Today’s Austin-American Statesman touts the benefits of new rounds of U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) workforce development grants.  Six states have been awarded nearly $15 million to increase employment opportunities for people with disabilities by connecting them with job training programs.  In Texas, $48.5 million has been made available over the next two years for the Skills Development Fund and job training programs.  According to the Texas Workforce Commission Chairman, this grant funding will “allow Texas workers to obtain customized job training that meets the needs of employers.”

Money to help workers on the lowest end of the job market is certainly good news.   The DOL and state workforce development agencies consistently frame the unemployment problem as one of a skills deficit, and so solutions are focused on skills remediation.  Moreover, the workers who are most likely to benefit from these programs are also most likely to receive services from the state in the form of income maintenance.  Because these workers are costing the state money, they are given priority by state unemployment programs.  However, workforce development agencies would do well to broaden their perspective on the population that constitutes un- and under-employed workers, as well as a way to monitor job quality.

The objective of workforce development agencies is to get people into jobs, and their performance metrics are focused on job placement success rates.  Thus, at least on the surface, the objectives of workforce development agencies and job seekers are aligned.  However, merely getting someone into a job does not necessarily guarantee either short-term subsistence or long-term economic security.  What is lost in the equation is any examination of job quality, either in terms of suitability for the worker or even the needs of society as a whole.

The problem is that the agenda driving workforce development policy is driven almost entirely by the demands of employers.  While this may be the fastest way to get people into a narrowly defined “job”, it may be neglecting other, more long-term and complex policy and social implications.  For example, this practice permits businesses to externalize the cost of training onto the taxpayer, while at the same time reap the benefits of increased profits from a trained workforce.  Additionally, the jobs themselves may pay so little that the worker needs continuing subsidization from the state for subsistence, e.g., food stamps, housing, day care and health care subsidies.  In essence, taxpayers (all of us) are subsidizing the gains of a few on both the front and back ends.

In addition to issues of economic fairness (that is, who pays the cost versus who reaps the benefits), there is the issue of the jobs themselves.  Are they designed for the worker to learn and grow, or are they discrete fungible positions constructed to support a rationalized process designed solely to maximize profits?  This is indeed the foundation of labor process theory, or what Harry Braverman termed the degradation of work. In essence, a job is deliberately designed to consist of a narrow range of discrete technical functions so that the jobholder is easily controlled and easily replaced.  While there are counter-arguments to Braverman’s theory that point out increases in the average technical content of jobs, the foundation of Braverman’s theory proposes that modern job processes have destroyed most avenues to upward mobility and personal fulfillment.  Moreover, in a rapidly changing economy, the workers’ narrow, technical skills may become obsolete quickly, at which point they will be laid off until they can be retrained again (at taxpayer expense), or replaced by more recently trained workers.

While the foregoing discussion has revolved around jobs on the lower end of the occupational hierarchy, what the so-called “skills shortage” and job training proponents miss is the army of un- and under-employed older workers, most who have been subject to some form of layoff or downsizing.  Unlike the lower skilled and less educated workers at the bottom of the hierarchy, these workers have skills, work experience (sometimes decades of it), and often have college or post-graduate degrees.  However, because they have some resources (either from a working spouse or savings from prior employment), they often do not receive public assistance, and so are not “priority” placements for workforce development agencies.

So, although providing state-supported training for workers lower in the hierarchy has the potential to benefit these workers by giving them a toehold in the labor market, it will not ipso facto solve the problem of un- and under-employment.  Academic researchers who study the labor market (whose findings are almost never quoted in the mainstream media unless they support corporate objectives) suggest that “the skills…for which [workers] are rewarded are partly a function of the jobs employers offer, rather than the intrinsic capacities of individuals acting as a kind of hard constraint,” and that policymakers should spend less time concerning themselves over purported skills deficiencies in the workforce because “the lack of decent jobs is the obvious basic problem.”