Tight Labor Market Is the Best Job-Training Program

Tom Petruno’s “Is the More Troubling Story Asia--or Boeing?” [Market Beat, Oct. 26] inadvertently highlights a central and almost universally ignored flaw in U.S. economic policy.

The flaw: Although almost every authority agrees that the rewards of our current economic growth are being shared unequally--and almost all agree that the remedy is better training of low-skilled, low-paid or unemployed workers for the skilled, better-paying jobs--almost all ignore the fact that it takes a tight labor market to create the needed training.

Petruno writes that “Boeing . . . simply can’t train workers fast enough to keep up with demand” and that Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan “doesn’t want to see companies paying extraordinary increases in wages to get workers.”

But it is a historical truism that the most effective (perhaps the only effective) job training is to fill jobs that exist. Such training carried out by companies under the stress of labor shortages and consequent wage pressures is far more effective in putting real people into real jobs than any artificial, government-conceived program.

ROBERT A. LEVINE

Los Angeles