An eager labor-minded reader forwards me this interview with author Malcolm Harris, who says the shift of job training to public education has shifted costs from employers to students (in time, college debt, and earnings) while creating a skills glut that drives down wages:
Cohen: You explore the idea that more and more skills-training has become the burden or responsibility of the job applicant, rather than of employers who could train workers on the job.
Harris: It’s all about saving costs. It’s obscene that a company as rich as Google complains about a lack of skilled workers and that they want someone else—whether it’s a charity, or a 501(c)(3), or the government—to teach people how to do the work Google needs, and to pay for that training. Google should be paying for it, and the idea that this isn’t the response every single time someone says “skills gap” is wild. We should be saying, no, we won’t re-engineer the entire public education system for your benefit, and we’re not going to waste our kids’ time teaching them things they’re likely never going to use [Rachel M. Cohen, “Q&A: Getting Millennials off That Treadmill,” The American Prospect, 2017.12.06].
If we really think the point of public education is to help students earn better wages, then we should replace all those vo-tech classes with Union Organizing 101:
Cohen: Wouldn’t the counter-argument to that be that we’re not really doing this for the companies’ sake, but for the students’? So they can earn decent livings?
Harris: But we know that when everyone does this, the aggregate effect is that wages go down. But that’s what companies want: They want it to be cheaper to pay for coders and workers with digital skills. If governments really wanted to help kids succeed in the labor market, the best correlate with high pay is union membership. Teach kids how to collectively bargain and join a union in schools. If schools wanted kids to get good jobs, strong jobs, no matter where they end up, they would teach them how to stand up for themselves and others on the job market. But we don’t have any classes on that. We have “here’s how you can get ahead by getting skills” [Cohen, 2017.12.06].
Empirical data supports Harris’s statement: strong unions mean strong wages.
Meanwhile, an Executive Branch led by a former TV show host wants more students to supply cheap apprentice labor to businesses, and South Dakota lawmakers are working to ban unions from our institutions of higher education.
South Dakota has a John Deere mechanic course at he vo tech in Mitchell.
Unions are bad. They are bad. If workers want to be paid more they need to work harder or get better jobs. If you don’t like the fast food wages, get a better job. If you cannot you are simply not trying hard enough. Lots of jobs out there.
WOW !! Sure was a lot of thought put into that last comment, eh ?
I think about it much, Mr. Bear
Union jobs are the better jobs of which you think a lot about, Grudzie. Union workers work harder and smarter than non union workers. That’s why we’re paid more.
Unions are dying everywhere and are pretty much dead here in South Dakota, where the minority of the bloggers here on this website live. I, grudznick, am a member of a minority. South Dakota bloggers on the Dakota Free Press.
Grudznick, what “better job” should a high school graduate go get? What is the “better pay” rate for that job?
Your “unions bad” rings hollow because you (like too many) like to act as if the union is some disembodied boogie man. A union is the collection of workers; to say you hate unions reads to me as saying you hate workers – at least the workers who speak up on issues of compensation, safety, and other working conditions that define their livelihood. Moreover, silencing the voice of the union (the workers) is to give voice only to the corporate interest. Outside of the top 1%, I don’t see that course strengthening the country (although it continues doing a fantastic job enriching the 1%). As unions die, what is rising in that new, unchecked environment? As productivity and profits reach record heights and wages stagnate or regress, a union revitalization is critical. Millennials like Malcolm Harris see the reality of the economic system they are entering: a system of disproportionate corporate power.
There is no more democratic institution than a union: it is the voice of the many speaking to the voice of the few in power. This country’s peril is the continued disenfranchisement of the many for the empowerment of the fewer and fewer.
Proud to post on a blog with someone as articulate, informed and sensible as “o”.
It started happening years ago, and still continues which blows my mind. At what point, did unions become a four letter word? (well, it’s more than four letters, but you know what I mean)
Unions have made this country strong. They have protected the employers from abusing their employees. They have pushed forward great things that all of us have benefitted from. Have their been some abuses? Sure, but painting with a broad brush that unions=bad, is ridiculous.
Porter and “o” pointed out the obvious. Corporations are “threatened” by unions because it impacts their bottom line. Corporations that don’t like unions, are corporations that want to continue the divide/expand the gap between the higher ups and the worker-bees.
Given the big shift toward cooperative learning activities over the past 30 years, you’d think teaching union organizing and collective bargaining would be a perfectly logical step.
Ever notice when Unions dwindled so did the wage growth in this country?
That’s exactly the correlation Harris has in mind.
There is also a subtle point to be taken here on who ought to shoulder the responsibility of funding education in a time when education seems to be focused on creating a benefit (good employees) for business. given that business benefits from that re-defined focus, shouldn’t business then be asked to take up more of the financial burden of that economic benefit? Shouldn’ there be a higher taxation on business to offset the states’ cost to educate this future workforce at the k-12, vocational, and college levels?
Looking at the mission of the DOE, to have all students college and career ready, would indicate the purpose to help the bottom line business more so than the individual or the abstract, intrinsic value of knowledge.
O, I like that justification for a higher corporate tax rate… or perhaps, in South Dakota terms, passing a corporate income tax before we pass an individual income tax.