COLUMN ONE : For Many, Retraining Is a Myth : Although Clinton and Bush tout it as the answer to displaced workers, stories abound about failed job searches and a significant drop in pay.
Putting on his “moon suit” during a make-believe chemical disaster was only part of the fun for Gary Remson when he took an eight-week course on handling hazardous materials last year at West Los Angeles College.
The teaching seemed first-rate. Experts from the Police and Fire departments sat in as guest speakers. But most important of all, the laid-off aerospace worker looked forward to his prize “at the end of the rainbow”--a job with a future.
“They were telling us, ‘You’ll finish up class on Friday, and you’ll have three or four companies waiting on Monday to pick you up,’ ” the displaced Hughes Aircraft employee said of the government-funded program. But in the end, Remson said, his opportunities were bottom of the barrel. Literally.
The only available jobs, as he recalls it, were to do things like shoveling waste and cleaning out dirty barrels for just a fraction of his old wage as a computer technician. “When we finished the program,” said the 38-year-old Sherman Oaks resident, “there wasn’t anything there.”
Today, as George Bush and Bill Clinton tout retraining as the answer for millions of workers whose jobs are jeopardized by an ever-changing global economy, Remson’s tale is a cautionary one: Great expectations, lifelong habits and economic realities can complicate the business of reinventing a displaced worker’s career in just a few months.
By some evidence, workers who attend government courses often end up no better off than their colleagues who steered away from the classroom and stuck to finding jobs. Even with new skills, many will have to swallow the idea of a sharply reduced standard of living. Indeed, while the word retraining sounds good in a society that places great value on learning, most workers trying to survive after a traumatic layoff actually avoid it.
People with kids to raise and bills to pay often feel compelled to grab the first job in sight rather than struggle without income as they acquire another skill. Others bide their time, clinging to the fantasy that their old jobs somehow will come back. Still others uproot their households and move on rather than get with the training program.
“The politicians can’t give you a job, which is what you really want and really need,” said Anthony P. Carnivale, an economist with the American Society for Training and Development in Washington. “But they can give you training.”
The need is growing, along with the unhappy ranks of the displaced. Global competition, defense industry retrenchment and labor-saving technologies are reshaping work life and putting once-secure jobs at risk. About 5.6 million workers who had been steadily employed for at least three years were laid off between 1987 and 1992, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Critics worry that the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement alone could add hundreds of thousands to the list.
A majority of the displaced drift into new jobs within about 18 months. But often the landing is not smooth: Half or more take home less pay than they did before, according to various analyses, including a recent Labor Department survey.
Dan Parks, a former Lockheed employee in Burbank, knows the costs and benefits of retraining. Parks, 46, got his layoff notice from the aerospace manufacturer in 1991, after 12 years as a production worker. At the time, he recalls, things didn’t seem all that bleak. “I figured that with my experience I could go and get a job with any major manufacturer,” he said.
Dealing With Rejection
Gradually, however, the rejection letters piled up, the telephone didn’t ring, and Parks figured that his luck was ending. Over the next six months, “I went through a lot of mood changes. I guess you’d say severe fits of depression. I didn’t know anything else.”
Then his union steered Parks, a high school graduate, toward a course at North-West College in Glendale. Participants were taught how to be a pharmacy technician, sort of a druggist’s helper. For nine months, Parks survived on an unemployment check, income from his wife’s bookkeeping job and occasional help from relatives.
Today he works part time at a Kaiser pharmacy in San Diego while continuing to learn new job responsibilities. A classic success story, right?
“I’m making half as much, and I feel that I’m working twice as hard,” said Parks, a down-to-earth man who wistfully recalls the camaraderie within Lockheed’s blue-collar ranks. The new career, he said, “gives me the ability to make a few bucks more than being a security guard somewhere. I guess I should be happy with that. But there’s a little emptiness that I don’t have a greater earnings potential.”
Government Funding
The federal government spends $650 million a year for retraining programs like the one Parks took, along with other services, including counseling, skill assessment and job-search guidance. The money, most of which is provided under the Job Training Partnership Act, is filtered through a vast network of community colleges, training centers, unions and other community organizations.
