Our Kitchen Table is Missing a Leg: Skills Training and 2020 Primaries
In her appearance on Morning Joe last week, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer talked about her road to victory in 2018. “The 2018 blueprint that I used was to show up, to actually stay focused on dinner table issues — whether it’s closing the skills gap, or cleaning up drinking water, ensuring we expand access to affordable, quality healthcare. These are the fundamentals that Americans are worried about…That blueprint…is what inspires and moves and is important to people.”
There’s evidence at every turn that voters see skills training as a kitchen table issue. In November, Army Reserve veteran Dave Degner had been quietly sitting in the audience, waiting his turn at a CNN town hall. Finally, he had the mic, and he asked presidential hopeful Joe Biden if he’d extend GI benefits so that someone like him, who’d been out of active duty for 15 years, could get skills training later in life.
Later that month, at a Sunday afternoon house party for then-candidate Kamala Harris, Steve Ovel’s hand shot into the air when she referenced her college affordability plan. “We’ve heard a lot from candidates about their plans to help people get four-year degrees,” he said. “How are you thinking about making sure people can access skills training if they want to follow a different path or need to get new skills later in life?”
While moderators of the ten and counting Democratic debates have yet to ask candidates about their plans for building a skilled workforce, it’s not surprising that when presidential hopefuls find themselves in front of actual voters, these are the kinds of questions they hear.
More than half of U.S. jobs (53%) require training beyond high school but not a four-year degree. These jobs in growing industries like healthcare, medical technology, IT and software, and advanced manufacturing — as well as tradespeople like plumbers and electricians — are the backbone of our economy and our communities.
But the evidence that voters care about this issue isn’t just anecdotal. In a National Skills Coalition poll of likely 2020 voters, 93% supported greater investment in skills training and by a 50-point margin were more likely to support a candidate who makes this a priority.
Heading into the Iowa caucuses last month, our polling in that state showed that with 12 percent of voters still undecided — a potentially decisive share of the electorate — more than half of them (55 percent) were more likely to support a candidate who vocally prioritized increasing government funding for skills training in the U.S.
What’s important about the questions asked by voters like Dave and Steve is that they speak specifically to the future and a perception of skills training not as a “one and done” activity, but as something needed throughout life.
At least 60% of today’s jobs will be impacted by digitalization, automation, and/or artificial intelligence, meaning about 90 million working Americans may have to acquire new skills just to stay in their jobs, let alone to advance in their industries.
Voters feel this. Our recent poll of California voters found that 66% believe that their current jobs will change due to automation and 59% believe the lack of access to skills training to keep up with these changes is a serious problem facing workers. And our poll of lowa caucus-goers found that 92 percent agree that greater investment in skills training would help ensure workers can upgrade their skills to keep pace with new technologies, while 91 percent support providing skills retraining at no cost to any worker who loses their job because of automation.
Voters are waving their hands in the air on the issue of skills training. And while it’s gotten a nod from most candidates, it has yet to rise to the level of Governor Whitmer’s kitchen table blueprint for anyone. Even with a greatly narrowed field, it’s worth unpacking how the candidates — current and departed — have approached skills training because it’s both promising and troubling.
Every candidate who has been a part of the primary cycle has had something to say about skills training, primarily as it connects to other first-tier issues on their platform. Nearly every candidates’ climate change agenda included some kind of re-training fund for fossil fuel workers to support the transition to clean energy technologies.
Former Vice President Joe Biden proposes expanding access to apprenticeship as part of his agenda to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure (as did Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar before they exited the race). Senator Bernie Sanders has built access to training into his criminal justice reform and job guarantee agendas.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Klobuchar, and Buttigieg built skills training into their healthcare agendas as well as their plans for rural America. Former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg centered his equity agenda around skills training during his brief time in the race. The remaining front-runners — Biden and Sanders — include skills training at community colleges in their college affordability plans.
It’s vitally important that skills training has shown up as part of candidates’ proposals to address some of the most pressing issues of our time.
An infrastructure agenda that doesn’t train local residents for the jobs created by brick and mortar investments will crumble: There are 68% more projected job openings in infrastructure jobs over the next 5 years than there are people training for these jobs, and infrastructure fields are estimated to have 50% more retirements than the workforce generally.
A healthcare agenda that doesn’t make a serious investment in skills training will be dead on arrival: To care for our aging population, health care occupations are expected to grow by 14% over the next decade, adding almost 2 million new jobs, a significant portion of which will require skills training.
A climate change agenda that doesn’t invest in training workers for clean technologies won’t change anything. Any effort to tackle the moral and economic imperative of correcting structural racial inequities in educational attainment, employment, and income will falter if skills training is not part of the solution.
And any college affordability effort that doesn’t include skills training, will invalidate the career aspirations of millions of voters and fail to address a persistent skills mismatch in our labor market.
There is no debate: Skills training is central to addressing some of the greatest challenges facing our nation. But if, as a nation, we want skills training to be there when we need it to respond to these challenges, we must invest in the system itself in meaningful and sustainable ways.
It takes capacity and solid, time-intensive partnerships to successfully train an infrastructure or clean energy workforce and to retrain that workforce throughout their careers as technologies change. That capacity and those partnerships cannot suddenly be conjured the day after a climate change or infrastructure bill passes, even if those bills include investments in skills training.
We can’t solely piecemeal fund our community college and community-based workforce training programs through carve-outs and time-limited discretionary federal grants as essential as they are. Instead, we must fundamentally shift how we prioritize investments in the systems that train our workforce if we want those systems to be robust enough when they are called upon in service of national challenges. That’s how a nation effectively addresses a kitchen table issue.
Unfortunately, we’ve been dismantling this leg of our kitchen table for decades. According to the White House Council of Economic Advisors, the U.S. underinvests in worker training compared to virtually all other developed economies. Funds for state job training grants have fallen by 40 percent since 2001. We spend $139 billion on college aid every year and only 14% of it goes to skills training despite the fact that jobs requiring skills training make up over 50% of the labor market.
We need a fundamentally different approach to investing in skills training in this country. We need to invest at a level that ensures any person can access the training and supports they need whether it’s to get a first job, to get a better job, or to keep a job as technology continues to change the workplace. We need to invest at a level that ensures that when we leverage political momentum to tackle climate change, our crumbling infrastructure, our healthcare challenges, we have the partnerships and sustainable capacity to train the workforce needed to make these efforts successful.
So what would it look like for candidates and policymakers to signal this kind of commitment as we continue on the road to November and after?
It would mean skills training is centered in every stump speech, every campaign ad, every debate.
It would mean that skills training is not solely talked about as a tactic for addressing other priority issues, but as a priority in and of itself.
It would mean more than just talk.
Centering skills training as a kitchen table issue for voters means backing up the commitment with a solid agenda to make America first in the world in investing in its greatest asset: It’s people.
