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Thursday, May 25, 2006

And speaking about the job market.....
Posted by Jill | 7:35 AM
...Bob Herbert weighs in on the "retraining myth":

For an unnecessarily large number of Americans, the workplace has become a hub of anxiety and fear, an essential but capricious environment in which you might be shown the door at any moment.

In his new book, "The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences," Louis Uchitelle tells us that since 1984, when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics started monitoring "worker displacement," at least 30 million full-time workers have been "permanently separated from their jobs and their paychecks against their wishes."

Mr. Uchitelle writes on economic issues for The Times. In his book, he traces the evolution of that increasingly endangered species, the secure job, and the effect that the current culture of corporate layoffs is having on ordinary men and women.

He said he was surprised, as he did the reporting for the book, by the extensive emotional fallout that accompanies layoffs. "There's a lot of mental health damage," he said. "The act of being laid off is such a blow to the self-esteem. Layoffs are a national phenomenon, a societal problem — but the laid-off workers blame themselves."

In addition to being financially strapped, laid-off workers and their families are often emotionally strapped as well. Common problems include depression, domestic strife and divorce.

Mr. Uchitelle's thesis is that corporate layoffs have been carried much too far, that they have gone beyond a legitimate and necessary response to a changing economy.

"What started as a necessary response to the intrusion of foreign manufacturers into the American marketplace got out of hand," he writes. "By the late 1990's, getting rid of workers had become normal practice, ingrained behavior, just as job security had been 25 years earlier."

In many cases, a thousand workers were fired when 500 might have been sufficient, or 10,000 were let go when 5,000 would have been enough. We pay a price for these excesses. The losses that accrue to companies and communities when many years of improving skills and valuable experience are casually and unnecessarily tossed on a scrap heap are incalculable.

"The majority of the people who are laid off," said Mr. Uchitelle, "end up in jobs that pay significantly less than they earned before, or they drop out altogether."

At the heart of the layoff phenomenon is the myth, endlessly repeated by corporate leaders and politicians of both parties, that workers who are thrown out of their jobs can save themselves, can latch onto spiffy new jobs by becoming better educated and acquiring new skills.

"Education and training create the jobs, according to this way of thinking," writes Mr. Uchitelle. "Or, put another way, a job materializes for every trained or educated worker, a job commensurate with his or her skills, for which he or she is appropriately paid."

That is just not so, and the corporate and political elite need to stop feeding that bogus line to the public.

[snip]

The most provocative question raised by Mr. Uchitelle is whether the private sector is capable of generating enough good jobs at good pay to meet the demand of everyone who is qualified and wants to work.

If it cannot (and so far it has not), then what? If education and training are not the building blocks to solid employment, what is? These are public policy questions of the highest importance, and so far they are being ignored.


Yesterday I blogged on the clubby nature of corporate boards of directors, and how this small cadre of cronies vote each other's huge pay packages. This is the flip side of the largesse being bestowed upon executives, and mass layoffs and pay squeezes are how corporations pay for these huge pay packages.

The retraining myth is just that -- a myth. A 40-year-old laid-off auto worker who goes to community college to learn computer programming or accounting is going to find himself as an entry-level 40-year-old priced out of the entry-level jobs he seeks, in fields that are rapidly being outsourced to the cheaper workforces in other countries. Not everyone has an entrepreneurial nature, and not everyone is capable of starting up a small business, especially when most small businesses fail.

The value system of the American worker is just that -- work. And with more companies shutting more workers out of the workforce, a society needs to have an alternative. And the current capitalist model does not have one.
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