The Job Training Charade (Collection on Technology and Work) - Softcover

Lafer, Gordon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801489512 ISBN 13: 9780801489518

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Job training has long been promoted as a central policy response to poverty and unemployment. Both Democrats and Republicans have trumpeted training as the answer to everything from welfare to NAFTA. The Job Training Charade provides a comprehensive critique showing that training has been a near-total failure. Even more dramatically, the book shows how politicians have ignored repeated reports of the program’s failure, and have kept funding a policy they know cannot work. Gordon Lafer first examines the economic assumptions and track record of training policy. He goes on to provide a political analysis of why job training has remained so popular despite widespread evidence of its economic failure. The author concludes that job training functions less as an economic prescription aimed at solving poverty than as a political strategy aimed at managing the popular response to economic distress. The Job Training Charade is a landmark book showing how a bipartisan consensus may coalesce behind a phantom policy that serves political needs while ignoring economic realities.

About this title

About the Author

Gordon Lafer is Associate Professor at the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801489512
• ISBN 13: 9780801489518
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320