For President Joe Biden, this may be one of the most far-reaching economic issues he will face, and failing to resolve it would undermine his promise to restore the US job market. Biden, who has strong support for organized work, is committing himself to expanding partnerships between unions, businesses and community colleges, expanding work-based learning programs and developing individual career services.
However, despite bipartisan calls for action, it may be a struggle for Biden to convince Republicans to agree to finance an expensive, large-scale reform of how the government addresses the requalification of workers. Even the $ 1.9 trillion financial aid package he proposed does not contain new funds specifically for professional training. Congress invested just $ 345 million in developing the workforce to serve Covid-19, according to the House’s Education and Work Committee, compared to the nearly $ 6 billion it allocated to respond to the Great Recession.
This “is not just a missed opportunity if we don’t help people get the skills for the jobs being created, it will be a real drag on the economy,” said Neil Bradley, executive vice president and policy director for the House of Representatives. Trade. “It will mean a lot of suffering for many people.”
Forty-three percent of companies expect to reduce their workforce due to new technology, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs survey. In December, searches for automation engineering equipment at Thomas, a product sourcing platform, increased more than 300% over the previous year. And research firm Gartner discovered in February that Covid-19 caused seven out of ten boards to accelerate their digital businesses.
The extremely rapid change has created a more urgent demand for worker training than ever before. With about 97 million new categories of jobs that may emerge from automation, companies estimate that 40% of workers will need retraining.
While automation generally affects blue-collar workers in manufacturing and food services, the emergence of other technologies, such as artificial intelligence, will also threaten white-collar workers.
Still, black and brown workers are bearing the brunt of the impact: lower levels of education and other barriers to opportunities mean that minority workers are more likely than whites to be employed as cashiers, cooks and other susceptible occupations automation. Even before the pandemic, 23 percent of black workers were at risk of losing their jobs by 2030 due to automation, according to one estimate.
The dozens of employment and training programs spread across agencies as of 2019 have been funded by the Department of Labor through the Labor Force Innovation and Opportunity Act and the Department of Education’s Pell and Perkins grant programs, as well as the program Temporary Assistance for Human Services and Health for Needy Families and the USDA SNAP Employment and Training Program, to name a few.
But the pandemic stressed that “there is no alignment of these plans in a way that gives us the opportunity to do the kind of worker recycling that is necessary,” said Nicol Turner Lee, director of Brookings’ Center for Technology Innovation. get out of this, we will have to figure out how to get people into jobs that no longer look like normal. “
In addition, many of the best performing programs – such as the Department of Labor’s Commercial Adjustment Assistance program – are strictly restricted, accessible only to a handful of workers who meet a strict set of criteria. as having been adversely affected by foreign trade.
If Congress intends to help workers affected by automation to keep – or recover – jobs, lawmakers, workers’ defenders and unions say a redesign of these programs will be necessary.
Van Kleunen says he and his team support the idea of a federal effort to bring all interested parties – companies, community colleges, unions – into a conversation about what kind of training is needed and how it can best be provided. People close to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, Biden’s nominee for Labor Secretary, say he would agree to such a move.
“We are going to create new jobs, but other jobs can be reduced or eliminated completely because of changes in the economy. And we have to provide the necessary tools, especially with minority workers, ”said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, Municipal and Municipal Employees.
Companies like PwC, L’Oreal and KeyBank have already launched internal efforts to requalify workers. But most employers lack the resources to do so and will require coordination with educational institutions and the public sector to help employees make the leap. Only 21% of companies report having access to public funds to support requalification.
The momentum is building to streamline existing efforts to get workers re-trained and back to work – including not only the 43 federal programs, but also safety net measures like unemployment insurance systems spread across all 50 states .
With many Americans unemployed or employed in a company unable to do their own retraining, an important part of the conversation involves ensuring that workers are able to pay their rent while getting the skills they need to stay afloat for the long term. Although Biden did not specifically endorse such a reform, he said he wants to extend unemployment insurance for as long as it takes to train and retrain workers.
Deputy Andy Levin (D-Mich.), Vice Chairman of the House’s Education and Labor Committee, called for the reauthorization of the Labor Force Innovation and Opportunity Act, which authorized funds for Department of Labor programs only until the fiscal year 2020.
“With [the legislation] For reauthorization, we will have the opportunity to improve our country’s workforce system so that workers have additional opportunities to compete successfully in the 21st century workforce, ”said Virginia Foxx (RN.C.), member of the Committee Education and Work House.
Many other developed nations, such as Sweden and Germany, already have these large-scale systems in place. The US, by comparison, spends less of its GDP on training workers than most other OECD countries. The OECD’s 2020 US economic survey found that building “retraining or retraining opportunities – would help workers displaced by the coronavirus shock.”
“This is not a pie in the sky,” said Mary Kay Henry, president of Service Employees International Union. “There are many global lessons that we can take advantage of.”