Reply #8: A little more of the article but doesn't do it justice..please try to link

[KoKo]

What had started as an escape from a unionized, often militant work force took on a second function. The outsourcing of heavy maintenance became a means for the airlines to cut costs, and nearly every major airline gradually moved that way. In an earlier era, before layoffs and outsourcing were acceptable options, United might have weathered the crisis by taking in work from other airlines, as it had once done with America West. But layoffs and outsourcing were now standard practice, and rather than pursue economies of scale, United sought heavy maintenance at the lowest immediate cost. As work shifted away from Indianapolis, the layoffs multiplied.

The 60 mechanics gathered at the Days Inn that January evening were in the fourth wave to lose their jobs, bringing the total to 1,200. The recycling of former mechanics into new lines of work was now in full swing, and Mr. Nunnally, when he had finished speaking about the importance of filing promptly for unemployment benefits, introduced Tori E. Bucko. She turned out to be the main speaker, the chief of the boot camp that the mechanics were being encouraged to enter.

Given her responsibilities, Ms. Bucko was surprisingly young — only 30. But as the manager of a federally subsidized program for processing laid-off airline workers in Indianapolis, she would soon play a more important role in the lives of many of the mechanics than Mr. Nunnally or the union they were leaving behind.

The program that Ms. Bucko directed was sponsored by the Indianapolis Private Industry Council, a coalition of companies, unions, government agencies and civic groups. Virtually all of the funding comes from Washington, which sends less than $7 billion a year to the states to recycle laid-off workers back into jobs. In Indiana's case, the state distributes its share of the federal money to 16 regional work-force investment boards. The Indianapolis Private Industry Council is one of these boards, and the council in turn paid a private, nonprofit company, Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, to do the actual work.

Goodwill employed Ms. Bucko as the manager in charge of the recycling program for laid-off airline workers in Marion County, whose boundaries encompass the city of Indianapolis. Goodwill also recycled men and women laid off in other industries in Marion County, recruiting them as they signed up for unemployment benefits at state-run offices. But in the winter of 2003, outcast airline employees, two-thirds of them United's mechanics, were still getting special attention in what was called the AIR Project, the short name for Airline Industry Re-careerment Project, a title that suggests just how awkward and difficult recycling is.

Ms. Bucko's task, in this initial presentation at the Days Inn, was to encourage the 60 mechanics to take the next step. There would be no help for them if they failed to show up at the AIR Project's center, in an industrial park not far from the airport. There, they would be asked to fill out a detailed enrollment application and submit to a series of workshops and evaluations.

What Ms. Bucko did not mention was the pressure on her employer, Goodwill Industries, and on herself, to meet the employment goals specified in the federal grant — to get most of the mechanics re-employed at 90 percent of their previous wage. Meeting this goal was a condition for getting more federal money once the initial grant expired. In the end, Goodwill managed to put together enough money to string out the AIR Project for nearly four years. But the employment goals were not met. They could not be met; they were too optimistic, mythically optimistic.

Ms. Bucko knew that as she struggled to meet the standard. So did Carolyn Brown, vice president of the Indianapolis Private Industry Council, the agency that picked Goodwill Industries to run the project. "When large numbers of people are laid off, there just isn't any occupational cluster that is waiting out there to receive them," Ms. Brown said.

Job training, as a result, became a channeling process, channeling the unemployed into the unfilled jobs that do exist, with a veneer of training along the way. Yet job training is central to employment policy. It has been since 1982, when Congress passed the Job Training Partnership Act at the urging of President Ronald Reagan. President Bill Clinton took job training even further, making it available to higher-income workers — including the aircraft mechanics in Indianapolis.

Saying that the country should solve the skills shortage through education and training became 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.

But training for what? The reality, as the aircraft mechanics discovered, is painfully different from the reigning wisdom. Rather than having a shortage of skills, millions of American workers have more skills than their jobs require. That is particularly true of college-educated people, who make up 30 percent of the population today, up from 10 percent in the 1960's. They often find themselves working in sales or as office administrators, or taking jobs in hotels and restaurants, or becoming carpenters, flight attendants and word processors.