Experts Link Job Retraining to Reduced Wages : Labor: Workers in such plans don’t fare much better than those who get search aid, they say. Focus is put on Clinton program to aid defense employees.

Government programs to retrain laid-off workers from defense firms and other industries help most participants find new jobs but often at lower wages than they had been earning, labor experts told a House panel Tuesday.

Officials told the subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations of the House Committee on Education and Labor that workers who enter retraining programs do not fare significantly better in the job market than those who receive only job search assistance.

In addition, only about one in three eligible workers even participate in retraining programs, raising questions about the Clinton Administration’s plans to expand government efforts to assist workers laid off by defense firms.

“Training individuals for a new job is a long process that’s probably only applicable for a small number of dislocated workers,” said Walter Corson, vice president of Mathematica Policy Research at Princeton University and co-author of a number of studies on displaced worker programs.

The Administration has proposed spending $1.4 billion to help pay for defense conversion, mostly to retrain military personnel.

Displaced defense workers also are eligible for the Labor Department’s Economic Dislocation and Worker Adjustment Assistance program, which provides all displaced workers with job search assistance and skills retraining. In fiscal 1991--the last year for which data is available--states and localities spent $410.5 million in economic dislocation program funds allocated to them by the federal government.

The program generally finds jobs for about 70% of its participants, said Carolyn M. Golding, acting assistant secretary of the Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration. Golding acknowledged that the decision for a laid-off worker to enter a retraining program is “a hard decision to make.”

Typically, a displaced worker’s unemployment benefits last 26 weeks but most retraining programs take a minimum of 20 weeks to complete and some last a year or longer. Many workers, Golding said, choose to spend their time looking for a job rather than retraining for work that may or may not be available when their training ends.

Even for workers who go through the federal retraining program, the new jobs they find often pay less than those they lost. On average, participants in the program in 1991 made $9.34 per hour before they were laid off, compared to $8.49 per hour after retraining.

But while officials testifying in Washington were generally optimistic about government retraining efforts, Curtis Johnson, a City of Los Angeles official who works with local programs under the federal economic dislocation umbrella, said that they generally have failed dislocated workers, despite the best of intentions.

The Community Development Department, where Johnson works, is now designing an alternative, model program that would bring unemployed workers and potential employers together through a sophisticated computer networking system.

Johnson described as typical, the case of a former manager who once earned $40,000 a year, only to be retrained as a computer-repair programmer and hired in a job that paid only $20,000 annually.

“When you have to take a 50% pay cut, that’s terrible,” he said.