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More and more Americans continue to gain the blessings of unemployment, but for some reason, that worries our presidential candidates.
Instead of commending the laid-off for regaining both their civil rights and some control over their lives, Clinton and Bush have both proposed federal programs to retrain people whose jobs migrated to Mexico or Singapore.
As follies go, retraining ranks somewhere between Bush's
1988 flexible freeze
and Clinton's claim that he
didn't inhale. Let us count the reasons:
1. The federal government can't train people for normal jobs. The major federal training program is the military; the recruiting ads all imply that you will acquire valuable civilian skills while in uniform.
If that's so, why do veterans get preference points in applying for federal jobs? If their military experience gives them useful skills, then that advantage should be reflected on their civil-service examination scores, and veterans wouldn't need the extra points.
The biggest and best-funded federal training program doesn't teach useful civilian skills; why would a small and poorly-funded program do better?
2. There aren't jobs now for skilled people. With defense cutbacks, thousands of experienced rocket scientists are looking for work now. As for brain surgeons, we suffer a serious over-supply of medical specialists.
The growing
computer industry? It has lost 67,000
jobs, twice as many as the auto industry, since 1989. Why
train for skilled jobs that don't exist?
3. The available jobs don't require training. The growth sectors are jobs like burger-flipping and bed-making, which you can learn inside an hour. Even so, the prospective employee will likely need to make other major adjustments, which brings us to
4. Most of the unemployed are characteristically unsuited for these jobs. For example, consider a laid-off miner who seeks employment in the tourist industry, say at Disneyland or a clone thereof.
He once did honest, sweaty, dirty work running a jumbo drill or a muckstick for $17 an hour. Now he's supposed to dress up like a glandular rodent and smile at strangers for $5 an hour.
To convert the Honest Laborer into the Always-Smiling-at-our-Esteemed-Guests would require not some six-week retraining program, but years of psychiatric therapy.
So retraining won't work. The presidential candidates could get serious about rebuilding the national infrastructure -- bridges, railroads, etc. This would employ millions of laid-off workers, who could then return to doing what they do best.
Or even better, Bush or Clinton could propose a retraining program, something like Marine Corps Boot Camp, for all those executives who continued to draw $2 million a year with hefty annual increases even as their companies lost money and exported jobs.
NOTE: Muckstick
is the mining-industry term for
what we topsiders call a shovel.
Apparently they
can't call a spade a spade, either.
QUERY: Whom do I ask to see whether the Post would like some coverage of Horace Tabor's trial in Leadville on Sept. 19?
It could make a good Sunday bright: Mining Baron Convicted of Abandoment, Oppression & Cigar-Smoking. Or maybe: Impassioned Gerash Appeal Persuades Leadville Jury to Acquit Bigamist.
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