Job Training Is Dandy--if There Are Jobs : Clinton’s campaign slogans can’t create employment; we need capital, meaning a tax hike.

Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign popularized that catchy line, “It’s the economy, stupid.” His campaign mantra was “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

A year later, those campaign lines are still applicable to the current state of the economy.

The President is trying. His economic-stimulus package was killed by Senate Republicans. It should be revived, although nobody thinks that alone will straighten out the mess we’re in. Clinton is pushing for a vast expansion of programs to train or retrain workers and create a whole new school-to-work transition system of education. But legislative proposals to establish those programs are not expected to even be introduced until next year.

And if they do pass Congress, the critical question remains: training and retraining for what? Administration officials say that these programs are urgently needed so that when jobs do increase, workers will be prepared to fill them.

Douglas Ross, assistant secretary of labor for training, argues that, as in past recessions, new job opportunities will come along if we can get capital to invest in them and workers are prepared.

Whether they are being adequately prepared is open to question. An interim Labor Department study shows that only one of five workers retrained under a separate program for those hurt by foreign trade has managed to get a job paying at least 80% of the wages of his or her previous manufacturing job. In general, the study found that the retraining program has been ineffective.

But retraining aside, without a new and substantial source of revenue--meaning a progessive tax hike--we aren’t likely to get the jobs we need to revive our own economy. We need the money, for instance, to build and repair a vast number of roads and schools. More money is needed to convert factories to peacetime production after they have for too long concentrated on production for war. It is time to start a campaign to reduce the work week, something that will be hard to do but is necessary if we are going to get jobs for all who want and need them.

While the recession officially ended back in March, 1991, unemployment is still hovering around 6.7%, real wages for most workers are still dropping and more than 25% of the jobs that have opened up are for part-time and temporary workers.

In the recoveries from all other previous recessions since World War II, the number of part-time workers declined, not increased, as is the case this time.

Many economists today are pessimists, and with good cause. They are concerned that as our technology improves and computers make us more efficient, we will need fewer and fewer workers. Twenty years ago, mathematician Richard Bellman estimated that by 1993 just 2% of the work force should be able to produce all the manufactured goods we need. His timing was off but the trend he predicted is certainly there.

Relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs have dropped by almost 1 million since 1983 and now make up only 16% per cent of the work force, compared with 26% in 1973. Lower-paid retail trade and service jobs are increasing somewhat, but unfortunately those industries are increasingly hiring part-time and temporary workers.

“The Joyless Recovery,” a recent study by Lawrence Mishel and Jared Bernstein of the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute, found that in the current economic “recovery,” less than half of the new job openings were in the private sector.

They also found that wages among the non-college-educated work force have dropped 5.5% since 1989 and wages of the average college graduate--those who should be doing pretty well based on past experience--fell nearly 1% between 1992 and 1993.

So while Clinton may try other initiatives to produce those high-wage / high-tech jobs he talks about so eloquently, the way things are going those, campaign slogans that helped him beat George Bush may continue to be valid during this Administration.