What The Story of Grandma's Ham Can Tell Us About Workforce Policies
In the story of Grandma’s ham, generations of family members dutifully cut the ham in half prior to placing it in the pot, with little consideration of its culinary rationale because, well, that’s the way we were taught to do it. As it turns out, the practice served no purpose in the present day, but was born out of necessity by a grandmother whose ham wouldn’t fit the confines of her tiny pot.
It is an allegory that offers an important lesson for an incoming Administration that will have to re-examine old mores and vestigial practices to not just repair the economic damage inflicted by the pandemic, but build a more inclusive economic recovery.
During 16 years in the U.S. Department of Labor spanning Democratic and Republican Administrations, I saw firsthand how unexamined assumptions about the historic role and rationale behind longstanding policies could undermine the impact of federal investments that were made to solve very different problems, at very different moments in time.
We now face an unemployment crisis that looks very different from others in recent history. Frontline workers (who missed out on the decade of growth that followed the Great Recession) were on shaky economic ground even before COVID-19. Economists have now characterized the pandemic as an “automation forcing event,” with estimates suggesting that as many as 40% of jobs lost may never return.
Against that backdrop, millions of workers will be challenged to retool themselves for new roles and industries. And just as today’s systems were designed in response to labor market shifts at the dawn of the Industrial Age, we will need a new era of policymaking to enable the sort of economic resilience — and mobility — that an equitable recovery requires.
Recall that today’s workforce development infrastructure traces its origins to 1933, when unemployment peaked at nearly 25% (still the highest rate recorded in U.S. history). Just a year earlier, the “bonus marchers'' — veterans from World War I who were unable to find jobs — had marched on the nation’s capital. Agriculture, which employed one-third of Americans in 1910, accounted for just one in five jobs by the early 1930s (the equivalent of nearly 20 million lost jobs today; eerily similar to job losses we witnessed earlier this year).
In June of that year, Congress passed the Wagner-Peyser Act to connect displaced workers with open jobs, ushering in a new national system of workforce development. Eleven years later, having learned the lessons of the bonus marchers and eager to transform World War II veterans into a strong middle class, Congress passed the GI Bill, which would eventually lead to the creation of Pell Grants in 1965.
Today, in the face of yet another historic crisis, it is intuitive to turn to education and training programs that have served us well in decades past. With good reason, we are now seeing proposals to grow the well of resources for displaced workers, from increasing the size of Pell Grants, to boosting appropriations for workforce programs weakened by decades of anemic appropriations. But each of these proposals presents an opportunity to not only increase funding but embrace the sort of policy creativity that enabled us to build back stronger from prior crises.
Pell, after all, was never intended to be responsive to the demands of today’s labor market. And the legislation that undergirds our system of One-stops and American Job Centers, was first codified 1998, at a time when we couldn’t have begun to imagine how technology might enable service delivery. Back then, we were still faxing and walking hard copies of legislative language between the legislative and executive branch teams. Mobile computers and apps — let alone broadband — were but figments of our imagination.
Today, the digitization of the economy provides us with near real-time insight into labor market trends, as online resources pair workers with training providers — and jobs. States like Alabama, are tapping into the potential of virtual reality to scale training to meet the demands of their economies. A multiplicity of new education and training providers, from coding bootcamps to next generation apprenticeships, help workers to develop in-demand skills through programs that are often ineligible for federal funds.
Reconciling our existing federal programs and the pace of innovation does not, of course, require that we replace existing programs altogether. There is much room for policy creativity within the contours of extent policies. In addition to expanding the pool of funding available for Pell, policymakers should consider proposals to increase flexibility to allow participation in the sort of short-term or non credit bearing programs that were pioneered by community colleges to put workers on the path to new careers.
Strengthening interagency data connectivity and transparency can promote its use by consumers who are making education and employment decisions. Such efforts should build on the success of the College Scorecard or Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Employment and Training Provider Lists to ensure that all federally funded education and workforce training programs report on the outcomes of students and participants across their programs.
It is not, after all, that historic policies — or the infrastructure they created — were inherently wrong or misguided. But, like grandma’s ham, they reflect choices made when the tools available were very different. Building back stronger demands that we acknowledge that our public education and workforce systems have been fighting today’s battles with inadequate resources, but we must also ask critical questions about how and whether their challenges are compounded by an aging policy infrastructure. We must consider how our rapid transition to a digital economy presents not just unimaginable challenges — but limitless opportunity.
Maria Flynn is a former United States Department of Labor executive under Presidents Clinton and Bush. She now leads the national nonprofit Jobs for the Future.
