Jobs
William George, President, Pennsylvania AFL-CIO
In the third and final Presidential debate, President George W. Bush responded to questions about offshoring jobs and the minimum wage by talking about the importance of helping American workers get the skills necessary for the jobs of the 21st Century.
Bush’s responses avoided addressing these jobs issues on their own merits (why does he oppose increasing the minimum wage?), but he is right to make the connection between skills and employment. The problem is that there’s an enormous gap between the President’s rhetoric and his actual record on worker training and education.
Earlier this year Bush touted a proposal – Jobs for the 21st Century – the centerpiece of which was $250 million for community colleges, but then proposed to pay for it with cuts of over $300 million to existing job training programs in the Department of Labor (DOL) budget, and another $300 million slice out of a vocational education program at the Department of Education.
Since taking office, the President has consistently tried to cut or eliminate worker-training programs in each of his annual budget requests. Overall, his 2005 budget proposed 10 percent cuts ($656 million) to key DOL training programs from the funding levels enacted by Congress in 2002.
Remember that debate question from Bob Scheiffer asking Bush what he’d say to an American worker who’s had his or her job outsourced to someone overseas? Here’s why the President had to dodge the question: He’s tried for three straight years to cut funding to the Dislocated Worker program, which provides retraining and support to workers laid off by large plant closings, despite the fact that these kind of mass lay-offs are at an all-time high in Pennsylvania. Since Bush took office, we’ve seen more than 3,000 companies with 50 or more employees announce layoffs of more than 160,000 workers.
The other federal program for laid-off workers, Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), has been administered by the Bush administration so poorly that required federal certification for assistance and training has been improperly denied to hundreds of workers who have lost their jobs due to trade.
One representative case involved workers laid off in 2001 at Quality Fabricating in North Huntington when their jobs were shipped to Mexico. Bush’s DOL was so unresponsive to workers’ attempts to gain eligibility for TAA that they had to appeal to the U.S. Court of International Trade. When the Bush administration tried to dismiss the case on a technicality the judge said, “The DOL should blush to have raised this argument against the working people whose interests it supposedly represents.”
Unfortunately, there’s only more to come if the President is re-elected. Bush’s own Office of Management and Budget has made projections for a second term that reveal far more than any of his campaign promises. They include additional cuts of over $1 billion by 2009 to the budget account that encompasses Pell Grants, Workforce
Investment Act job training and Dislocated Worker programs, Job Corps, and other critical employment and training programs.
Whether the President’s grand rhetoric about helping workers get critical job skills is creative campaign spin or just another failure to recognize reality, the consequences of his first-term record are all too real in Pennsylvania: Too many of the workers who have lost their jobs in our state since Bush took office can’t get federal grants to retrain for new occupations. Businesses that have good jobs to offer in sectors like health care and construction can’t find qualified employees. And workers stuck in low wage jobs can’t get the skills training they need to move up to better jobs that allow them to support their families.
The bottom line: We need a new national commitment to invest in the skills of the American workforce. President Bush acknowledges—in words if not in action—that skills’ training is critical to America’s ongoing economic development. But this country needs real leadership on this issue, not just more campaign sound bytes.
Contact Jim Deegan (I717) 231-2867
Or Bethany Bobb (717) 231-2858
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