NAFTA's Impact on NC Part 2
Remedy misses mark Part 2: Retraining programs fall short By KARIN RIVES AND JOSEPH NEFF, Staff Writers
Raleigh News and Observer, Monday, August 19, 2002
THE SERIES
Part 1: Globalization of trade creates a lost generation of Tar Heel workers.
Tomorrow: Political and business leaders awaken slowly to workers' pain.
Tear down trade barriers and export low-paying factory jobs to countries that can better use them. Then train Americans for new and better opportunities that arrive with an expanding global economy. In many North Carolina factory towns, this national economic strategy sounds more like a cruel joke.
Worker-retraining programs have long been the primary remedy for trade-related layoffs, but a quick look at the numbers shows they often miss their target. To begin with, few workers enroll in the programs. Only one-fifth -- or 10,588 of the approximately 49,000 North Carolinians displaced by trade-related layoffs since 1998, when the state began keeping count -- had entered training as of early this year. (In reality, many more workers who were not included in the official statistics were caught in job cuts that occurred because of foreign competition or trade.)
Of the 10,000-plus workers who decided to return to the classroom, 15 percent did not complete their courses, records from the state Employment Security Commission show. Another study found that less than one-quarter of those who completed retraining programs landed the kind of jobs they trained for. Many of those who do enroll are older workers with limited education, making them difficult prospects for retraining. Thirteen percent did not finish high school, and 60 percent have a diploma but went no further. Forty-four percent are over the age of 45.
Rather than bringing new opportunities, globalization has left many of those workers -- two-thirds of whom are women -- stuck in unemployment, underemployment or menial jobs. "You tell me what you can do with a 50-year-old textile worker with an eighth-grade education who makes $9 an hour, has four weeks' vacation and good benefits," said Harris Raynor, the Atlanta-based regional director for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees.
"When you pull the rug out from under him, what alternative does he have? Where are all the jobs that these people can move into? They're going to the guy who gives you the cart and tells you, 'Hello, and welcome to Wal-Mart.' " So far, Evelyn Blow, 47, hasn't even been able to secure a spot at Wal-Mart.
After sewing clothes in Beaufort County factories since she dropped out of high school at 16, she lost her job at Hampton Industries in Washington nearly two years ago. But returning to the classroom proved difficult. Blow was forced to quit without her high school equivalency diploma when her tuition benefits expired after six months. Today, she's hunting for a job in a county with a 9 percent unemployment rate, calling on every plant and retail store she can think of. They all tell her to come back with a high school diploma, or when the economy picks up. In the meantime, Blow is collecting what's left of her unemployment insurance and cutting back on spending, thankful that her husband, a trucker, still has a job. "I try not to sit around and dwell on it," Blow said. "I know the Lord is going to make a way for me."
She's pleased that her two daughters, both of whom did stints in local factories, ended up choosing different careers. Regina, 29, is doing well as a beauty shop owner in Washington. Rhoda, 27, has moved to Charlotte where she works for a real estate agency. Only John Jr., the couple's 21-year-old son, is unemployed and looking for work. Throughout the state, understaffed state agencies and overburdened community colleges have the nearly impossible task of steering thousands of workers into a job market that has little use for middle-age, under-educated, former factory employees.
Diminishing returns
Some college officials have adjusted by lowering their expectations. "If they can stay in the area with their family, even if they're not successful finding a job in the field that they trained in, I still consider it a success," said Clay Carter, who coordinates programs for trade-affected workers at Beaufort Community College. Carter and others involved in retraining efforts say they seek to encourage displaced workers to try sectors that are hiring, such as health care. Still, many workers spend up to two years in school at taxpayers' expense training for jobs that are scarce where they live.
For example, more than 800 of the 10,000-plus North Carolina workers in retraining programs since 1998 have enrolled in classes on information systems, software programming or other computer-related jobs, even though few of the state's small towns and rural areas have such businesses. Structural problems hamper the training programs' effectiveness as well. Most associate degrees at community colleges require two years of study, but the federal government provides only 18 months of unemployment and tuition benefits to most trade-affected workers. As a result, some participants drop out a few months short of completion because they can no longer afford to stay in school.
New federal legislation approved this month would extend such benefits six more months, but only to workers who are in remedial training to improve their English skills or to earn a high school diploma. Michael Center, 51, a former furniture factory worker in Hickory, received his last government check in June and worries that he might have to drop his computer-networking studies just one semester shy of graduation. A straight-A student, Center is applying for any job he can think of in a region where unemployment has more than quadrupled in the past two years.
'Trying everything'
"I'm trying everything -- bartending, security guard jobs, heat and air conditioning -- and nobody wants to even talk to me," Center said. "It's a waste of government money to get me this close and not let me get my degree. One more semester and that could pretty well get me where I need to be." If he does manage to graduate, his prospects of finding a job in his new field are uncertain. Computer positions in Catawba County are scarce, and Center hasn't ruled out moving out of state.
A 2001 audit by the U.S. Department of Labor found that only 22 percent of workers nationwide who participated in the trade-assistance programs landed jobs they had trained for; 38 percent ended up in jobs that either paid considerably less than they earned before their layoff or that didn't provide full-time employment, and 28 percent had not found work when the retraining program ended. The audit found that the average annual earnings of workers who experienced trade-related layoffs dropped 27 percent, from $23,332 to $17,100. North Carolina's trade-affected workers fared somewhat better: Within a year of exiting a retraining program, they had jobs that paid 12 percent less than they earned before the layoff.
But the North Carolina statistics hide the fact that many workers came from some of the lowest-paying manufacturing jobs in the United States -- textile and apparel production -- and that a 12 percent drop in income could mean they're now earning bottom wages. Diane Clark, who worked with Blow at Hampton Industries in Washington, was among those who decided against retraining. "I thought about going back to school, but I had been at that plant for 27 years," said Clark, 48. "It would have been hard."
After nine months of unemployment, she's finally eking out a living cleaning offices at night at the huge PCS Phosphate mine in Aurora. Her pay recently rose from $6 to $6.35 an hour, which means she takes home $13,208 a year, about $40 a week less than she did sewing sleeves. "I get kind of tired sometimes," Clark said one afternoon before climbing into her 1989 Cadillac for the seven-mile drive to work. "Those mining guys come in with them big boots. There's nothing but dirt."
Clark makes just enough to pay her bills and maintain her mobile home near Aurora, a small town 20 miles east of Washington where she has lived all her life. She has stopped eating out and has put off buying a new sewing machine, instead using an old one to supplement her income. The saving grace is her late husband's health insurance, which covers her cholesterol and blood pressure medicines.
She is concerned, not so much for herself but for the the future of her community. She can't help but notice how many young people are moving away to take jobs in Raleigh, Greensboro or Atlanta, or up North. "I look around my church, and I see it," she said. "The ones who go to college, they keep right on going the other way, and they don't come back. With the factory jobs, at least they had a chance. But now most factories are gone, so there's nothing for them here."
On to part 3 of NAFTA's Impact on NC
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