$10 million for “training and certificate programs” HUZZAH!
I guess we could use a few more electricians but this sounds so vague and scammy to me.
What are the specific skills being taught? Where are the specific businesses that are so eager to hire these retrained folks? Until I get specifics I gotta think that this is a jobs program for Nicole Poore’s tax accountant.
What part of “The executive order establishes a task force to create a protocol” don’t you understand?
Looks like the usual suspects and a pot of money. What could go wrong?
I notice shitmaggot Mark Brainard is prominently featured.
I also love the way Carney doesn’t talk about education, he talks about job training. Fucking Delaware assholes don’t even pretend it’s about anything but preparing people for the hungry maw of capitalists eager to exploit them.
I think “job training” means getting CNA licenses to be home health aides or to feed the endless appetite of our nursing home scammers for low cost labor. Marketed of course as “jobs in health care” with pictures of happy shiny young people in lab coats smiling while typing into a computer. or peering into test tubes in a hi-tech testing lab.
It looks like a “we’re not going to give you extra tax money (wink wink) but this should work too”
“Fields like healthcare, IT, and construction will be focal points, with skills like welding, HVAC, and advanced manufacturing being skills Dr. Mark Brainard President of Delaware Technical Community College, said he will be ready to teach to get people back to work.
“Find something new.” – Ivanka Trump
It is a needed initiative for sure. Jobs are gone. People need some help. I remember the jobs initiative in 2008 was disappointingly set up with lots of funding for the training center over on Old Baltimore Pike at the union offices then under Sam Lathem. I don’t remember getting a report on ROI or success of that.
One thing favorable about Harris McDowell’s retirement is the end of his chronic advocacy of getting a state property tax for DelTech off the ground. Anyone asked Sarah McBride if she will carry that torch? I don’t see it but no harm in asking.
I am just about to look through this somewhat related post “International Trade Has Cost Americans Millions of Jobs. Investing in Communities Might Offset Those Losses”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/08/international-trade-has-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs-investing-in-communities-might-offset-those-losses.html
“Retraining and Moving for Work
What are the solutions for the millions of American workers who have lost their jobs? Economists generally support “people-based” over “place-based” policies and investments. The rationale is that it’s more important to invest in workers rather than bolster a place where workers live. Economists would argue that directing public funds into regions doing poorly is akin to wasting money. The logical outcome of such policies is that towns that have lost their economic base are allowed to shrink while other economies take their place.
The Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance for Workers program helps workers displaced by international trade with job training and relocation assistance, subsidized health insurance and extended unemployment benefits. Trade Adjustment Assistance is a “people-based” policy because it invests in workers. I believe that, relative to the magnitude of the job losses, Trade Adjustment Assistance provides too little relief. While there is little support among economists for place-based policies, recent evidence demonstrates that such policies may deserve another look.
Examples of place-based policies include enterprise zones where economic incentives are offered to firms to create jobs in economically challenged areas and policies that seek to promote economic development by investing in infrastructure, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, which, since 1933, provided electrification to the rural South, promoting industrialization and enhancing the quality of life in that region.
Adapting to Joblessness
People-based policies are predicated on the assumption that if given the right incentives, people will leave economically strapped areas and move to flourishing regions. Yet researchshows that even in regions of the U.S. where deep manufacturing job losses have occurred, workers frequently did not move to new jobs. Those who lost their jobs adjusted, spent less money and stayed put, resulting in a further reduction of economic activity in regions that, in turn, became poorer.
Workers who can move to more promising locales, but choose not to, is a phenomenon not only in the U.S. but in Germany, Norway and Spain, even if economically depressed regions have a negative impact on those who live there. Men – particularly young, white men – in the U.S. are less likely to graduate from college, more likely to bear children out of wedlock and more likely to suffer from what the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called “deaths of despair.” These deaths arise because of a deep sense of hopelessness stemming from unemployment, lack of resources and alcohol and drug dependency.
Strengthening a Place Called Home
If relatively low-skilled workers are unwilling to move, then should policies that favor people-based programs continue? Or is it better to make place-based investments, as the 2019 Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo suggest?
I believe that the U.S. should back policies that support people where they live and invest in those places when global trade, specifically liberalized trade, has taken a toll on American workers. Regional policymaking might ask what is needed so that those who are unemployed do not feel, as Nobel Prize-winning poet Gabriela Mistral writes, that “everyone left and we have remained on a path that goes on without us.””