THE CHANCES are minuscule that Congress will reauthorize the Workforce Investment Act before the fall presidential election, leaving job training in political limbo.
Partisan jousting in the House and penny-pinching by President Bush undermine the hopes of 8.2 million unemployed Americans who need education and training to compete in the job market. The goal of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 is to create universal access to training and employment services. Funding for such services has been cut by nearly $1 billion, adjusted for inflation, since 2001. And now the Bush administration is threatening to eliminate one of the better aspects of the law: local control over how the funds are spent.
Work force training deserves an elevated place in the coming presidential exchanges. Bush has stated that more job seekers could be served with no additional funding through consolidation of programs and elimination of overhead. Dozens of professional and trade associations, including the US Conference of Mayors, counter by pointing to what they say are more than $500 million in hidden cuts to the $4 billion work force budget.
What's clear is that the availability of federal dollars to improve worker skills is too modest, especially when US workers are required to compete globally. A recent study by the Brookings Institution found that training funds per worker are significantly less here than in other industrialized countries. Yet Republicans in the House stubbornly block reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act under the misguided belief that rigid block grants placed under the control of governors would be superior to the current flexible system favoring local municipalities and career centers.
``I don't know how you get DeLay to back off and compromise," said US Representative John Tierney of Salem, referring to the House majority leader, Tom DeLay of Texas. Tierney, a Democrat, is a member of the Education and Workforce Committee.
Locally, the Boston Private Industry Council is seeing twice as many job seekers in its career centers as it did in 2000. And job hunters are increasingly desperate. Even offers of small stipends on the order of $25 to participate in studies on unemployment attract applicants for whom the money makes a critical difference, according to the council's staff. Youth unemployment is also spiking, with summer jobs tougher to come by as adults take jobs in fast food restaurants and other traditional venues for teen employment. In Boston alone, roughly 5,000 teenagers are seeking summer employment.
This year an estimated one in seven workers will turn for help to government training and employment services. Elected officials should be working a lot harder to show they are equal to the task.