 U.S. companies surveyed, 88 percent of the firms that go overseas for services claimed to get better value for their money offshore than from U.S. providers, and 71 percent said offshore workers did better quality work. A CNN/Money article on the survey said: "...(developing country) workers are increasingly better-trained, especially if they've spent significant time working in the United States on temporary visas."
(See also: "White-Collar Work A Booming U.S. Export," Peter Goodman, Washington Post, April 2, 2003.)
Labor history is often recounted as a saga of unrelieved conflict. Peter A. Swenson, Chairman of the Political Science Department at Northwestern University, has written a useful book that provides some balancing perspective: Capitalists Against Markets: The Making of Labor Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden (Oxford University Press, 2002). Dr. Swenson compares the development of labor and welfare systems in Sweden and the U.S.--two countries that often seem very different. He finds some intriguing similarities. In both countries, cooperation across class boundaries was necessary to achieve progress in unemployment insurance, health care, social security and other welfare measures. Sometimes this cooperation was overt, while in others either business or labor purposefully stepped back, offering no resistance to change. Swenson contends that when labor or reformers try to move forward without the support or acquiescence of business, they "underestimate the power of capitalists in a capitalist society." His description of the dynamics of union/employer cooperation on behalf of social legislation in the past may offer useful lessons for those working to build business/labor partnerships for training at the workplace.
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The Workforce Investment Act:
The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998 was supposed to create a comprehensive system of federal job training and educational programs. It has produced a tangle of bureaucracy that offers little to employed workers whose jobs are at risk from globalization or technological change. By passing this group by, the WIA forfeits its claim to being comprehensive. More important, it leaves our workers and our economy in a largely defensive stance when it comes to dealing with turbulent and sometimes destructive forces of economic change. To play on the current Washington preoccupation, it's like responding to terrorism with duct tape and bottled water instead of taking the offensive. The rationale for the Workforce Investment Act was that it would consolidate a number of diverse federal programs that had some education and training component. Most of these programs had their genesis in job training efforts that were tied to social welfare programs of the 1970s (CETA) and the 1980s (JTPA). The central purpose of these programs was to help people who had difficulties getting into the mainstream workforce: the urban poor, those in areas of severe unemployment, young people, returning veterans, the disabled, migrant or seasonal farmworkers and American Indians. By and large, the programs that fall under WIA offer education and training to help groups with widely diverse social, economic and physical problems become productive, independent members of the labor force. The hope was that WIA would improve services, delivery mechanisms, and performance measures by making them more uniform and coherent. But it soon became evident that the bureaucratic impulse for consolidation was running afoul of the absence of homogeneity among the populations being served. This has made the effort unwieldy, and, according to some, too often unworkable. Congressional authorization of WIA expires on September 30, 2003, and the Bush Administration has proposed a number of changes to the legislation that it contends will make WIA better serve “the workforce needs of businesses and individuals.” Some of the changes aim at cutting away administrative complexities: reducing the size of the boards that oversee WIA implementation at state and local levels, streamlining performance indicators, and re-jiggering funding mechanisms for local “One-Stop Career Centers.” Other changes proposed will alter funding formulas for the allotment of federal funds to the states for the state-managed programs that WIA mandates. (Some contend these are simply ways of cutting federal funding.) But two changes being proposed in WIA could prove interesting. First, mainly at the urging of employer groups, states may be allowed to spend up to 10 % of adult grant funds on incumbent worker training. This opens the way for experiments in training workers who now have jobs so they can keep them as skill requirements change – a way of avoiding predictable job losses, not just ministering to the wounded. Second, a proportion of the funds provided to the states may be made available to Governors for “activities such as rapid response, support for core services in the One-Stop system, evaluations and demonstrations.” Giving Governors this flexibility could open WIA-funded programs to new political pressures. But giving the Governors some latitude can also produce innovation and accountability. In recent times, the states have often served as laboratories for effective social and economic policy. America's workforce development strategies are still heavily influenced by concepts rooted in the welfare state and industrial economy of a passing era. If nudged in the right direction, the Governors could help.
Small Business and British Labour
Natascha Engel, a Labour Party NEIS E-Bulletin reader, reports that British trade unions and small business representatives are working together on training and employment issues. The two groups have sponsored a pilot project in Liverpool in which companies with fewer than 10 members get advice from union training representatives with no strings attached.
The undertaking is getting warm cooperation from the business side. Jim Redmond, head of research at the Forum of Private Business, told Business Europe "We want to help both employers and workers get the most out of training and skills and we hope the pilot scheme will bring about more understanding and
cooperation between SME employers and the unions."
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This E-Bulletin is published by the New Economy Information Service
(NEIS), a project of the Foundation for Democratic Education. NEIS
provides information and reviews debate on the impact globalization
and technological change has on democracy at home and abroad.
Current interest focuses on how American workers can be equipped
with the skills they need for decent employment and economic
security, and on how the globalization of the economy and the
expansion of democracy can strengthen one another.
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