Job Placement For Bureaucrats

Welfare reform advocates who rejoiced at the end of "welfare as we know it" may have celebrated too soon. While reformers were celebrating an end to the generational dependence on government that the welfare system produced, a new and even more comprehensive group of programs was waiting in the wings.

Often promoted as "workfare," workforce training and education programs have found bipartisan support as a cure to the problem of getting past welfare recipients and dislocated workers back to work. Several state and federal agencies oversee scores of workforce training and education programs. The goal of the federal government is to provide these programs in a "seamless web" which would enable participants to move easily from one program to another. Unlike the welfare system which primarily targeted the poor, workforce training and education programs have been developed to serve every citizen of every age.

The House of Representatives may institutionalize these efforts tomorrow as H.R. 1385 comes up for a floor vote. HR 1385, "The Employment, Training and Literacy Enhancement Act," will reinforce federal control over each state's workforce training system. The bill would bypass state legislatures' control of funding over their state programs and expand the scope and power of the Departments of Education and Labor. It would also intensify federal involvement in public schools through mandated "School-to-Work" reforms. H.R. 1385 is intended to eliminate the overlapping objectives of workforce training efforts and to strengthen the U.S. economy by providing workers with the skills advocates say they will need to compete in the 21st Century.

But critics of these efforts say the generational dependence created by the modern welfare system will be dwarfed by that of the workforce training programs. David Boze, a research analyst for the Evergreen Freedom Foundation who has studied Washington's workforce training system, questioned the legitimacy of many of the existing programs. "The most successful aspect of these programs is providing jobs to bureaucrats," said Boze " I don't think the general public will be too happy when they find out they will be paying for programs that not only serve people who can already get a job, but also those who already have jobs."

Washington State has been at the forefront of the movement toward Workforce Training reforms and implementations. In 1993, then Secretary of Labor Robert Reich told the Post-Intelligencer "Washington is in the Vanguard: it's very close to the model we'd like to see the rest of the states follow." When HR 1385 comes before the House of Representatives for a vote tomorrow, the former Secretary and the Clinton Administration may get what they've been waiting for.

Evergreen Freedom Foundation P.O. Box 552, Olympia, WA 98507 Phone: (360) 956-3482, Fax: (360) 352-1874 Email: effwa@effwa.org