Retrained for What?

By John Greenwald

For the 80 laid-off aerospace workers in Southern California, the future suddenly appeared brighter than it had in years. After completing an eight- week course in handling hazardous materials, the students looked forward to new white-collar careers in pollution control. But fewer than one-third of the graduates landed the principal jobs available: on-site work cleaning up toxic spills. "They would be the people out there exposing themselves to hazardous waste," says Robert Nelson, director of government relations for the Los Angeles-based Labor Employment Training Corp., which ran the program from September 1991 until early last year. "A lot of the people we trained had been administrative and managerial types used to working inside."

That mismatch is sadly typical: most trainees end up with a fancy certificate but no decent job. Just last month, a Labor Department study found that only 20% of about 1,200 people who received training under a federal program for dislocated workers got a job paying at least 80% of their old wage or salary.

Yet the Clinton Administration still regards training as the key to putting America's growing army of laid-off employees back to work. In a long-delayed initiative, the Administration plans to ask Congress next year for $3 billion to transform the current hodgepodge of federal job programs into a unified effort to retrain the more than 2 million workers who lose jobs each year.

That ambitious effort could take a lesson from the Rev. William Cunningham, a Roman Catholic priest who runs Detroit's highly successful Focus Hope. His secret: persuading companies to guarantee jobs rather than leaving students to the mercy of a shrinking marketplace. More than 90% of the 90 graduates of a recent Focus Hope machinist program found work at companies that Cunningham had painstakingly recruited. "I had never even drilled a hole in my life," says Laura Cronyn, a 29-year-old single mother and former waitress who got one of those jobs in Detroit, "but I graduated No. 1 in my class." Cronyn plans to enroll part time in a six-year Focus Hope program that will teach students how to run a computerized factory floor. After eight years of waiting tables, she is clearly on a roll.

With reporting by James Willwerth/Los Angeles, Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit and Adam Zagorin/ Washington