Workforce development policy in the USA has long been tightly bound up with debates over how the government should respond to the dual problems of poverty and inequality of opportunity. Publicly funded workforce development programs have consistently failed in their mission to provide welfare recipients and unemployed workers with the skills and opportunities to move into well‐paying jobs. In the mid‐1990s, the Clinton‐era “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act” introduced strict time limits on welfare benefits and increased work requirements, which increased the numbers and visibility of women among the working poor. Mary Gatta and Kevin McCabe tackle the broad set of challenges these trends raise for policy makers, based on a rather particular case study of an online learning program targeted at working poor single mothers that the US Department of Labor piloted in New Jersey.
Not Just Getting By covers a lot of ground for such a slim volume, moving from an expansive discussion of past research on such diverse topics as welfare policy and low wage labor markets to a few rather particular examples of what a reformed workforce development system might look like in practice. The main empirical contribution of this book is to describe and evaluate the New Jersey online learning pilot program, which the authors view as a best practice model of targeted and flexible workforce development. The program gave 128 working poor single mothers computers, internet access, and skills training courses for a year. Gatta gives it glowing reviews, based on interviews with the participants that show improved self‐esteem and greater computer literacy; as well as high retention rates (92 per cent) and evidence of positive wage gains.
The book then changes course somewhat, moving to a discussion of how one might successfully improve communication and responsiveness in the bureaucracies involved in training and placement. Kevin McCabe, the former New Jersey Commissioner of Labor and Workforce Development, reflects on his experiences overseeing the reorganization of New Jersey workforce services. The volume then concludes with the transcript of a discussion between Gatta and McCabe on the role of collaborations between researchers and policy makers in transforming workforce development.
The book is strongest in providing a thorough discussion of how working poor single mothers are systematically disadvantaged by workforce development policy due to unique work and family commitments, complemented by a concrete example of a program that addresses some of these challenges. Gatta argues for a workforce development agenda grounded in careful research on the “life needs” of the workers who use the programs, as well as the needs of businesses in the community who will be hiring them. This covers well‐traveled ground: researchers and progressive policy makers in the USA have long argued that workforce development lacks adequate resources, does a poor job of integrating the provision of different services, and tends to be more focused on job placement than skill development or lifelong learning. Indeed, as Gatta points out, the Workforce Investment Act was premised on remedying some of these problems. Translating these good intentions into real transformation in the organizations that deliver services and the programs themselves has been a more persistent challenge. The book thus provides a nice snapshot of a few areas where tangible improvements can be made within a system that has historically been difficult to change, along with a couple of “success cases” that suggest where concrete improvements in existing policy might make a difference for the people they are intended to serve.
Gatta and McCabe are less convincing in their attempt to tie together the different pieces of the book into a coherent analysis of how policy makers should move, in the words of their title, into “the new era of flexible workforce development”. Gatta raises a number of big issues in the first three chapters that do not clearly connect with her analysis of the online learning program. She describes ideal workforce development policy as promoting a “flexible and customized system that addresses the lifelong learning and skills and training needs of existing and potential workers in concert with the skills demanded by employers” (p. 5). However, the New Jersey program appears to have been more narrowly focused on overcoming the more specific problem of scheduling classroom‐focused training around the busy lives of working mothers. The relatively modest gains of the program are rather disappointing when measured up against Gatta's broader vision for a transformed system, and this disconnect is never critically reflected upon.
A more basic question is whether more programs like the New Jersey online learning program can actually help make progress in addressing the problems of low pay, lack of advancement opportunities, and weak social supports that plague the working poor in the USA. Gatta points out that most job growth in the USA has been in service sector jobs and other forms of low wage work that make it difficult to acquire further training or make wage gains. She describes the tension between policies that focus on the skills and opportunities of the individual worker vs those that try to address outcomes like pay, working conditions, and health care, through, for example, strengthening collective bargaining. While she argues that policy should ideally do both, her analysis focuses on a program that is self‐consciously targeted at boosting individual opportunity rather than overcoming these more structural obstacles to alleviating poverty.
Taken as a whole, Gatta and McCabe provide a succinct and readable account of the state of the art in US workforce development policy. It should be particularly useful reading for Europeans interested in an overview of contemporary=debates in welfare to work and training policy in the USA. This is a timely issue as European governments begin to debate overhauling their own welfare systems and as the rhetoric of policy reform shifts from creating jobs toward fostering individual responsibility. While the authors do not provide a clear model for how to fix a dysfunctional system, they provide a road map of incremental changes that take seriously the concerns of working poor single mothers who are often cut off from opportunities within that system.
