Posts about Job Training

Governors Bob McDonnell and Martin O'Malley announced plans to spend $10 billion to build a new freeway across the Potomac River in order to accommodate the Metro riders, but added that funding is too scarce to contribute more to speed up the Metro repairs. "We think this is the best way to use our state transportation dollars to help commuters," said Virginia Secretary of Transportation Sean Proaughton.

In addition, MARC will add new service on the Brunswick Line. CSX announced that it would allow MARC to run more trains and actually tell its dispatchers to give priority to passenger trains on the line, as opposed to previous times when they claimed to have done so but dispatchers did not actually follow through.

Metro is launching a new public relations campaign around the closure, called "Red Line: Deal With It." Customers will see construction walls at Red Line station entrances with slogans like, "8 Months Isn't So Bad, Is It?" and "No More Delays. No More Red Line."

Organizers of large national events are also being informed. A national tea party convention has already modified its website to inform attendees driving to the region from points north on I-95 to take the Beltway to Vienna instead of driving to Glenmont or using any other station.

Metro will suspend all work on other lines, including Silver Line construction, in order to complete the work in 8 months. "We hope that by the time the Red Line reopens, we'll only have to single-track twice a month," said WMATA CEO Richard Snarles.

Dessel said Metro is working with Mayor Gray to hire thousands of unemployed District residents to help with the 24-hour repairs. The program is part of a new employment program called "One City, One Line."

A social media component of the program, called "Metro Fast Forward," will equip track workers with helmet video cameras and editing software so that they can produce videos of the work in real time.

This concept has actually been in the works for over a year. Previous WMATA spokesperson Lisa Dystone planned not to tell riders about the closure, arguing that nobody would notice. However, Michael Perkins noticed an obscure footnote in a WMATA Board presentation and encouraged officials to mount a larger campaign to inform riders.

Some have already criticized Metro's plan. The critical blog DeCrapify DC Metro said 8 months is far longer than needed to finish the work. Another blog and popular Twitter account, WTF WMATA, wrote that customers deserve better treatment and vowed to hold Metro accountable.

How will you adjust to the Red Line closing? Let us know in the comments.

Who are the unemployed?

Tackling crisis-level unemployment is one of Mayor Gray's top priorities. Yet the DC government appears to have no profile of the unemployed in DC and their barriers to employment.

Even the number of unemployed by ward that DC provides each month is deeply flawed. Each month, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics samples DC residents and reports unemployment for DC. The DC Office of Labor Market Research then allocates that number to each ward based on out-of-date ratios from the last census. Ben Orr of Brookings has shown that the resulting numbers of jobless by ward are sometimes wildly inaccurate.

The government also has no data on the reasons why the jobless don't have a job. This lack of data creates a vacuum that is then filled with assumptions and stereotypes about the obstacles faced by jobless residents.

Advocates for cutting off Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) benefits after 5 years, as the corresponding federal program does, say that dependency on TANF is the cause of unemployment. Those who support tax incentives for developers say that lack of jobs is to blame. Smart growth advocates point to lack of affordable transit access to most jobs. Training providers say that the problem is a mismatch between workers' skills and available jobs.

Who is right? What policies should we invest in to address unemployment? We don't know because we lack basic data about the unemployed.

Investment in a survey of unemployed DC residents by a research company on an annual basis would cost a fraction of what these policies cost, and would help ensure we are actually targeting the true causes of unemployment.

Who are the training providers and are they effective?

The District has no data on the effectiveness of training providers across the city. In fact, the director of one training provider recently told me that the Department of Employment Services (DOES) actually has no comprehensive list of training providers at all.

The training providers, known as Workforce Development Organizations, provide a range of services from soft skills training and hard skills training to case management of jobless clients. What percentage of their clients get a job? More importantly, what percentage of their clients are still employed a year or two later? No one knows.

The DC Department of Employment Services (DOES) should require such reporting by recipients of government funding. This data could presumably be verified using payroll tax data.

Of course, no one knows the extent to which we should even invest in job training because we have no definitive profile of the obstacles to employment faced by jobless residents.

What development projects have received incentives, and have they been worth it?

The CFO's office does not track economic impact of development projects that receive incentives. In fact, there appears to be no comprehensive list in existence of companies that have received tax incentives for development projects over the past 5-10 years.

The District has provided billions of dollars in tax abatements and TIF financing to developers over the past decade. The rationale of proponents is that these investments bring a return to the District in the form of corporate property taxes, sales taxes and jobs for DC residents. If proponents of what some call corporate welfare are so sure that these returns are real, then why not track and report them to bolster their case?

All this data should exist in the Office of Tax and Revenue's (OTR) integrated tax system. OTR says that sales taxes cannot be tracked by address when retailers have multiple DC locations. However, recipients of incentives could simply be required to report such data by address as a condition of receiving incentives.

Hotels under construction currently in the District are receiving over $500 million of tax incentives in total. While some are questioning whether we will really see that money in higher tax revenues, the reality is we will never know.

