The Job Training Charade

In The Job Training Charade, Gordon Lafer attacks the U.S. economic policy that calls for the advancement of the skills and education of American workers as their way out of poverty. Lafer, a professor specializing in labor, politics, and union research, challenges the rationale of this twenty-year policy that has remained popular but, he asserts, continues to be unsuccessful. He swings at three assumptions on which job training policy are based: that there are enough decently paying jobs available if only workers had adequate training to fill them; that wage levels are determined by skill level; and that the cause and solution of poverty in America is nonpolitical. Agree or not, readers will be challenged by this criticism of the underpinnings of American labor policy.