Bush gets into training for the election stakes

THE Toyota plant in Fremont, California, is a good example of why George Bush reversed course on US job training and proposed a new dollars 10bn programme. Several years ago, in another incarnation, the Fremont factory was a failing General Motors Chevrolet car plant that was scheduled for closure. The job losses from this shutdown and related business failures would have devastated the community.

The plant was restarted, however, as a GM-Toyota joint venture, and the results have been startling. Using the same physical plant and workforce and adding very little new technology, the new owners fashioned the plant into one that quickly achieved quality and productivity levels comparable with those of Toyota plants in Tokyo. The difference was worker training and vastly improved organisation.

Last week, in the depressed city of Ansonia, Connecticut, a once prosperous manufacturing centre that has been savaged by defence spending cuts, President Bush promised to recreate the Fremont success on a national scale.

'We cannot afford to waste the talent of one single worker,' he told the Ansonia defence workers, who were once solidly Republican and solidly pro- Bush. It was a theme borrowed directly from his Democratic opponent, Governor Bill Clinton, who has based his presidential campaign on a message of investing in people. The fact that Mr Bush was forced to reverse course and jump on board the federal job-training bandwagon says much about the current state of the US economy and about voter sentiment.

One of the depressing features of this on-again, off-again US recession is a lack of the solid job creation that has been typical in previous economic recoveries. Most industries have been cutting back to meet spending and profit targets, not expanding their production and employment bases. The result has been mounting unemployment and an intense political debate over the nature and future course of US job creation. Better education and more job training have emerged as dominant issues.

There is little question that the US has fallen behind in these areas, particularly in job training. The typical US worker belongs to the 'less-educated' group of non-college-bound workers, who comprise 75 per cent of the US workforce, and receives little or no training throughout their working lives. This occurs even though US companies spend an estimated dollars 10bn annually on training employees. Most of that is spent on training managers, not front-line workers. The US Bureau of Labour Statistics estimates that only one in 13 US workers has ever had any job retraining. One startling result is that German and Japanese companies are unable to use their most up- to-date technology in their US plants.

In a ground-breaking report entitled America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages, two highly respected officials lay much of the blame on the antiquated system of management that still permeates US business life. Former labour secretaries Bill Brock, a Republican, and Ray Marshall, a Democrat, found that most US businesses continue to pursue a low-skill approach to production, developed in the early 20th century by Frederick Taylor. According to the Taylor school of management, all the intelligence and initiative in production should be in the hands of managers.

Workers should be limited to a small number of simplified activities, repeated throughout each working day, week and year. Mr Taylor wrote that the full potential of his system would not be realised until 'all of the machines are run by men who are of smaller caliber and attainments and are therefore cheaper than those required under the old craft system'.

In reflecting on this system, Mr Marshall describes it as 'designed by geniuses to be operated by morons'. The widespread adoption of the Taylor approach is cited as one reason why the low end of the US education system meets only minimal standards.

Of course not everyone agrees with this line of thinking. But the dramatic decline in wages during the Eighties of non-college-bound US workers - 9.9 per cent from 1979 to 1989 - has fuelled demands for more and better worker education. Germany's rigorous apprenticeship programmes and Japan's system of lifetime learning are held up as models. It is doubtful that one presidential campaign, or even one four- year presidential term, will produce similar systems in the US. However, it appears that the die has now been cast in the pursuit of a new high-skill, high-wage strategy for the American workforce. The big unanswered question is how to pay for it.