Now it boils down to this: can the White House and its corporate supporters find a sliver of votes in the House to pass fast track and, close on its heels, the Trans Pacific Partnership? To do that end, the president and his allies are going to rely on tried-and-true phony promises conjured up by Bill Clinton and Robert Reich when they squeezed NAFTA through by a handful of votes in 1993--the Clinton-Reich playbook is back on display again.
Today's false promise: retraining.
Retraining does not work. It's a fraud--if the criteria is will a person get a job that pays anything near what s/he was paid at the job being obliterated. The programs are designed to sell the fast-track/TPP corporate, middle-class destroying jobs deals, at a piddling cost, and completely hide the erosion of good jobs. They are cruel frauds because they hold out a false promise to millions of workers.
Retraining is NOT a moral economic middle-class jobs program.
It's burial insurance.
Here is why.
To recap the current state of play, the president has already united the party behind him on both issues--that is, the Republican Party (congrats, Mr. President, on that awesome bi-partisan exercise--deserves a special room, I think, in your presidential library). So, what he needs to do is give something to a handful of members of his own party, particularly in the House (where the real action is on the vote) that each one can point to, partly to avoid a primary challenge, and say: "it was a tough vote, I had many concerns but I voted for the legislation because of the provisions to assist workers who lose their jobs because of TPP/fast track." As an aside, this will be particularly useful to one multi-millionaire person riding around in a van and eating at Chipolte who is avoiding taking a position on either bill--even though it's clear that she supports both.
I raise the retraining issue today because this afternoon the Senate will vote on an amendment by Sherrod Brown to the fast track bill that would to increase the Trade Adjustment Assistance program from the $450 million currently in the bill to $575 million. Republicans hate the TAA. And progressive should hate it, too.
First, what is the TAA?:
The Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) Program is a federal program that provides a path for employment growth and opportunity through aid to US workers who have lost their jobs as a result of foreign trade. The TAA program seeks to provide these trade-affected workers with opportunities to obtain the skills, resources, and support they need to become reemployed. The program benefits and services that are available to individual workers are administered by the states through agreements between the Secretary of Labor and each state Governor. Program eligibility, technical assistance, and oversight are provided by the US Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration's Office of Trade Adjustment Assistance.
The Department of Labor
says:
Since the inception of the TAA Program in 1974, nearly 4.8 million workers have been certified trade-affected and eligible to receive TAA benefits and services.
As of December 31, 2013, the TAA Program has served 2,192,910 workers
It is fascinating to read
the most recent assessment of the TAA, an assessment by the DOL which, of course, is aimed at shedding the best possible light on TAA because, after all, the point is to make sure the programs continue to get funded. The most fascinating, in a very subtle way--you could miss it--is actually the discussion of the success stories.
All of the success stories, with a heavy dose of good, "Mad Men" like positive chatter, talk about finding a new job. Example:
Stephen Haight lost his job after working for the same company for 33 years. He knew he needed to acquire more education and new skills in order to be competitive and find a good job. With the support of his case manager, Stephen enrolled in an Associate’s Degree program in Natural Gas Technology. Upon completion of his program, Stephen not only achieved a 3.9 GPA but started a full-time position the very next day in the field of his training.
Not a single one of the "success stories" speaks about WHAT THE NEW JOB PAYS.
Because TAA advocates, going back to Clinton and Reich, never want to admit that people are basically screwed when they lose their jobs to trade--especially in a world where unions are weak and new jobs are Wal-Mart jobs.
Reason #1: The U.S. throws a pittance at retraining and income support. Today the support is even lower and pathetic than it was 15 years ago. Back then:
In FY 1999, the federal government spent $3.4 billion on UI, of which only $2.3 billion was paid to individuals. Direct government outlays for dislocated worker programs in FY 1999 totaled about $1.4 billion. Funding for TAA and NAFTA-TAA together added another $414 million. Assuming an average of 1 million workers laid off each year, total federal funding for training and income maintenance (not including UI) amounted to approximately $1,800 per worker – barely enough to cover the costs for enrollment in training, let alone sufficient funds for any kind of serious income support. The United States spends far less on training and income support than any of the other industrialized countries[emphasis added]
Reason #2: jobs obliterated by so-called "free trade" are good-paying jobs because they are often held by people in unions who had good wages and real pensions. In case anyone didn't notice, those are not the jobs being created today.
