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:: Bury what you know

Louis Uchitelle's Disposable American
By David Hoppe

In his new book, The Disposable American , Louis Uchitelle tells the wrenching story of what's happened to the skilled workers who once made this city's United Airlines maintenance center hum. These were professionals able to literally take a giant airliner apart and put it back together again. They worked well and they worked fast. The Indianapolis center had a world class reputation for effectiveness and efficiency. Its employees were so good at what they did other airlines started bringing their planes here for service.

A labor-management confrontation put an end to all that. According to Uchitelle, militant union members overplayed their hand and created an opening for management to begin farming out maintenance work to lower cost centers in other parts of the country. Now the United maintenance center in Indianapolis is history.

But the dark heart at the center of Uchitelle's story has to do with what's happened to the United mechanics since they were let go. It's a story that's playing itself out again and again in this economy. Skilled workers who were making as much as $31.00 an hour are finding it hard to make half that today.

That's bad enough, but even more chilling is Uchitelle's finding that the programs intended to retrain these workers are no answer. Job training, Uchitelle points out, has been central to employment policy since at least 1982, when President Reagan signed the Job Training Partnership Act. Bill Clinton expanded the act to include higher-income workers like the Indianapolis aircraft mechanics.

Uchitelle writes that education and training have become "part of nearly every politician's stump speech, an innocuous way to address the politics of unemployment without strengthening either the bargaining leverage of workers or the federal government's role in bolstering labor markets."

So let's say you've worked at developing a skill-set over the course of, say, 15 or 20 years. You're making good money and planning for the future. Then you find out that your company's been bought, or that workers in India do what you do for a quarter of the cost, or that you're being downsized. No problem: enroll in a retraining program and you'll be back on your feet in no time. Right?

The trouble is that American workers already have more skills than most jobs require. What's more, since December 2000 the Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that, on average, there have been 2.6 job seekers for every job opening - and that ratio would be even higher if it included the millions of people who have simply given up on looking for work.

But not only is the demand for jobs greater than the supply, Uchitelle finds that, contrary to what politicians would have us believe, most unfilled jobs pay low wages. From spring of 2003 to spring of 2004, 55 percent of hiring in this country was at wages of $13.25 an hour or less: jobs like hotel and restaurant workers, health care employees and temps. According to the Department of Labor, seven of the 10 occupations expected to grow fastest from 2002 through 2012 pay less than $13.25 an hour. These jobs include retail sales clerks, customer service representatives, food service workers, cashiers, janitors, nurse's aides and hospital orderlies.

More than 45 percent of the workers in America earned less than $13.25 an hour in 2004.

If you think getting a college degree will somehow inoculate you from these grim statistics, the answer is: well, maybe. College-educated people comprise 30 percent of the population today, compared to 10 percent in the 1960s. While the number of jobs requiring a bachelor's degree has been growing, the number of graduates has been growing even faster. Uchitelle quotes Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard: "The average college graduate is doing very well. But on the margin, college graduates appear to be more vulnerable than in the past."

Eight hundred airline mechanics in Indianapolis went through a retraining program. By the spring of 2004 only 185 were working again. Of those, most were earning $14 to $20 an hour as heating and air-conditioning repairmen, auto mechanics, computer maintenance workers and freight train conductors. Many chose to take a two-week driver training course and become tractor-trailer drivers. The former head of the airline mechanics' union local is washing windows.

Uchitelle describes the retraining process this way: "The process was like a funnel: wide at one end, where all the laid-off workers go in, and narrow at the other, where a limited number gradually emerge into retraining and, if they are lucky, new jobs at decent pay." He quotes Mark A. Crouch, an Indiana University professor of Labor Studies, who calls the recycling of laid-off workers "a burial program."

The trouble with this analogy is that these workers are still walking among us. At the moment we have a mind-numbing system that makes it easy for us to hold the unemployed responsible for their hardship - that's the beauty of retraining. If these folks would just face reality, pretend they're 20 years-old again and start over at a lower wage, we could forget about them and the circumstances that killed their livelihoods. Until, that is, we're next.

Louis Uchitelle's Book, The Disposable American is published by Knopf. Big Hat Books is bringing him to Indianapolis on April 20. For the time and location of his appearance here, go to www.bighatbooks.com .