Is it time to rethink how we deal with unemployment?

It is probably too early to determine whether the current federal stimulus money that has been appropriated to save the banking and auto manufacturing industries will have its intended effect. Most economists predict that even if the stimulus money is effective, the unemployment rate will either remain where it is or even increase for a period of time because adding employees lags behind improvement in business conditions.

Without throwing a monkey wrench into the ambitious legislative agenda being pushed by the White House, I believe it is time to think ahead, on the theory that the U.S. will experience more cycles of growth and recession and the unemployment increases that accompany those cycles. It is even more critical if this latest recovery will be legitimately characterized as a "jobless recovery". The current system is nearly a century old, born out of the New Deal in the 1930s and has not been significantly changed since then. The nation's needs at that time are different from today's needs. For the most part, the jobs are different. As jobs became more complex, we have necessarily credentialized a large part of the labor market. Let's not forget that a person in the 1930s without more than a high school diploma was considered qualified to get a responsible banking job (if one existed), get promoted and have a lifetime career. Barack Obama's grandmother was one of them. Of course, that's very different from today's reality.

Over the last decades, federal and state governments have tried to blunt the impact of many of the problems associated with unacceptably high unemployment, including COBRA options, training programs, government-sponsored public works and numerous other strands of an improved safety net.

I still recall very vividly the conversation I had my with my high school guidance counselor over 25 years ago, when he realized that I had included in my academic schedule an auto mechanic's class that I wanted to take. Whether he had the authority to do so I'll never know, but he forced me to take another "academic" elective to replace the trade-based class. He bluntly told me that it would be a waste of my time and would not be viewed favorably by the best universities that he assumed would accept me. My motive, by the way, was not to become an auto mechanic. I just wanted to be able to do basic work on my old car and thought it was a good idea to have a skill other than writing a good essay. If I was told that I was barred from the class because it was already full with students who intended to pursue a career in that area, I would have backed away and probably forgotten about it. In my counselor's defense, I was accepted at Cornell University as he expected and went on to law school. I admit that I was offended that he seemed to assign little value to BOCES programs.

In New York State the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) has for decades offered trade-school education for high school students who are not college-bound. The reality is that a huge part of the 18 year old population is either not college-bound or will never finish a degree program. They are locked out of many jobs but not all of them, particularly skilled trade jobs provided they get those skills during high school. BOCES and institutions like it around the country, in my view, are extremely important. People like me own cars that need repair from time to time. We need welders, nurses' aides, and many other service providers that are immune from having their jobs shipped overseas but don't require 4 year (or sometimes even 2 year) college degrees.

Others have written about the value of community colleges and suggest that those colleges offer more skilled-trade coursework. In theory, that makes sense. The problem is not that community colleges are incapable of enhancing or creating those kinds of courses of study. The problem is the lack of funds to establish or improve those courses and the lack of funds of potential students that would benefit from those offerings. Community college appears pretty cheap to many people but for some potential students, they don't have the money to enroll and even if financial aid made it possible, they often must work full-time jobs as soon as they receive their high school diplomas, either to become independent of their parents or to assist their families in meeting their financial obligations. [After I initially posted this piece, the NY Times reported on the exact same dilemma faced by college students. Jump to this link if you're interested: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/education/10graduate.html?ref=us

Obviously, many skilled trade jobs include a required apprenticeship to achieve journeyman status and may not have to attend much traditional classroom instruction in order to develop the skills necessary to get real jobs. Some employers will do all of their own training but many will pay a "trainee rate" in the meantime. That doesn't necessarily work for a kid who needs more than that for transportation, food and housing.

There must be more creative ways of giving skill-development opportunities to high school kids while they are in high school. I am sure that some high schools do a pretty good job with the resources they have but many lack the funds to provide those opportunities.

How should we deal with this? If we ignore a race to the bottom, there will be millions more kids who throughout adulthood get stuck in minimum wage jobs. If that is acceptable to you, congratulations. You don't need to do a thing, but we all should remember that these kids and their employers will be paying much less in payroll taxes that keep Social Security and Medicare intact. Scrambling for work or living on the economic edge in general doesn't leave much time for political awareness or participation. To me, that makes participation in a democracy a privilege, not a right. I would hate to think that few people care about that. I am not a conspiracy theorist but there are plenty of people who believe that we consciously stack the deck against these kids because we're afraid that the pool of potential fast-food employees will shrink and it will end up costing us more for a Big Mac. If that's true, it's a tragedy.