Retraining

A favorite political buzz word these days is competitiveness. The entrepreneurial spirit. Managements lean and mean. Industries able to compete with foreign producers. But the concept is a nebulous one. Politicians are now labeling a wide array of proposals, from increased funding for education and scientific research to more restrictive trade legislation, as ways to make America more competitive in the world.

In one of the few fresh initiatives in his fiscal 1988 budget proposal Ronald Reagan weighed in with a plan of his own: a $1 billion counseling and retraining program designed to help workers displaced from their jobs and to counter Democratic plans to capitalize on the competitiveness issue through protectionist legislation. The Worker Adjustment Assistance Program is likely to be part of a trade bill that the Administration intends to put forth as a defense against those Democrats who are pushing for new tariffs, quotas and other restrictions on "unfair" foreign competition.

Over the past year, Labor Secretary William Brock has been working on a plan for dealing with what he calls the "new realities," among them the need for a more mobile and flexible skilled-labor force. A task force headed by Malcolm Lovell, a professor at George Washington University, recommended consolidating diverse federal programs and almost tripling the $344 million annually spent on worker retraining.

The plan would rely on the states to come up with specific proposals and compete for the available money. The guidelines emphasize training and re- employment as opposed to income support. "We want people to get back to work, not make it more comfortable to be out of work," says Assistant Labor Secretary Roger Semerad. "Everything in the future is going to be much more technologically oriented, and a much higher level of literacy is going to be required." The proposal applies not just to workers made jobless by foreign competition but to everyone stricken by long-term change.

The new program would not address one problem: new jobs that open up are often far away from where old jobs disappeared. "That is just a fact of life, and I'm not sure that the Government should necessarily have a solution," says Semerad. Nevertheless, the proposal will probably be politically attractive. "It is historic in that the Federal Government assumes the responsibility for dealing with these major problems of fundamental adjustment," says Pat Choate, author of The High-Flex Society. "We have over 2 million people a year who lose their jobs." He views the $1 billion, which could serve as many as 900,000 dislocated workers, as a "step in the right direction."