Job Training Programs Fail to Deal With Hurdles of Poverty

After Watts erupted in 1965 and government officials across the country began trying new remedies for urban problems, job training programs opened up for disadvantaged South Los Angeles youths such as Ronald M. Mack.

Trouble is, much of the time and money spent educating Mack, then a teen-age high school dropout, went down the drain. First he was trained in a federal program as a nurse’s aide, but after he finished, Mack said, none of the local hospitals wanted him because of a minor marijuana offense on his record.

Then Mack learned how to assemble electrical equipment and landed a manufacturing job. Within months, though, he was so demoralized by the low pay that he quit. Eventually, Mack earned a degree from a business college, but his career struggles have continued.

Job training, he said, lifted his hopes only to lead to repeated disappointments and disillusionment. “You think you’re going somewhere, and all of a sudden, you find yourself on a dead-end street,” said Mack, now 43, who attributes some of his more recent setbacks to being an ambitious black man in a white-dominated business world.

As politicians and policy-makers consider plans to revitalize South Los Angeles and other ailing inner cities, job training initiatives are high on the list. In one form or another, such programs inspire widespread support. Yet judging from the mixed results of past government-sponsored efforts, nothing short of a huge investment in job training and related anti-poverty programs would go very far in improving the lot of minorities and the poor.

One of the main problems, experts say, is that training programs fail to deal with the full range of issues--including discrimination, declining public schools and, at times, and an inability to handle something as basic as getting to and from work--that keep America’s underclass from getting good jobs.

Another major pitfall of current and past training efforts has been their failure to make sure that there is work for trainees once they graduate, a problem complicated by the exodus of factories and chain stores from the inner city.

“Training has a very limited role in solving the problems of Los Angeles,” said Steve Duscha, who was executive director of the California Employment Training Panel from 1983 to 1989. “First, you’ve got to have jobs.”

If jobs in private industry cannot be created, he said, it would be better to invest in public works employment programs than in training that spawns “false hope” and leads to “more and more frustration and more and more cynicism.”

“There is such a misguided impulse to throw training at social problems when a lack of training is not the (entire) problem,” Duscha said.

For many newly trained youngsters from poor homes, the inability to find a well-paying job “just gives them an excuse to drop out” and turn to street crime, said Ronald Venerable, a South-Central Los Angeles gang member in the mid-1960s and a federal Job Corps graduate who owns and runs a beauty salon.

“They feel ‘I’ve done the best I can, and it hasn’t done anything for me, so I’m going to go the other way,’ ” Venerable said.

Always an uphill battle, finding good jobs for newly trained young people in South Los Angeles is harder today. Major industrial employers such as General Motors, Goodyear, Firestone and Bethlehem Steel--which were operating plants in or near South Los Angeles when Watts burned--closed the plants in the years that followed.

Moreover, workers who do not own cars may find it difficult or impossible to get to jobs in outlying areas. And for all the apparent “Rebuild L.A.” enthusiasm, many companies struggling with the recession and international competition are unlikely to find room for large numbers of new trainees.

Los Angeles’ recent uprising complicated matters by eliminating, according to the latest estimates, as many as 5,000 jobs in riot-scarred neighborhoods where burned-out businesses are not expected to return. On top of that, some of the businesses and other concerns hit by rioters, including the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, were providing training.

Even if more jobs are created, it is questionable whether taxpayers and government officials will be willing to foot the bill for major training initiatives.

Sar Levitan, director of the Center for Social Policy Studies at George Washington University in Washington, noted that federal spending on employment and training programs has fallen, after inflation, by 62% from its peak in 1978, to $10.1 billion this year. Recent federal programs have helped the poor only marginally, he said, largely “because we put in very little money.”

In fact, training efforts have often failed to reach many of the neediest candidates. In testimony before a House subcommittee last year, a General Accounting Office official said that discrimination by employers and the “limited availability” of aid for child care, transportation and living expenses deters minorities and women from enrolling in Job Training Partnership Act programs, the main federal job training vehicle.

For participants in most JTPA programs, which typically last less than six months, the results appear mixed. The U.S. Labor Department studied 20,601 people from 1987 to 1989, and its preliminary findings showed that adults who went into JTPA increased their earnings. But young men under 22 in these programs earned less than their counterparts who did not participate.

The study tracked the earnings of participants for the 18 months after they were assigned to a training or job search program. Their earnings--some of which came from on-the-job training--were compared to those of others in the study group who were eligible for JTPA but did not get in because of lack of space.

For adults with JTPA training, the average earnings gain over the 18 months was $543. Wages for out-of-school young men in JTPA, however, averaged $854 less than their counterparts not in the program. Young women in JTPA earned $182 less than their counterparts, but that gap was not considered statistically significant.

The reasons for the lower earnings among young men in JTPA are not fully clear, but one explanation is that some JTPA participants may have found regular jobs sooner if they had not waited for the program to place them.

