Brief Description
Job training has long been promoted as a central policy response to poverty and unemployment. Both Democrats and Republicans have trumpeted training as the answer to everything from welfare to NAFTA. The Job Training Charade provides a comprehensive...
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Job training has long been promoted as a central policy response to poverty and unemployment. Both Democrats and Republicans have trumpeted training as the answer to everything from welfare to NAFTA. The Job Training Charade provides a comprehensive critique showing that training has been a near-total failure. Even more dramatically, the book shows how politicians have ignored repeated reports of the program s failure, and have kept funding a policy they know cannot work.
Gordon Lafer first examines the economic assumptions and track record of training policy. He goes on to provide a political analysis of why job training has remained so popular despite widespread evidence of its economic failure. The author concludes that job training functions less as an economic prescription aimed at solving poverty than as a political strategy aimed at managing the popular response to economic distress.
The Job Training Charade is a landmark book showing how a bipartisan consensus may coalesce behind a phantom policy that serves political needs while ignoring economic realities."
Review Quotes
1. "In The Job Training Charade, 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. . . . Agree or not, readers will be challenged by this criticism of the underpinnings of American labor policy." Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge, Aug. 5, 2002"
2. "Lafer's intention is to provide 'the first comprehensive critique of the history, track record, and economic assumptions underlying' American job training policies since the early 1960s (page 1). His book delivers on that promise. From cover to cover, it is an unrelenting, tough, thoroughly documented, passionately argued, and uncompromising indictment of the politicians, powerful economic interests and bureaucrats he holds responsible for the policies he so roundly condemns." Michael Law, University of Waikato. Journal of Industrial Relations, Sept. 2003."
3. "In this well-written and hard-hitting critique, Lafer . . . argues that job training, as a federal policy response to poverty and unemployment, has been a near total failure. . . . This well-researched and insightful book should provoke widespread debate among scholars, politicians, policy makers, labor leaders, and employment and training professionals alike." Choice, December 2002"
4. "With the collapse of the high-tech 'new economy, ' The Job Training Charade can be useful for understanding the dangers facing newly unemployed workers and for combating ideas of the right wing?which blame poverty on the lack of skills or motivation of poor people themselves." Keith Rosenthal, International Socialist Review, November-December 2002"
5. "Lafer suggests there are other things the government could do that would help more than training. Among those are restricting the use of permanent-temp workers; stopping competition from goods made under illegal conditions in other countries; increasing the minimum wage; and capping prescription drug and health care costs." Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, March 31, 2003"
6. "The Job Training Charade could become a modern classic of economic and policy analysis. It is massive, relentless, elegantly organized and written, and comprehensive in establishing both the intellectual and the political context of the argument." James K. Galbraith, University of Texas, Austin"
7. "The Job Training Charade provides an incisive and insightful discussion of the political economy of training. Gordon Lafer explains that the notion that the government has a role to play in job creation was replaced with the far more anemic and low-budget view that government's role can be reduced to providing job training. This timely and original book is well written and will make a significant contribution to upcoming debates about welfare reform." Eileen Appelbaum, Director of the Center for Women and Work, Rutgers University"
8. "Why does job training remain the policy of choice to address poverty and underemployment even though it has an almost totally unimpressive record of accomplishment? Gordon Lafer answers this question with original, sophisticated research and argument. The Job Training Charade is a must-read for anyone interested in the links between politics, ideology and public policy." Adolph Reed, Jr., New School for Social Research"
