Nations Struggle to Retrain Workers as Times Change : Economy: Joblessness due to advancing technology is a trend. Many leaders are looking to U.S. for guidance.

In Canada, the government is poised to unveil an “internship” program as part of an $800-million initiative to help high school graduates find a home in the workplace. In Britain, a program dubbed ReStart aims to offer workers training and job placement soon after they are laid off, rather than when their jobless benefits run out years later.

And in recession-ravaged Japan, where lifetime corporate employment no longer seems like a sure thing, officials are beginning to think about an expanded government role in moving workers from declining industries to faster-growing sectors of the economy.

Throughout the industrialized world, government leaders are finally beginning to focus on one of the most corrosive, dangerous trends of the 1990s: the inability of modern economies to help ease the transitions that the young, the poor and older workers must make to keep up with rapid technological changes in the workplace.

Now, virtually all of the Group of Seven nations, which gathered in Detroit this week for an international jobs conference, are thinking about new programs to address the transition from school to the workplace, from welfare back to work and from layoffs back to employment in growing high-tech fields.

Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich, the host of this week’s jobs summit, was surprised by the extent to which European officials are following the Clinton Administration in developing re-employment and job transition programs.

“We found we’re using the same vocabulary, and we are all talking about the problems of transition in the face of technological change,” Reich said in an interview Tuesday. “I think there is a consensus now among the G-7 nations that we have to target our training and educational efforts at those people who are having the most difficulty coping with the restructuring going on in the global economy.”

For many Europeans, even acknowledging the need to change the way the government copes with such issues poses domestic political problems; many Japanese officials are still reluctant to acknowledge that lifetime employment is on the wane.

“It is very hard for some of these countries to face up to this,” said Lawrence Katz, chief Labor Department economist. “But we are beginning to see a consensus that they have to change. The British and the Canadians are doing it, and now we are seeing the continental Europeans starting to talk about new programs as well.”

Yet Europe and Japan are approaching the problem from a different perspective than the Administration, because of vast differences in how each nation deals with long-term unemployment. In America, the government provides basic jobless benefits for 26 weeks; the unemployed then are often left to fend for themselves.

In Japan, corporations traditionally have been able to handle retraining for their own employees, then have found new uses for them.

In Europe, there are countries where workers can go for two years on very expensive unemployment benefits, reducing incentives for retraining.

But rich social safety nets have left many European nations with much higher unemployment rates than America or Japan. France, for example--which spends more on social welfare programs, proportionate to its size, than any other major power--also had the highest jobless rate among G-7 nations last year.

“I think we have traditionally had a system that gave workers a relatively short period of benefits and then allowed them to fall off a cliff, while the Europeans had a system that ignored people for two years or more while they were getting benefits, and they were out of the work force for such a long period of time that it became difficult for governments to help them to readjust,” Katz said. “Now, I think all of us recognize the need to find a third way, that we all need to develop early intervention programs that help get people training and job placement quickly to keep them employable.”

Yet the problem receiving the most attention among major powers, Reich noted, is the hurdle facing students entering the workplace for the first time.

The Administration has developed its own “school-to-work” legislation, calling for development of national education standards and new apprenticeship programs. Administration officials say Germany’s longstanding apprenticeship program is their model. Now, other industrial nations are following suit; France has passed emergency measures to increase funding for apprenticeships.

“I came to this conference thinking that the United States lagged behind Europe and Japan in the way we handled transitions from school to work and the way we dealt with retraining and re-employment,” said Laura D’Andrea Tyson, chairwoman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. “But one thing I’ve learned is that the pace of technological change has been so swift in the last few years that even the Europeans are being forced to rethink the way they handle these issues.”