For President Joe Biden, it could be one of the most far-reaching economic issues he faces, and the failure to resolve it would undermine his vow to restore the U.S. labor market. Biden, which has strong support from organized labor, plans to expand partnerships between unions, businesses and community colleges, scale up work-based learning programs and expand individual career services.
Despite the twofold calls for action, it could be a struggle for Biden to persuade Republicans to agree to fund a large-scale and costly overhaul of the government’s re-acceptance of workers. Even the $ 1.9 billion economic relief package he proposed does not include any new funds specifically for job training. According to the House Education and Labor Committee, Congress has invested only $ 345 million in labor force development to address Covid-19, compared to the nearly $ 6 billion it has allocated to respond to the Great Recession.
‘It’s not just a lost opportunity if we do not help our people gain the skills for the jobs that are being created, but it’s going to be a serious blow to the economy,’ said Neil Bradley, executive vice president and chief policy officer. at the Chamber of Commerce. “It’s going to mean a lot of suffering for a lot of individuals.”
Forty-three percent of businesses expect to reduce their employees due to new technology, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs survey. In December, searches for automation equipment at Thomas, a product sourcing platform, increased by more than 300 percent compared to the previous year. And research firm Gartner found in February that Covid-19 had caused seven of the ten boards to accelerate their digital business.
The lightning-fast shift has created a more urgent demand for workers’ training than ever before. With an estimated 97 million new job categories that could result from automation, companies estimate that 40 percent of workers will need a re-contract.
Although automation usually affects most employees in the manufacturing and food service products, the emergence of other technologies such as artificial intelligence is also possible for white-collar people.
Yet black and brown workers bear the brunt of the impact: lower levels of education and other barriers to employment mean that minority workers are more likely to be automated than whites as cashiers, cooks and other occupations. Even pre-pandemic, according to one estimate, 23 percent of black workers were at risk of losing their jobs by 2030 due to automation.
The dozens of agency and training programs distributed by agencies since 2019 have been funded by the Department of Labor through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act and the Department of Education’s Pell and Perkins grant programs, as well as the Temporary Assistance Program for needy families for health and human services. and USDA’s SNAP Employment and Training program, to name a few.
But the pandemic stressed that “there is no consistency between these plans in a way that gives us the opportunity to do the type of worker retraining that is needed,” said Nicol Turner Lee, director of Brookings’ Center for Technology Innovation . ‘ When we get out of this, we will have to figure out how to get people into positions that no longer look like their normal ones. ”
In addition, many of the best-performing programs – such as the Labor Department’s trade adjustment program – are limited and accessible to only a handful of workers who meet a strict set of criteria. such as being adversely affected by foreign trade.
If Congress wants to help workers affected by automation maintain – or recycle – their services, lawmakers, advocates and unions say workers need to revamp these programs.
Van Kleunen says he and his team support the idea of a federal effort to bring all stakeholders – businesses, community colleges, unions – to the table for a discussion on what training is needed and how it can best be offered. People close to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, Biden’s nominated candidate for secretary of Labor, say he would be on board with such a move.
‘We are going to create new jobs, but other jobs may be reduced or eliminated due to the changing economy. And we need to provide the necessary tools, especially with minority workers, ”said Lee Saunders, president of the U.S. Government, County and Municipal Employees.
Businesses, including PwC, L’Oreal and KeyBank, have already made their own efforts to retrain workers. But the majority of employers do not have enough resources to do so, and they will need coordination with educational institutions and the public sector to help employees make the leap. Only 21 percent of businesses say they can access public funds to support re-acceptance.
Momentum is streamlining existing efforts to retrain workers and get them back to work – not just the 43 federal programs, but also safety net measures such as the unemployment insurance systems spread across 50 states.
Since many Americans are jobless or employed in a business that cannot do their own retraining, an important part of the conversation involves making sure that workers can pay their rent while acquiring the skills they need to get on. to keep the long lasting head above water. Although Biden did not approve such an overhaul, he said he wanted to extend unemployment benefits for as long as it took to train workers.
Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.), Vice-Chair of the House’s Education and Labor Committee, called for the Labor Force Innovation and Opportunities Act, which was approved by fiscal 2020 only, to be authorized.
‘With [the legislation] for empowerment, we will have the opportunity to improve our country’s workforce system so that workers have the additional opportunity to successfully compete in the 21st century workforce, ”said Virginia Foxx (RN.C.), a member of the House of Education. and Labor Committee, said.
Many other developed countries such as Sweden and Germany already have such large-scale systems in place. In comparison, the US spends less of its GDP on workers’ training than most other OECD countries. The OECD’s 2020 economic survey of the United States found that expanding “retraining or reuse of opportunities – will help workers displaced by the coronavirus shock.”
“It’s not nice in the air,” said Mary Kay Henry, president of the International Service Union. “There are many global lessons we can learn from.”