Posted on 09/13/2011 5:11:44 AM PDT by markomalley
Last Thursday, President Obama proposed new federal jobs and job-training programs for youth and the long-term unemployed. The federal government has experimented with these programs for almost a half century. The record is one of failure and scandal.
In 1962, Congress passed the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) to provide training for workers who lost their jobs due to automation or other technological developments. Two years later, the General Accounting Office (GAO) discovered that any trainee in this program who held a job for a single day was counted as "permanently employed"—a statistical charade by the Department of Labor to camouflage its lack of results. A decade after MDTA's inception, GAO reported that it was failing to teach valuable job skills or place trainees in private jobs and was marred by an "overriding concern with filling available slots for a particular program," regardless of what trainees actually needed.
Congress responded in 1973 by enacting the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). The preface to the new law noted that "it has been impossible to develop rational priorities" in job training. So instead of setting priorities, CETA spent vastly more money, especially on job creation. Notorious examples reported in the press in those years included paying to build an artificial rock for rock climbers, providing nude sculpture classes (where, as the Pharos-Tribune of Logansport, Ind., explained, "aspiring artists pawed each others bodies to recognize that they had 'both male and female characteristics'"), and conducting door-to-door food-stamp recruiting campaigns.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Huh. I always thought CETA was a Carter program.
One radio host bemoans that many of the corrupt, useless, incompetent, and otherwise ill-suited local and state work..., er, employees, and pols, got their start in Jimmy Carter's CETA, and never left the government teat.
The PRIMARY “jobs training program” has been a miserable failure!
Because the PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM refuses to focus on a basic foundation on which to build marketable skills.
It prefers to indoctrinate a liberal social and political agenda.
YUP
I ‘participated’ in the CETA program during the Carter years.
Useless.
I got paid about a dollar or so less than my co-workers, who did the same job. Every now and then, we were required to go to ‘job training’ seminars - and made to do the most ridiculous crap, like ‘act out’ a job interview with each other and write up fake resumes. (we were high school kids with NO work history)
I remember feeling how stupid it all was and that I’d be better off going out and finding a job MYSELF instead of having the mafia government place me and taking a portion of my earnings for their service.
Another note, We had 2 of us CETA guys and there were 2 ‘regulars’. We CETA guys knew it was a temp job and got treated like 3rd class citizens so we just didn’t care. It made us lazy and to work harder at getting OUT of work.
I got in on the ceta program as the last class before reagan did away with it....I took the education they offered and turned it into a career...but, there were the “professional” ceta students, who had taken many diffent courses, just to get the pay that went along with it....
If you really want to get rid of teenage unemployment, get rid of the Minimum Wage Laws, both federal and state. Let the inexperienced youth get a job at a lower wage, gain some experience, learn the job, and advance upward. That’s hard to do when you’re not worth the minimum wage in the first place and you have a law that prevents you from getting any experience.
The PRIMARY “jobs training program” has been a miserable failure!
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DC used to run (probably still does) ‘job training programs’ for asphalt workers and I was working for a company in Virginia that was associated with it.
We would take the graduates, hire them, receive some kind of tax break. I doubt in the 5 years or so we were affiliated with them that 10 ‘asphalt school graduates’ hooked on with full employment.
“School” consisted of the ‘students’ patching potholes in the District, with ‘Instructors’.
They ‘filled’ the students heads with visions of $20.00 per hour jobs, when in reality $10 was considered good pay, then they expected to get a full weeks pay if they showed up for work on Monday - much like the Union halls expect if you have to dip into their ranks for operators or such.
Oh yes, the school ‘forgot’ to mention that Asphalt work isn’t a 9-5 job with holidays etc. When the ‘graduates’ were expected to ‘stay for the duration’, they would balk.
The company I worked for might have ‘made out’ with this deal but to the Superintendents/Foremen/Laborers, 98% of the ‘grads’ were failures.
The ‘grads’ had some sort of thought that ‘asphalt work’ was actually along the lines of the city/state/county etc work force - then again you couldn’t really blame them because that is what they were ‘taught’.
Hit the ‘private sector’ with that work ethic and you do not last - at least not in a Non Union situation.
I am deeply suspicious about all of this “job training” that Premier Hussein (and many others) are constantly harping on. Exactly what “job” are they “training” people for?
If it is a job with the UAW, many unemployed yewts already know how to drink beer and smoke pot, so they will fit right in with the lunch crowd at many automotive plants.
However, if your kid didn’t piss away the free public education that you no doubt paid dearly for with your taxes, then he or she should have all of the basic skills necessary to go out and successfully seek an entry level job. Most employers start people out at the very bottom of the training queue and teach them the specifics of their job as they go.
To my knowledge there is no magic “Job Skills” course out there and paying some Federal employee $100,000 to teach illiterate high school dropouts how to produce a resume is throwing good money after bad. “Jobs Training” is yet another liberal code word that has cost us billions over the decades and gotten us exactly nowhere.
All jobs bills initiated by Dems are nothing more than ruses to get more money and jobs for Dems and their stooges.
I believe Mark Levin once said on his radio program that when he took his position in the Reagan Administration he found cases and cases of Saul Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” which had been paid for with CETA funds. Presumably they were to be shipped to the program’s participants.
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