It's difficult to solve problems when you don't know their causes or whether previous attempted solutions worked. When such information is lacking, then dogma and stereotyping supplants reasonable, data-driven policy discussions.

Why have companies like MCI, Nextel, Corporate Executive Board, and the Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group left the District? According to Ein, the culprits are corporate tax rates and the high cost of real estate.

By that logic, Omaha and Tulsa should be the nation's high-tech hotspots.

I co-founded a tech company in the District in 2000 that now has 60 employees and is headquartered in Tysons Corner. We moved there despite very high rents for two reasons. First, my partners who live in northern Virginia would have far longer commutes into the District than I would have to Tysons. Second, Tysons Corner is where the potential software partners and vendors are—it's where the action is.

Slashing the corporate tax rates in the District would benefit owners of DC businesses like Ein. It would do little to attract outside businesses and even less to help the unemployed, who are already threatened by cuts in social services by the cash-strapped city government.

Technology hubs form where there is a large source of very talented developers, capital and a large number of similar technology companies that serve as rivals or partners. According to Michael Porter, who wrote the definitive text on industry hubs or clusters, these are factors that contribute to clusters in any industry.

Tax rates, according to Porter, are not relevant to the rise of tech hubs. If they were, the largest enterprise software firm on the planet (SAP) probably wouldn't be in Germany, and the largest tech hub in the world (Silicon Valley) wouldn't be in the state that has the second-highest business tax rates in the US.

Ein claims that Washington has "been a place for people to start companies that want to tap into the deep population of one of the most well-educated, computer-savvy young workforces anywhere in the nation". But Northern Virginia's tech cluster didn't just happen; firms located there to take advantage of federal government contracts.

Non-government software firms have been only a knock-on effect, or consequence, of the government contracting hub. My company, which sells software to phone companies, is such a knock-on effect, benefiting as we do from the local telecom sector hub that arose when telecom was heavily regulated by the government.

Washington is quite unlike Silicon Valley, Austin, or New York City with their legions of talented software developers. There is no leading computer science department in a Washington-area university, and there is no rivalry amongst local firms for the best developers as exists between Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

The number of tech companies founded in DC, to which Ein points as evidence of our lost potential, is actually not high for a city our size. One of the largest software companies in the world, Compuware, is based in Detroit, and no one is looking to the Motor City as the next Silicon Valley.

DC's unemployed also aren't jobless due to a lack of jobs. They simply lack the skills that even the bulk of existing jobs demand. More than 40% of jobs in DC require a college degree, while nationally only 20-22% of jobs require a college degree. Yet 36% of DC residents are functionally illiterate.

DC lacks a manufacturing base and is a hub for public policy, non-profit and legal sectors that require college or advanced degrees. We need to solve the root problem and not waste our time attracting more employers that require higher education.

Mayor Gray thinks job training will close this skills mismatch. That sounds great, but one wonders what cluster will form in the District that can provide 10,000 jobs for which functionally illiterate residents can train in a year or less. Gray hasn't delved into such details, but it's these details that must be worked out if job training in the District is to avoid being a multimillion dollar boondoggle.

Is there an industry that could employ the 30% of Ward 8 that is unemployed, yet find a home in a knowledge-based economy? The answer is key to the city's ability to wash the moral stain of 30% of its children living in poverty.

There is a real debate about the effectiveness of public investment in job training. The debate generally proceeds as follows.

Training Doesn't Work: The millions that have been spent on training in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as was shown by the Labor Department and the NY Times, have demonstrated zero results. It makes us feel better, but the data shows that recipients of publicly subsidized training end up pretty much like they did before the training.

Training Works: This criticism is true in general. Many, perhaps most, training programs have been poorly executed. But studies, such as a recent study from Public/Private Ventures, have shown that training programs that target high-demand jobs in a city's growth sectors do work.

Training Doesn't Work: Not if the jobs simply aren't there. Training doesn't create jobs.

Training Works: No, but training does close the mismatch between the skills required by high-demand jobs and the skills of the unemployed. And employers in high-growth fields report that they are having trouble filling lots of positions due to precisely this mismatch.

Furthermore, if we can create a workforce whose skills do match the needs of high-growth fields, employers will be attracted to DC and will create more jobs. So, training can create jobs in the long term if it targets high-demand jobs that employers have difficultly filling.

Training Doesn't Work: This sounds great. But the mismatch between the skills of most unemployed and the needs of the labor market, particularly in DC, is sadly too great for training to bridge.

More than 40% of jobs in DC require a college degree, while nationally only 20-22% of jobs require a college degree. Yet 36% of DC residents are functionally illiterate.

Approximately 18,000 TANF recipients have less than a high school credential and almost 50% are reading below 7th grade. What training does Councilmember Barry expect will match these 18,000 TANF recipients with the jobs that exist in DC?

What do you think? Can job training work? Is the skills mismatch sadly too great to bridge? What implications do these considerations have for Gray's job training plans?

Gray's Jobs Summit, which will be chaired by Barbara Lang, president of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce, and Josyln Williams, head of the Metropolitan Council of the AFL-CIO, should address these difficult questions head on.