Partnership of Business, Education Pays Dividends : Work: Company helps itself by getting employees to improve skills. But few firms invest in their workers.

At Weber Metals, a medium-sized aerospace supply company in Paramount, Mike Nycum is brushing up on algebra to help him better run a huge metal-forging press. Fernando Alvarez is studying English so he can better understand his Anglo co-workers. Joe Reed is studying Spanish so he can better understand his Latino co-workers. Bobby Bracy is introducing himself to computers at age 51.

The studying is done voluntarily on each worker’s free time in a small wood-paneled office next to the company lunchroom. There, four computers are programmed for instruction in two-dozen subjects, ranging from language to math to literature.

It’s a sensible way for Weber Metals to encourage workers to upgrade basic communication skills and, indirectly, to adapt to increasingly complex manufacturing methods. It’s also a cheap way, because the local adult school provides the computers through a federal grant.

What it’s not is commonplace.

Only a tiny fraction of American companies invest significantly in improving the skills of their work force. The bulk of that limited attention goes to white-collar employees at major firms.

Most American blue-collar workers--particularly those in the manufacturing sector of the economy, so often criticized for its sagging productivity--are never exposed to company programs that help them work smarter by improving their academic skills.

Weber Metals was a rare case in which a company and an enlightened public educator teamed up to provide those opportunities. The work force, consisting largely of immigrants with minimal educational background, responded with unanticipated enthusiasm.

Of the company’s 110 factory workers, 65 now put in varying amounts of free time in the makeshift learning center, which opened in March.

It is not unusual for employees, who make their living forging chunks of aluminum and titanium, to hop into the center during a 15-minute break, sign on to the computer and practice English or spelling. Others arrive at the factory early. Some eat lunch on a morning break so they can devote their half-hour lunch break to studying. The Paramount Unified School District sends an adult-school instructor to the center three afternoons a week.

“It has helped me in so many ways,” said Elias Garcia, a 32-year-old immigrant from the Mexican state of Puebla who works at Weber Metals as an inspector. He is one of three workers who have qualified for a general equivalency high school degree through their at-work studies. Garcia has lived in the United States for 10 years, but had never undertaken this effort on his own.

The program appears to have helped the company as well. Much of the improvement is the simple easing of language barriers. Other changes are more subtle. One supervisor believes some workers do a better job of reading work orders. Another says workers will be better prepared for the introduction of more computerized equipment.

These benefits may appear obvious. But American business remains largely blind to them, according to a widely praised study issued earlier this year by a bipartisan panel of business, education and labor leaders.

In a harsh view of American management, the Rochester, N.Y.-based National Center on Education and the Economy said the United States must quickly invest tens of billions of dollars in public schools and on-the-job training.

American industry, the report said, needs to emulate its overseas competitors, whose front-line production workers are far better educated and handle a broader range of responsibilities, resulting in more productive companies and higher-quality goods and services.

The report, based on a year of interviews with 2,000 people in 450 businesses in the United States, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Japan and Singapore, said American business spends $30 billion a year on training workers, but 90% of that money is spent by just 15,000 large companies--less than 0.5% of all American employers.

Only a third of the training money is spent on non-college-educated workers, meaning that only about 8% of front-line workers receive any on-the-job improvement training, the report said.

This void has created a fatal pattern in which businesses continue to rely on outdated methods of production in the belief that their employees cannot handle more sophisticated and efficient processes, the report said.

As a result, in place of higher productivity, employers have relied on holding hourly wages significantly below the cost of living during the past decade--a policy the report said is fraught with negative social consequences.

“We still have that old work ethic which says that front-line workers don’t have to be educated, they just have to be disciplined,” said Ira Magaziner, a Rhode Island-based international business consultant who oversaw the report. “We have to create a different culture.”

Among the report’s recommendations was a federal requirement for companies to spend at least 1% of their payroll on education and training.

“The small companies are riding the horse as fast as it will go without a whole lot of resources, and most of them without a whole lot of vision,” said Wellford Wilms, a UCLA professor in the graduate school of education who specializes in the relationship between education and work.

Tellingly, even at Weber Metals, the creation of an on-site education center was not the idea of company executives.

Two years ago the firm hired a part-time consultant, Sinclair E. Hugh, to run its personnel department. When Hugh asked about the company’s problems, he was told that the workers and bosses often had trouble talking to each other--too many Latino workers had been hired without being adequately tested for conversational English. Also looming over the company was the question of how workers, who earn between $6 and $14 an hour, would adjust to eventual plans to phase in more complex manufacturing and quality-assurance methods.

Then Hugh got lucky. In the files he was handed by company officials, he found an old letter from Edward A. Quesada, director of the Paramount Unified School District’s adult school, offering the district’s resources.

At its Paramount campus, the adult school offered many courses of value to employees looking to build their skills, but many workers simply did not have the spare time. Many drive long distances to their jobs.

So last spring Quesada made Hugh an unusual offer: The district was willing to set up instructional computers at the factory, linked by phone lines to the adult school’s mainframe. The computers were interactive--they would ask questions and tell the student if he or she answered properly. A $50,000 federal grant would pay the bill.

“I said, ‘Maybe if we can’t get employees to the school, we can take the school to the workers,’ ” Quesada said.

Weber Metals agreed. The company, which does about $40 million a year in sales, could have made it easier on the workers by giving them time off with pay to attend classes, but it decided that would be too costly. As an incentive, workers who came to the learning center would be given $15 gifts for each five hours of instruction.

Some workers who had been taking instruction elsewhere used the center for further improvements. Antonio Romero won a promotion from inspector to maintenance mechanic. Joe Reed put in hundreds of hours in the learning center and was promoted to shipping and receiving clerk.

Adult education specialists have complained for years that state budget limits, in effect since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, have restricted their ability to fund such partnerships. They also complain that businesses rarely seek them out.

New federal money that began making its way to states this year may cure some of the problem. California is allocating $4 million to school districts to conduct “literacy audits” of employees at local businesses that ask for assistance. Districts would then create instructional programs for the companies to improve worker skills.

“There’s no question that work-place literacy is the fastest-growing program we have now,” said Ray Eberhard, the state Department of Education’s adult education administrator.

Sinclair Hugh was walking through the gritty factory the other day, heading toward his office from the learning center, trying to explain what he had learned.

“I read letters to the editor complaining about people who come from other countries and immediately become part of our welfare system,” he said. “When I hear that now I say, ‘Man, you haven’t seen the right people. See our people.’ Give them an opportunity and they take it. Opportunity is the key. Here, they got one.”