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Labor Studies Journal 28.2 (2003) 96-97



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The Job Training Charade. By Gordon Lafer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2002. 297 pp. $32.50 hardback.

Once in a great while, a book comes along that takes such a fresh and original look at some accepted way of American life that it takes your breath away. These are books like Michael Harrington's The Other America, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring or, in the area of work and labor, books like Bluestone and Harrison's The Deindustrialization of America or Juliet Schor's The Overworked American. Their power comes not only from the strength of the conventional wisdom they are debunking, but from the simple elegance of their insight and rebuttal. In slightly less than 300 pages, Gordon Lafer has delivered a careful, intelligent, yet devastating critique of contemporary federal job training in The Job Training Charade. Our thinking about job training will never be the same.

Lafer's book reminds us that the focus on job training is relatively new in the U.S. Until the 1980s, most federal employment programs focused on job creation, not skills training. This changed dramatically in 1982 with Ronald Reagan's support for the passage of the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA). Despite Reagan's radical free market approach, Lafer suggests that his administration needed to show some responsiveness to double digit unemployment. Reagan asserted that one had only to look in the newspaper to see that there were jobs available, just not workers with the right skills. As Lafer argues, this "skills mismatch" argument became became the fundamental building block of JTPA and served as a powerful political tool for a President who was loathe to institute a federal jobs creation program.

Lafer presents simple yet overwhelming evidence that the lack of good jobs, not lack of job training, has kept most Americans unemployed or underemployed. Here he unpacks the sacred American belief in the power of education in securing and keeping a well paying job. While there continues to be a wage premium for a college education, less than one third of all jobs require a degree and, as Lafer writes, "in the two-thirds of the labor market where college degrees are not required, the relationship between education and wages is extremely weak". Even using their own evaluations, Lafer suggests, there is virtually no evidence that JTPA has been effective in doing what it has promised - preparing Americans for finding and keeping steady work.

So why continue this approach if it is clearly not effective? Why, in some kind of cognitive dissonance, does it continue to hold the imagination of Republicans and Democrats alike? Here Lafer's analysis is at its [End Page 96] sharpest when he suggests that this approach to job training "starts out looking like a policy issue and ends up looking like a political strategy." Part and parcel of JTPA was a shift in how training agencies were funded, with a high proportion of government funds going to private employers. As Lafer suggests, "Thus, many of the very organizations which had historically rallied poor communities in pursuit of progressive economic demands were now statutorily subordinated to private employers, and were forced to market themselves to business representatives in order to obtain program funds." In this way, JTPA and its implicit assumptions undermined the "moral and ideological basis for political mobilization" as workers were isolated, going through training that would probably not provide them any additional capital in the labor market.

This will be a controversial book. Undoubtedly the industry that has grown up around job training will do its best to undermine Lafer's sober analysis. If the history of the past 20 years tells us anything, the American political community will continue to cling to the training mythology, in part because it absolves them from having to confront the more fundamental issues of corporate power and inequality in this country. I expect few will be happy to see their cowardice so exposed. But if you think about or are involved in labor and workplace issues, go buy this book...

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