A lot of our attention is focused on getting people connected to the labor market. The tools at hand include pre-employment workshops, language training, and certificate courses. With some support services mixed into this recipe many individuals can get a job and hopefully move up over time. But what are the real possibilities for getting ahead?
Joan Fitzgerald paints a sobering picture in her new book "Moving up in the New Economy." After thoroughly examining the best available research she concludes "Often there is no pathway for low-wage workers to advance through a progression of more responsible and better-paid jobs as they gain skills and experience, for the simple reason that there are no more intermediary jobs for them to advance into. In many industries the middle rungs of what ought to be or used to be a career ladder are simply missing; there are well-paid professional or managerial jobs at the top and dead-end jobs at the bottom - and few if any positions in between."
Restoring those middle rungs will require more structure in the labor market. One approach encourages employers themselves to structure work and advancement within their firms. Another way to achieve structure involves government policy like the minimum wage and labor regulations. Unions or some form of representational advocacy are also at play. These areas of workforce development are often the least understood, yet perhaps the most critical if we are to find ways to increase the number of middle-class jobs.
Colin Austin
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I believe a comprehensive view of increasing the standard of living by getting people connected to the labor market includes the availability of job, the skills to do the job, and all the surrounding supports to keep the job, get to the job, etc. I see a need to link workforce development, economic development, and support services, which are inextricably linked in the situation that we are facing in some of these communities.
Not only are there at times no intermediary jobs for people to move into; in some areas such as distressed rural areas, there are few jobs at all, requiring long commutes for people who may not have transportation.
Of course there are all kinds of debates around how much structure there should be in the labor market. Just a few days ago, Dr. Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute spoke at a conference on Wealth Inequality and the Eroding Middle Class sponsored by the UNC Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity about some of these issues. He spoke about the “deregulation” romance of the last few decades and tied the growing income inequality to lack of public investment in workers. The solutions he and several others described at the conference to increase the standard of living of workers included a strengthened role for government in providing social outlays such as health insurance, as well as civic engagement in groups such as unions.
These strategies make sense to me; however, they only go so far if we do not have sufficient numbers of quality jobs. So I would couple the kinds of strategies above with effective economic development strategies in areas with low numbers of these jobs. Some approaches might include entrepreneurship, cluster development, and utilizing intermediaries to make effective linkages and provide resources and technical assistance.
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