Labor & Employment Law

The Best Job Training Is a Job

By James Parks

Millions of college graduates and displaced workers who go back to school are finding out that after years of hard work, all they are left with is hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Employers say we need a more educated workforce, yet they use the excuse that they can?t find qualified workers here in the United States to ship jobs overseas or import foreign workers in a cynical scam to inflate their own bottom lines.

Now, some of corporate media are blaming the students and their parents for making a bad economic decision for sending their kids to college. The bad economics is not the parents? fault?the blame lies squarely on the fact that there are no good jobs for the graduates to go to, says Stan Sorscher, a labor representative for the Society for Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace/IFPTE  Local 2001 (SPEEA).

Writing at Huffington Post, Sorscher says:

The problem is not the investment families and our governments make in education. The problem is our dangerously low level of job creation.

Investment creates jobs. GE invests billions in China. Microsoft invests billions in India. Boeing invests billions in Russia. General Motors builds more cars in China than in America. We are making millions of new jobs?just not in America.

Education is part of the answer. However, education, training and re-training do not cause new jobs to appear, particularly when new investment is heading overseas.

To capitalize on our social investment in education, we will need to create new jobs in our domestic economy. That means new trade policies, new policies for investment, economic development, R&D, education and immigration, and we will need a national industrial policy to coordinate new growth.

Read Sorscher?s entire article ?The Best Job Training Is a Job.? here.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on August 05, 2010 (boomark / email).