Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin speaks during a meeting of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board at the White House, June 26, 2020.
Donald Trump’s American Workforce Policy Advisory Board rolled out an ad campaign exhorting jobless workers to “Find Something New.” Good luck with that in a pandemic.
The scorn didn’t just come from the left. “Workers who are seeking new employment may struggle to find a job, even if they are willing to try something new,” CBS News warned. The Washington Post noted that “the effort … was swiftly derided on social media as ‘clueless’ and ‘tone-deaf’ given the pandemic, recession and Trump’s own familial employment history.”
The most generous interpretation of the tagline is that Trump’s advisers were informing workers about new resources that could help them find a job. Unfortunately, the advisory board isn’t offering anything helpful, new, or tangible for workers. Instead, it has recycled discredited ideas about automation as a cause of joblessness and worker retraining as a response—as if the pandemic were not the main reason for the sudden jump in unemployment to Depression levels.
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The board itself is a who’s who of major corporate interests. It’s co-chaired by Ivanka Trump and Labor Secretary Wilbur Ross. Ross is a billionaire investor who specializes in buying and flipping “distressed” companies. The board’s other members include the CEOs of Apple, Lockheed Martin, Walmart, Visa, Siemens, IBM, Accenture, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; some educators and politicians; and a lone representative of labor, Sean McGarvey of North America’s Building Trades Unions.
It’s true that, as The New York Times reports, the group “called for ‘immediate and unprecedented investments in American workers,’ both for training and help in finding jobs.” But the board’s only mention of public expenditure comes in a run-on sentence calling for “an array of existing and new public- and private-sector investments including changing the way employer-led training costs are treated from an accounting perspective to encourage further investment.”
Scrape off the excess verbiage, and that sounds a lot like a familiar pitch for business tax breaks.
If the document’s vagueness doesn’t trigger a migraine, the prose probably will. One sentence reads:
Frictionless hiring practices that prioritize skills and competencies must be embraced, and pathways to jobs should be based on “skills first.”
Writing skills, apparently, don’t come “first.”
But the jargon, however challenging, serves a purpose. It obscures the fact that this proposal—sorry, “Call-to-Action”—is little more than the typical corporate wish list: looser regulations, relaxed certification standards (which effectively lowers the cost of labor), and lower taxes.
“Find Something New” promotes health-related careers, even as Republicans block funding for crisis-related care. It also pushes wind turbine jobs, despite Trump’s long-standing opposition to wind turbines. (“The wind kills all your birds,” Trump famously said. “All your birds.”)
Trump’s board was created in July 2018 with an executive order that misstated the then-current state of affairs. “Our Nation is facing a skills crisis,” it said. “There are currently more than 6.7 million unfilled jobs in the United States, and American workers, who are our country’s most valuable resource, need the skills training to fill them.”
It’s true that there had been a reported 6.7 million job openings the previous month, but there’s little evidence the problem was unskilled workers. If it had been, employers would have been expected to increase wages for those jobs. But average wages had only increased 2.7 percent over the previous year.
Trump’s executive order also asserted that “the economy is changing at a rapid pace because of the technology, automation, and artificial intelligence that is shaping many industries, from manufacturing to healthcare to retail.”
A recent Times article by Steve Lohr echoes this conventional wisdom, starting with the headline: “The Pandemic Has Accelerated Demands for a More Skilled Work Force.”
Economists, business leaders and labor experts have warned for years that a coming wave of automation and digital technology would upend the work force, destroying some jobs while altering how and where work is done for nearly everyone.
But that assessment has been hotly debated for decades.
In 2013, the Economic Policy Institute’s then-president Larry Mishel co-authored a report with John Schmitt and Heidi Shierholz challenging the theory that technology was driving increased wage inequality. And in 2017, Mishel and Josh Bivens wrote a report whose title blended two movie tropes: “The Zombie Robot Argument Lurches On: There Is No Evidence That Automation Leads to Joblessness or Inequality.”
“I’m all for training workers,” Mishel told The American Prospect, “but ‘let them eat training’ is a remarkable response to the current crisis. There is no evidence it will reduce unemployment.”
Economist Marshall Steinbaum told the Prospect he disagreed with the “skills gap” interpretation of unemployment. “That theory is the go-to anytime there is high unemployment,” Steinbaum said. “Nothing else is ideologically acceptable in some circles. But we know it’s factually false. How do we know? If it were true that there aren’t enough workers with certain skills, there would be a bidding war for those who do have them.”
