A Rationale For A Strong Employment and Training System

The American employment and training system has become increasingly marginalized in public policy discourse and we currently lack a convincing narrative to justify public investment in the job training system. The irony of this is that on a substantive level the case remains quite strong. For example, the number of adults who are trapped in low wage sector of the job market has remained disturbingly stable and remedying this is certainly a worthy goal for the system. In this paper I address a different concern: the increased volatility and risk that many American workers face, even those higher up in the income distribution. In the past several decades, under the pressure of restructuring, the nature of job loss has changed. For example, during recessions the fraction of layoffs that are temporary, and hence followed by recall to the previous job, has declined sharply (McConnell and Tracy, 2005). In addition, the duration of unemployment spells has increased, rising to 16.2 weeks in the current decade from 11.8 weeks in the 1960s (Keltzer and Rosen, 2006). This increased volatility of the job market has taken its toll on more experienced and skilled employees. For two decades the Current Populatio