Common offerings include bookkeeping, secretarial skills, office automation, machinery repair and health care. And sometimes they help: Seven of 10 graduates of JTPA training were placed in jobs in 1990, at an average wage of $7.80 an hour, according to the General Accounting Office, a branch of Congress.
An analysis of female employees laid off from an Atari assembly plant, a Calvin Klein warehouse and other jobs in El Paso in the 1980s found that those who went through retraining earned substantially more than their counterparts who didn’t.
Yet a controversy rages over whether statistics like these provide a full picture. “You’ve got to put the right people in the right slots--and when you do, it can work,” said Howard S. Bloom, a professor at New York University who authored the Texas study. Nonetheless, he cautioned that such artful “targeting” of individuals and jobs is hard to achieve, and that retraining often disappoints those who go through it. “There’s no silver bullet,” he said.
Some critics also question the validity of job placement statistics. They note that in the past, some training groups have been accused of “creaming” the system by enrolling only the most qualified trainees. That ploy would tend to ensure more successful placement statistics--and higher compensation--from the government.
“Do the people who get the service do better than the people who don’t get the service?” asked Richard W. Moore, an associate professor of business at Cal State Northridge. “The answer is usually no.”
Pete Roullard hopes to be an exception. The laser researcher, who used to work on “Star Wars” technology for Rockwell International, saw his own job prospects get chilly as U.S.-Soviet relations warmed up. “After peace was declared with Russia, a lot of us realized that our jobs were going to disappear,” he recalled.
The ax fell in February, 1991. After nearly a year on the unemployment line, the 44-year-old San Fernando Valley resident managed to hook up with an Orange County firm that produced lasers for dental offices. But the business got hit by the recession, and Roullard lost his new job after just four months.
Next stop: a USC program that seeks to transform aerospace engineers into environmental engineers and offers free tuition for nine months, courtesy of government training funds. Roullard, along with 19 others, began his new studies late last summer and now hopes to start a new career in the growing field later next year. He plans to continue pursuing a master’s degree in environmental engineering at USC even after his training benefits run out.
“I feel like there’s good reason to be positive,” he said. In the meantime, it isn’t always easy to get by. “Each month we have to dip a little bit further into our savings,” said Roullard, who is married and has two children. “That’s how we make ends meet.”
Roullard’s isn’t the only upbeat tale from the retraining world. Sometimes the same employers who cut back their work forces help the victims maneuver toward new livelihoods in different industries. For example, 752 employees who toiled at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys before it shut down are pursuing outside studies with the help of a $2,800 annual benefit that was part of the union contract.
“The way I see it, this is my second chance,” said Tony Simoes, a 15-year veteran from the paint department who is studying for an aircraft maintenance license, an effort he hopes will end by 1994 when he has received the two licenses he needs for the new career.
By some reckonings, displaced workers typically earn 25% less than they would have received if they had stayed on their previous job track, even five years after getting new jobs. Retraining can help, but it might take a two-year program to close the wage gap, analysts say.
Yet short-term government retraining usually lasts no more than several months, unlike bona fide academic programs that may take a couple of years or longer to complete. For many, the payoff is questionable. For example, a study by Bloom of 1,054 workers in Houston who took classes in air conditioning, computer maintenance and other technical skills in the mid-1980s found that they fared no better than counterparts who received guidance in conducting an effective job search, but no retraining.
“That’s the basic problem of training--the value of the investment isn’t enough to justify taking yourself out of the work force,” said Louis Jacobson, senior economist at Westat, a research firm in Rockville, Md.
Practical Realities
These practical realities do not escape the former workers who are faced with urgent decisions about daily survival. An analysis of laid-off employees in New Jersey in the 1980s found that among those over the age of 25 who had been with their employer for three years or more, only 20% opted for retraining.
“There’s resistance,” said Walter S. Corson, vice president of Mathematica, a social policy research firm in Princeton, N.J. “You get laid off from a job you’ve held for a long time and what you want is another job. You don’t want to change careers.”