“Health care technicians have experienced eroded status and decredentialization,” he said, adding: “We need a health care infrastructure buildout. We have a public health care crisis, and yet we have unemployed health care workers.”
Lately, mainstream economists who once accepted the skills story have joined the skeptics. They include two leading economists quoted in the Times, David Autor of MIT and Harvard’s Lawrence Katz.
Katz was quoted by the Times as saying that the Great Recession was a “lost opportunity,” and elaborating:
Now, are we going to take this moment to help low-wage workers move into the middle class and give them skills to thrive? Or are they just going to go back to low-wage jobs that are dead ends?
Katz added some context for that comment in an email exchange with the Prospect, writing:
Increased public investments in effective skills training and employment programs, as well as community colleges and public 4-year institutions, are essential. But skills training and education are only a small part of the policy response needed to help those who have lost jobs, low-wage workers, and struggling parents in the current crisis.
Katz continued:
Most urgent is the immediate extension of generous unemployment insurance, large increases in federal support for state and local governments, and more support for SNAP benefits. And we need to provide hazard pay and PPE to essential workers in the continued pandemic, and to invest in support for our care infrastructure (child care, and elderly and disabled care), that is showing its limitations and inequities at present.
Finally, said Katz, “Much more needs to be done to increase worker clout: including an increased minimum wage, attempts to build up sectoral wage bargaining, and policies to support rights to unionization.”
The Times article drew a direct link between the pandemic and skills training, asserting that “the coronavirus pandemic has transformed some of those predictions”—i.e., that automation and digital technology would inevitably upend the workforce—“into reality.”
But neither of the economists quoted in the article makes that claim, and the teleworking imposed by COVID-19 is not the kind of job transformation predicted by automation and robotics doomsayers.
Housebound workers on laptops still have their jobs, and perform them in largely the same way. Other than mastering Zoom—a process that rarely takes more than a few minutes—they haven’t yet needed to “upskill,” “reskill,” or find “frictionless pathways” to work.
Retraining workers was once a go-to move for politicians of both parties during times of high unemployment. The 2012 Democratic Party platform called for federal and state funding to “ensure that Americans of all backgrounds will be prepared for the jobs and economy of the future.” In his 2012 campaign against Obama, Mitt Romney stated that federal money should “go to the workers so they can create their own pathways to get in the training they need for jobs that will really help them.”
That approach has been echoed in various “bipartisan” initiatives. A recent proposal from Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Republican Sen. Ben Sasse would offer tax breaks of up to $4,000 in skills training for workers who are unemployed because of the pandemic. While they wouldn’t need to have taxable federal income to collect the credit, the proposal doesn’t tell us how many cash-strapped workers could afford a $4,000 outlay that’s not reimbursed for many months. Klobuchar characterized the proposal as “bold action,” while Sasse echoed both the Trump group and the Times. “Our economy was changing rapidly before this nasty virus,” he said in a statement, “and the current economic crisis is going to speed things up.”
There is broad support for worker retraining and other forms of adult education, but there’s little evidence it’s a solution for un- or underemployment.
For his part, Obama returned to the “future” theme in early 2016 with an initiative to teach every child how to program. “[W]e have to make sure all our kids are equipped for the jobs of the future,” Obama said, “which means not just being able to work with computers but developing the analytical and coding skills to power our innovation economy.”
But it’s hard to know which jobs are “the jobs of the future.” The once-popular idea of teaching every child to code is a case in point. “Workers who are in software programming professions are being deprofessionalized and having their labor standards eroded,” says economist Steinbaum, “just like blue-collar workers.”
In short, there is broad support for worker retraining and other forms of adult education, but there’s little evidence it’s a solution for un- or underemployment.
The “skills gap” argument isn’t just a technical one; it’s also deeply polemical. If the public believes that the problem lies with workers themselves—that they’re underskilled, or unprepared for “the jobs of the future”—there’s likely to be less support for measures that extract larger costs from the business community: a higher minimum wage, for example, or greater union representation. If unemployment and low wages are seen as individual shortcomings, there will be less pressure to address them through social change.
It’s not clear why the Times article made the assertions it did. But the Trump group’s approach certainly seems to be in the self-interest of most of its members. It’s also ideologically compatible with Trump and his party. But times have changed, and the “skills gap” argument is not likely to persuade as many voters as it once did. If these CEOs want to make a jobs case that persuades the public, they’ll need to find something new.
