The Myth of Retraining and Re-education

[General Lee]

Folks, here is a link to a New York Times article that hits a home run regarding the myth of retraining and further education that bush Inc will keep spewing until 2008.

Here's quote:

"Unable to stop layoffs, government has taken on the task of refitting discarded workers for "alternate careers." In deciding as a nation to try to rejuvenate them as workers, we put in place a system, however unrealistic, that implicitly acknowledged layoffs as a legitimate practice.

The presumption — promoted by economists, educators, business executives and nearly all of the nation's political leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike — holds that in America's vibrant and flexible economy there is work, at good pay, for the educated and skilled. The unemployed need only to get themselves educated and skilled and the work will materialize. Education and training create the jobs, according to this way of thinking. Or, put another way, an appropriate job at decent pay materializes for every trained or educated worker.

If the workers were already trained, as the mechanics certainly were, then what they needed was additional training and counseling as a transition into well-paying, unfilled jobs in other industries. If the transition failed to function as advertised, well, the accepted wisdom suggested that it was the fault of the workers themselves. Their failure to land good jobs was due to personality defects or a resistance to acquiring new skills or a reluctance to move where the good jobs were.

That was the myth. It evaporated in practice for the aircraft mechanics, whose hourly pay ranged up to $31. Not enough job openings exist at $31 an hour — or at $16 an hour, for that matter — to meet the demand for them. Jobs don't just materialize at cost-conscious companies to absorb all the qualified people who want them."


The Myth of Retraining

[Warpy]

1. The only retraining in this article was the retraining the mechanics

away from expecting a living wage, away from expecting superior work to be rewarded, and from expecting hard work to sustain them at all.

It's a long article and well worth the read.

Any official who suggests education and retraining as solutions to chronic unemployment in the US is a FOOL.

[xchrom]

3. ''fools'' advise ''the people'' all the time.

i.e. nafta is good for us -- cafta is good for us and on and on.

and worse are conservative preachers whipping the very people who suffer most from these things into frenzies re: gay marriage and abortion.

[xchrom]

2. a lesson that ordinary people already knew.

i'm sure it will be a comfort to see it in print.

ok -- i'm being flip -- it's a very good article -- but i think about all the workers, like at caterpillar, who would got to ''right to work'' states during recessionary periods and never recover the kind of dollars they were making. and that's been since the eighties.