Certainly, Gary Remson didn’t want to switch from doing technical work with a computer to moving hazardous waste with a shovel. Last year, when he got rehired by his old employer, Hughes Aircraft, at $41,000 a year, “I figured, ‘Oh, boy. I’m back at Hughes. I’m gonna be here till I retire.’ Four months later there was a 10% cut--and I was part of that 10%.”
When he had heard about the hazardous materials course, he hoped it might lead to a mid-level job, perhaps doing paperwork, based on what the course’s sponsors told him, he said. Later, after no attractive offers materialized, he started using his knowledge of computers to teach courses part time. Today, Remson said he is “wary” about enrolling in any other training courses.
Asked whether Remson received false promises, one official at West Los Angeles College declined to comment on his case, but added that some displaced workers find it hard to accept the realities of lower pay in today’s economy. “We trained them the way we said, and there were jobs the way we said,” maintained Clare Adams, director of the Center for Economic Development and Continuing Education at the West Los Angeles school.
While the latest spasms of corporate restructuring may seem new and unnerving, displaced workers are as old as the pulleys and conveyors that ancient societies began using 2,000 years ago to improve on raw muscle power. The federal government’s most recent efforts at retraining expanded dramatically in the early 1980s, following a wave of cutbacks in steel, autos and other old-fashioned U.S. industries that were under siege from foreign competition.
Economists teach that the sort of sea changes now transforming the job market often create more opportunities than they destroy. Yet that abstract notion does little to comfort the many workers who are shunted aside in the process. “Nobody has ever figured out a way to transfer the people who lose jobs into the ones that are created,” said Carnivale, of the American Society for Training and Development.
With these economic realities in mind, this year’s presidential candidates all support more training for workers, and they have raised a once-humdrum issue to extraordinary visibility. They also have varying measures to promote training before workers are displaced by a factory shutdown or cutback, a strategy that is followed more effectively in Germany, Japan and other countries than in the United States.
“For those who need training, we must provide it,” Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton declared earlier this month, citing one of his conditions for supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Clinton has proposed requiring employers with more than 50 workers to spend 1.5% of their payroll on worker training, a level that is mandated in France and Australia. It would generate $21 billion in this country, according to the American Society for Training and Development. He also has placed emphasis on apprenticeship programs and the idea of continual training for the labor force. He has not disclosed details of his plans for displaced workers, but aides have said he seeks to upgrade the current system and may lean toward longer-term efforts.
President Bush also has expressed faith in retraining, citing it in the first presidential debate as a key answer for beleaguered defense workers. On the campaign trail, he announced a $10-billion program to combine federal training efforts, featuring “skill grants” of up to $3,000 to modernize the knowledge of displaced workers and those who are in danger of losing their jobs.
Ross Perot also has endorsed training, proposing a tax credit to encourage employers to prepare their work force for the competitive realities of the global economy.
New Prominence
Those who analyze the plight of displaced workers generally are pleased with the new prominence of the issue, while their preferred strategies divide along philosophical lines. Those who seek to limit the bureaucracy lean more to the Bush voucher plan, while those who seek a greater government role prefer the Clinton approach. Experts of all persuasions tend to be wary, however.
“We can do some of it usefully, but I think a lot of it has been a waste of money,” said Gary S. Becker, this year’s Nobel laureate in economics and an expert on issues of human capital.
“The expectations of the public will be far beyond what could ever be achieved by these (retraining) programs,” said Bloom, who studied the experience of workers in Texas. “These problems will be solved only in part by retraining.”
Dan Parks, the aerospace worker turned pharmacy aide, would probably agree. He completed his retraining course successfully. But in a way, that was the easy part; now he is going through his own relearning course--striving to fit into a radically new working environment, accepting lower pay and adjusting to the multitude of hassles that go with shifting careers in midstream.
“It takes me longer to learn things. I might make a mistake a few times before I get it,” he acknowledged. “At my age, it’s not a piece of cake being the new guy.” But he added: “It’s becoming more routine every day.”