Another theory is that young participants were less committed to their jobs than people who found work for themselves, and thus were more likely to quit.

The most upbeat finding was that a greater percentage of JTPA participants--both adults and youths--returned to their studies to receive a high school diploma or equivalency degree, a factor that could improve their earnings over the long run.

Experts say the training programs with the best payoffs tend to share a number of characteristics. They generally provide longer training--often given on the job--along with close supervision, placement assistance and perhaps temporary living expenses.

A program along those lines helped Denyveous Jackson turn his life around. He was born into poverty in Watts. His father died when he was 10, and Jackson and his three brothers were raised on welfare by their mother.

As a teen-ager in the 1960s, he belonged to a gang and was often involved in street violence.

“We were really mad at the system. We were ready to die,” said Jackson, now 45. “We didn’t feel there was a future for us.”

In 1967, however, Jackson got a chance to be trained for a job as a community worker at the state Employment Development Department. It worked, he said, largely because it was an on-the-job training program that lasted nearly a year.

Jackson also credits the interest shown in his progress by a supervisor who assured him and his fellow trainees that he would “help us get a job that would establish ourselves in society.”

“It’s the only thing that saved me,” Jackson said.

Today, Jackson still works for the EDD, helping place unemployed workers in jobs. But he often is distressed by what he sees happening to clients coming out of training programs.

These programs, Jackson said, generally fail “to deal with the whole problem” and take into account the everyday problems faced by the poor, including drug abuse. Neither, he says, do the programs make sure that people are trained for jobs that suit their abilities and interests.

As an example, Jackson cited a former client who finished at the top of his class in a sales and marketing program but foundered when it came to finding work. The trainee was afraid of flying, and all the jobs that appealed to him required extensive travel.

“This man was not going to get on an airplane,” Jackson said. “All that training was for naught.”

Jackson also said he has had clients who completed training courses but who could not find transportation to get to work, sometimes because their driver’s license was suspended. In other cases, clients have failed to apply for state certification to work in the fields for which they were trained, either because they did not know how or because they could not pay the required fees.

Likewise, Jackson said, too many people who have never worked before fail to receive on-the-job training and lack a realistic sense of what standards they will be required to meet in the workplace.

Apparently recognizing the value of on-the-job training, the Bush Administration and Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Clinton have proposed national apprenticeship programs. Although the Rebuild L.A. task force is still being formed and has yet to make specific proposals, it is likely to embrace on-the-job training, too.

Barry A. Sanders, a lawyer working with Rebuild L.A., said the revitalization effort probably will provide tax incentives and regulatory relief to bring businesses into South Los Angeles. In exchange, he said, the companies will be asked to provide training.

“What we have to do is put the job training onus on the employers . . . so you don’t have someone trained here for a job that’s over there,” Sanders said.

Programs that encourage businesses to provide more training for their workers have gained acceptance among employers. One example is the California Employment Training Panel, the state’s main training program and an initiative that has been copied by many states. The program has proved popular with business largely because it focuses on retraining or upgrading the skills of current employees, said Duscha, the former head of the agency.

But Duscha said that although programs such as the Employment Training Panel can do a good job of upgrading current employees’ skills, they do not directly bring more poor people into the work force. On the other hand, government programs intended to help the poor run into resistance from employers who are skeptical about the skills and work ethic of government-trained job candidates, he said.

“The real world isn’t interested” in hiring poor people graduating from government training programs, Duscha said. “That’s the main problem. Everyone is talking about how we want to rebuild L.A., but will they hire lots of people coming out of training programs next month? Probably not.”

One government training program that is an exception to the rule--a success story generally supported by liberals and conservatives--is the Job Corps. Established in 1964 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, the Job Corps provides basic education and vocational training for an average of seven months to extremely disadvantaged youths.

To pull the enrollees out of the culture of poverty in their communities and help their social adjustment, most live at residential camps while in the program. Venerable, the onetime teen-age gang member who owns a beauty salon, spent a year with the Job Corps from 1965 to 1966 in Texas.

He remembers it fondly, for the most part, as “a chance to get out of the city and to get my head together.”

“Some kids need to get away from home,” Venerable added. “They need to get in a stable environment.”

The close supervision, duration and intensiveness of the program are credited for its success. By one assessment, taking into account such factors as the trainees’ improved work performance and reduced crime, every $1 invested by taxpayers in the Job Corps yields $1.46 in benefits.

The cost of training and job placement runs $17,302 per enrollee--an expense that has occasionally drawn fire from political leaders such as former President Ronald Reagan. The Bush Administration--which acknowledges the success of the Job Corps--has nevertheless proposed a small cut in its budget for fiscal 1993. Yet continued support of costly but successful programs such as the Job Corps is the key to using training to lift people out of poverty, said Levitan of George Washington University.

“If we mean business,” in fighting poverty and unemployment, he said, “it has to be a sustained program, it has to be a multibillion-dollar investment.”