Job Problems Need Action, Not Study

The Bush Administration and Congress have been intensively studying workplace issues ranging from job training for the disadvantaged to the invisible “glass ceiling” barrier of discrimination that keeps minorities and women from moving up America’s corporate ranks.

The trouble is, almost nothing is being done about the disturbing findings, and just defining problems isn’t good enough.

Take the excellent report just issued by the General Accounting Office showing “waste, abuse and mismanagement” in America’s most important program to provide employment and training to disadvantaged workers.

The $4-billion-a-year program indirectly helps workers in a limited way by, among other things, paying companies a substantial part of their wages while they are being trained for jobs. Congress, using the GAO study, is considering legislation to correct some of the many flaws found in the administration of the Job Training Partnership Act.

But no consideration is being given to a fundamental flaw: The program is reaching only 5% of the disadvantaged workers who are fully eligible for it, and those who are being helped often are not the ones who need it most.

Instead of a major overhaul of the act, Congress and the Administration are trying to do only a little about abuses the GAO found, some of which are pretty blatant.

The GAO study showed that nearly 25% of the workers receiving on-the-job training had at least one year of prior experience on the same job, yet their bosses got the government to pay up to 50% of the wages for the “trainees” for several months.

One too typical example involved a company that got the government to pay 50% of the wages of a janitor to train him for three months for a job he had been doing for 19 years.

Another employer received 50% of the wages of a home-heating technician to train him for a full year for a job he already had for five years.

Yet another company got reimbursed for 50% of the wages it paid to workers over the 129 days the firm said it took to train the employees to wash cars.

Nearly nine years after the act’s adoption, Congress and the Bush Administration are getting around to legislation to minimize these abuses. They want to place some tighter control over the way JTPA officials and employers reach out to help those who are supposed to be the real targets of the program: the millions of unskilled, undereducated, disadvantaged workers few employers will hire without financial government enticement.

Workers who have finished high school are not automatically job-ready, of course, but they are not the most disadvantaged among us. Yet more than half of those getting help from the program have finished high school.

That means the problem of “creaming” is still with us, as it has been since the law was passed in 1983. “Creaming” means giving JTPA funds to employers willing to train relatively easy-to-place high school grads instead of paying employers to help train the hard-core unemployed.

The ploy makes for a nice-looking success record for JTPA in finding jobs for those who complete its training, but the results really aren’t that good: Nearly half of those who are placed in jobs after training are unemployed again after a few months.

The program can rightly claim some real successes, and on the theory that anything that helps improve the skills of workers is better than nothing, it should not be eliminated. But it is much too small to meet the nation’s needs.

Congressional Democrats say they want a far larger program, but they didn’t even try to get it because they knew that President Bush would veto anything more than some provisions to curb the more obvious abuses of the program we now have.

A meaningful expansion of the effort to train and find jobs for the hard-core unemployed would almost certainly be vetoed by Bush. However, at least congressional liberals could offer substantive improvements rather than just noting flaws that the GAO found in the program and then tinkering to correct them.

There are numerous other recent examples of extensive studies but no action by Congress and, especially, by the Bush Administration to deal with serious workplace problems.

Labor Secretary Lynn Martin, for instance, got nationwide attention last month with a study that told us what we have long known: Despite some improvements, few top management jobs are filled by women and minorities.

Terrible! cried Martin. “The time has come to tear down, to dismantle, to remove and to shatter the glass ceiling” so the nation can “unleash the full potential of the American work force.”

Tough talk, but her only plan of action is to use the Labor Department as a “clearing” house for ideas that would then be passed along to companies that want to end that form of discrimination. She vowed to use her office as “the bully pulpit to encourage every corporation to develop its own strategy that will allow all employees to realize their maximum potential.”

Martin volunteered in a telephone interview that there will be no quotas set for employers to try to meet.

Instead, she seemed interested only in pointing out the problem to the white males who dominate corporate board rooms.

Presumably, once they realize the injustice of it all, they will voluntarily crack the glass ceiling they have created to preserve top jobs for themselves and move more women and minorities into their ranks. Fat chance.

A last, sad example: Bush recognized the need to extend benefits for long-term unemployed workers after Congress passed a bill to do just that. So he signed the bill--but then withheld the funds to pay for them.