Fundamentally, the problem is not a lack of skills. I've written about this issue a lot going back a decade partly to critique the obsession over education. The problem with "retraining," and, generally, the obsession about getting educated, is that the global economy is based not on competition over skills but competition based on wages. No matter how smart you think you are—and, by the way, those people who say we have the smartest workers in the world should pay attention to the racist sentiments inherent in that idea—there will always be someone who will do your work for less if there is no minimum standard. So, retraining and education, which in the abstract is nice, is the wrong answer to the question of how people will have any kind of economic stability.
Reason #3: Here's the main point, connecting #1 and #2--no one connects the two. Meaning, training isn't thought of as training for real jobs that exist AND are part of a large economic policy to create good paying jobs.
To take away from the heat of the moment regarding trade, let me use a parallel example. At the end of the Cold War, the defense industry dumped roughly 1.4 million workers between 1987-1996; a huge number of those workers were highly-skilled, unionized workers. A whole bunch of government programs collectively put $16.5 billion between 1993-1997 into trying to retrain and reemploy these workers--and, remember, these were workers who had a kind of patriotic glow about them since they were at the leading edge of the fight against those big bad Russians. And that amount--$16.5 billion--is a whole lot more than is being suggested be allocated to those people who will be "displaced" by TPP.
And the defense industry transitioned efforts failed. Why? Laura Powers and Ann Markusen dug into this and found basically two reasons:
...the main hallmark of federal transition policy has been acquiescence in wholesale defense industry consolidation and restructuring. This process that has viewed workers largely as impediments to cheaper weapons production. Through their post-Cold War military-industrial policies, the Pentagon and the Clinton Administration have:
l Agressively supported mergers among the nation’s largest defense firms;
l Encouraged firms to seek foreign military markets rather than to diversify at home;[emphasis added]
So, number one, even under a Democratic Administration, workers didn't matter as much as corporate interests. Surprise!
And second:
Second, defense workers who were laid off often did not find the assistance necessary to make satisfactory job and career changes. Local displaced-worker programs, while they varied considerably from place to place, were frequently unprepared -- in terms of financial resources or administrative capacity -- to serve this population. Although a strong economy in this period helped to keep aggregate unemployment rates low, our research indicates that private sector defense workers did not, on average, experience rapid re-employment at wages comparable or better to those they had received in their former defense-related occupations. We estimate that a majority of the workers displaced from defense-related industries between 1987 and 1997 now work at jobs that pay them less than their former wages and that fail to take advantage of their defense-bred skills. and a sizable minority has experienced a drop in earnings of 50% or more.
Let me underscore this. At a relatively stronger economic time, when unions were stronger, and Wal-Mart was not all the rage, workers who were dumped by the defense industry--the defense industry--still ended up in jobs paying far less.
So, let us not be fucking naive and let's stop lying to workers and playing a phony game: these "retraining programs" are phony. They don't help people. They cover up the grim reality.
It's burial insurance.
In a sense, the TAA does give us a great metaphor for the pathetic choice between the two major parties on economics: Republicans hate TAA because they think it's too expensive and don't want to help workers because "the free market, the free market"; Democrats are too cowardly to challenge, and/or, they believe in "the free market, the free market", so they toss a few bones in "burial insurance" so they can claim they care and justify votes that are indefensible.
I do not blame Sherrod Brown for trying to get a little more money for these programs; I'm sure he knows, deep down, that these programs don't work, and he's working hard to defeat both fast track and TPP.
However, we should not let Congresscritters justify a vote for either fast track or TPP based on a few crumbs of "burial insurance" included to assuage someone's conscience or cover up what is really horrendous economic policy.