These programs would also have job training components, teaching individuals how to install pipes, mix and pour cement, install solar panels, and/or even advise homeowners and businesses on how to improve energy conservation.
Those job training ideas sound great, but they only work for motivated folks with some intelligence and the ability to work for many months at learning a trade. One does not create a worker competent to “install pipes”, or “mix and pour cement” in a once-over-lightly training camp. Had that been true, there would have been far more workers trained and available for the construction boom that ran through most of the Bush administration. There weren’t, and it was common knowledge that illegal immigrants were filling those jobs. Does the Obama administration intend really to train the long-term unemployed (or unemployable) citizens, or is it simply looking give a windfall to those illegals in order to harvest their future votes?
Says Reich: “people can be trained relatively quickly for these sorts of jobs, as well as many infrastructure jobs generated by the stimulus – installing new pipes for water and sewage systems, repairing and upgrading equipment, basic construction…”
By the casual hauteur that Robert Reich exhibits in this implausible scheme, it’s plain that he’s never had to perform to contract specifications on a construction job, and simply assumes that any idiot can do it – and collect union wages in the process. Or that evil white male contractors can be bullied into hiring any and all applicants, regardless of ability, and be forced to “provide the training and do the hiring”.
I have a better suggestion. Let the triumphant Obama administration hire those long-term unemployed with their obscenely hasty, wholly-owned Democratic party stimulus loot. People can be trained relatively quickly for Senatorial and Congressional staff positions – hell, even a few undersecretary positions might be set aside for those lucky pobrecitos, all they’d have to do is show up for work and parrot the Party line, that can’t be too hard.
But having my local infrastructure beset by swarms of ‘long term unemployed’ after quickie training programs? Only if the Democratic Party will take out a ten-year maintenance guarantee bond for each project involved, and pay for those bonds out of their own fundraising – not my taxes, thank you.
