Taking Aim at Job Training

Through these doors pass the future automotive painters of the world. --Sign over a Los Angeles garage

THE words may not seem wildly ambitious, but to the ghetto blacks being trained inside the garage with money from the Labor Department, the sign symbolizes the hope of acquiring a marketable skill. In the past ten years, the Government has spent $19 billion to nurture that hope through job-training programs that at one time or another have enrolled more than 8,000,000 people. This fiscal year, Washington will pay $1.6 billion to companies, vocational schools and public and private agencies that contract to teach job skills to more than 1,000,000 of the unemployed and underemployed--and sometimes to instruct them in the three Rs and personal grooming.

The payments are being made with growing reluctance. In the view of many businessmen, and more important of high Nixon Administration officials, the programs have swallowed huge amounts of taxpayers' money but failed to put enough unemployed into productive jobs. The programs are thus prime targets for budget cutting. The President, in a letter to Congress last spring, charged that the "array of patchwork programs...is not delivering the jobs, the training and the other manpower services that this nation needs." Such opinions will be reinforced by the recent drop in unemployment, which may make training seem less urgent. The Government reported last week that the jobless rate in November fell to 5.2%, the lowest figure since August 1970.

Is manpower training a boondoggle or a boon to those who are still unemployed? The Government's total effort is a complex of programs too diverse to support any generalization, except that manpower training has grown into a bureaucratic monstrosity. There are separate programs--many bearing such optimistic names as Apprenticeship Outreach, Operation Mainstream, JOBS, JUMP and WIN--for the urban poor and the rural poor; for blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Appalachian whites; for Viet Nam veterans, displaced aircraft engineers and welfare mothers.

Some programs offer classroom instruction, others on-the-job training, still others a mixture of both. They aim to place graduates in a wide variety of jobs, including auto mechanic, shoe repairman, nurse's aide, hotel bookkeeper. Coordination and supervision are spotty at best. Houston-area officials of the Labor Department's Manpower Administration do not even know how many programs are operating locally; they estimate twelve to 18.

Several programs have had meager results. WIN (for Work INcentive). which trains welfare mothers for such jobs as clerk and keypunch operator, enrolls about 120,000 women a year, but 70% drop out before finishing the three-to six-month course, mostly because of physical or emotional problems, including drug addiction. The Job Corps, which houses youths in camps in order to take them out of a ghetto environment while providing training, has attracted only 21,000 to its 71 centers, which have a capacity of 25,000. Many youngsters prefer even slums to the barracks-like camps.

JOBS (for Job Opportunities in the Business Sector) program, under which companies contract to hire and train the hard-core unemployed and are reimbursed for half their wages, started strongly in 1968. But many companies cut hiring of trainees during the 1970 recession and have not increased it in the present economic upsurge. A study by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee staff charged that a few JOBS employers used federal money to hire uneducated, foreign-born hopefuls for dead-end jobs--although the companies were supposed to train them for jobs with upward mobility.

Repaid. Still, manpower training can hardly be written off as a total failure. Even outgoing Deputy Treasury Secretary Charls Walker, who once named the training programs as his "personal favorite" for elimination in a federal economy drive, figures that they have lowered the nation's jobless rate by one-half of 1%. Modest as that figure seems, it is really a striking achievement, because many of the trainees might otherwise have drifted onto the welfare rolls or into prison.

The JOBS program, for all its troubles, has scored some outstanding successes. Texas Instruments, for example, in the past four years has trained 2,000 workers, many poorly educated black women who had to be taught mathematics and English as well as the techniques of putting electronic devices together. Some 88% stay long enough to qualify for regular jobs that after a year typically pay $2.44 an hour or more. The National Urban League, which gets money from the federal On-the-Job Training program and pays it out to employers, boasts that its efforts cost only $870 per trainee. The Urban League figures that that sum is repaid to the Government in taxes on the new employee's earnings within two years.

In New York City, the federally funded Vocational Foundation works with the hardest of the hard core: ghetto youths who are nearly all high school dropouts and average a fourth-grade proficiency in math. Half of them have had run-ins with the law, and 30% admit to having used hard drugs. Among other things, the foundation offers a JUMP (for Joint Urban Manpower Program) course that gives classroom instruction in architectural drafting to the youths who are placed simultaneously as junior draftsmen with 21 architectural and engineering firms. In the foundation's last class, 19 trainees started, 17 finished and eleven are still working as draftsmen; another trainee has gone on to college.

These successes do not greatly impress the Nixon Administration. Earlier this year it proposed in effect to turn over all the programs to states and cities by pooling all the money that Washington now spends on training and shipping it out in revenue-sharing grants. That was a questionable move because manpower training needs more central coordination, not less. The attempt was defeated in Congress, where manpower training has strong support--but for the wrong reason. Because the programs funnel money into many congressional districts, Congressmen tend to look on them as a new variety of pork barrel and vote for each other's favorite programs.

The fate of the programs in the next Congress is unpredictable, but one possible outcome should be avoided: a situation in which Administration pressure would produce deep cuts in funding, and congressional log-rolling would get the cuts distributed equally among ineffective and successful programs. The need, rather, is for an overhaul and refocusing of training efforts that would eliminate the unsuccessful programs--and give more money to those that are producing results.

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