In a year in which Congress passed the fewest laws since 1931, the House Education and Workforce Committee managed to break through the legislative stalemate in December and produce a bipartisan workforce development bill that has gone on to garner majority support from both sides of the aisle.
As the action moves over to the Senate, it’s important to ask what the legislation can be expected to accomplish for working people. If the goal of the legislation is to help more unemployed and underemployed Americans get good, family-sustaining jobs, the House bill is a step in the wrong direction. Indeed, the legislation makes very few changes to a system that has consistently fallen short in connecting people to high-quality, stable jobs.
Why has the system generated such disappointing results for job seekers over the last several decades? It is organized around a failed premise: the belief that unemployment and underemployment are primarily a result of individual skill deficits and that if the system can equip people with “in-demand skills,” then employers will reward those people with good wages.
That has not happened.
To the contrary, we’ve witnessed decades of increasing educational attainment and skills accumulation while earnings for low-wage workers remained mostly flat. Our public workforce system has contributed to the problem, providing employers with high turnover rates, a steady stream of freshly trained job applicants, and a way to avoid raising wages and improving job quality to retain their workers.
The House bill exacerbates these problems, threatening to make a bad situation worse. The most significant change in the bill — mandating that half of all formula funding going to Workforce Development Boards be distributed as training vouchers — reinforces the “skills gap” myth and further absolves employers of responsibility for designing good jobs. Moreover, it allows policymakers to sidestep the much more urgent challenge of updating our labor and employment laws to better protect workers. The “skills gap” is the problem that too many policymakers want to solve, but it is not the primary problem facing workers in our low-wage, poorly regulated labor market.
We can build a workforce development system that helps people find good jobs while also helping employers find workers, but that will require a fundamental rethinking of our approach. Here are four guiding principles for a system that puts the needs of workers at the center:
—Job quality is non-negotiable: At a time of low unemployment, a focus on job quality needs to be central. Policymakers should revisit and expand on a previously proposed process for integrating job quality standards into the performance accountability system. A workforce development system that is blind to job quality will continue to perpetuate the lose-lose outcome of low-quality jobs and companies unhappy with their ability to find, retain and engage the workers they need.
—Skills are not enough: Job training will always need to be an important feature of any workforce development system, but it needs to be coupled with strategies for ensuring quality jobs for trainees. Strategies that bring employers with a track record of retaining and advancing their workers into training partnership with the public workforce system have demonstrated promising results. California’s “High Road Training Partnerships” exemplify this approach.
—Shared governance leads to better results: The public workforce system is administered by a network of workforce development boards that, by law, are led by employers. By contrast, the construction trades and a growing share of the healthcare industry have developed labor-management partnerships that provide training and other support for employees and new recruits. This model of shared governance among equal partners has consistently generated better training, wages, retention rates and career advancement opportunities than our current employer-dominated system.
—Workers’ rights go hand in hand with workforce development: The separation of worker rights education and enforcement from workforce development is hampering the ability of our public workforce system to meet the needs of both jobseekers and vulnerable workers. Incidences of wage theft, safety and worker misclassification have been rising, particularly as gig work becomes more widespread, and workers have few places to turn for help. The public workforce system can be a source of trusted information and confidential reporting. For example, the Texas Workforce Commission recently added a link to its home page for reporting violations of child labor laws. Worker rights’ education and enforcement need to be a part of any new public workforce system.
As the Senate takes up this bill, there’s an opportunity to initiate a critical national conversation about what workers really need from our public workforce system. This conversation is not just overdue; it’s essential for the future of American workers.
