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Subject: Importing Advice on Job Training;Our Toughest Competitors Can Teach Americans
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 92 09:14:31 EST
Message-ID: <21.1992Nov1.091431@AmeriCast.com>

Importing Advice on Job Training;Our Toughest Competitors Can
Teach Americans How to Work Smarter<By Ray Marshall and Marc
Tucker=

GEORGE BUSH is once again running as the Education President and
Bill Clinton says that education is at the heart of his domestic
agenda. But how likely is it that their proposals will actually
produce what the nation so ardently wants - a competitive work
force?

One way to take the measure of the candidates' education and job
training proposals is to hold them up to the models long em-
ployed, with great success, by our competitors. Today, those
models are helping Germany and Japan clean our clock. With real
commitment from the next administration, however, such training
programs could be helping us catch up.  Not so long ago, a young
American could leave high school with or without a diploma, join
a union, go to work in one of our basic industries and confident-
ly expect to become a full-fledged member of the middle class. No
more. Now, that same worker is competing directly with workers
half a world away who also have access to the most advanced
machinery on the globe, and who are willing to work for a dollar
and a half a day. The product of their labor can be shipped for a
pittance to the most attractive markets anywhere and sold at a
price with which we cannot compete.

To overcome the advantages that long hours, low wages and ad-
vanced machinery can give to low-skilled workers, higher skilled
workers must produce better quality, work more productively and
respond more quickly to changes in consumer taste. And the only
way to do that is for ordinary front-line workers to work smar-
ter.

All over the world, the best firms are assigning to front-line
workers  duties and responsibilities that American businesses
typically reserve for managers and professionals.  Because work-
ers actually making products or dealing with customers are
trained to do it right the first time, respond promptly to prob-
lems and figure out how to make constant improvements, firms can
get rid of many layers of management.  These firms are competing
on quality and productivity, not wages. Their reward is high pay
for everyone.

Our two most effective competitors, Germany and Japan, have taken
the lead in worker development. Given the enormous differences in
their national cultures and political systems, it is not surpris-
ing that each has taken a very different route to skill develop-
ment.  Still their training systems have much more in common with
each other than with America's. We do not suggest that the United
States should adopt either system, but surely there is something
to learn here.<In Germany and Japan, policies on skills are inti-
mately related to economic policy. Both are explicitly committed
to economic policies that will produce high wages. That means
making life uncomfortable for firms that pay low wages, but it
also means providing firms with a highly skilled work force.

For the Germans, this begins with a set of national social poli-
cies that provide a children's allowance to all families (about
$1,600 per child) as well as universal health insurance. In this
way, the Germans assure that their children arrive at school
healthy and ready to learn. Once in school, all children, not
just those going to college, are expected to perform at high lev-
els. Seventy-six percent of all middle school graduates take na-
tional examinations that set a stiff standard of academic accom-
plishment. German performance on international assessments of
educational achievement is consistently high.

About 20 percent of German children complete college (about the
same proportion that actually completes college here). While in
school, all German children except those in academic high schools
are required to participate in a formal learning program about
industry. At about the age of 16, 85 percent of those not in
academic high schools enter two- to three-year apprenticeship
programs, the standards for which  are set mainly by industry and
are uniform throughout the country. The student enters into an
apprenticeship contract with a firm that provides a highly struc-
tured program of on-the-job training (about 3 1/2 days a week),
state-provided vocational training (1 1/2 days a week) and a
firm-paid training wage that increases as students progress
through the program. Students get a journeyman's certificate -
their ticket to employment - only when they pass a demanding
written and practical exam at the end. By 18 or 19, these kids
have a very high level of academic and vocational skill and know
what it means to work.

German firms are not required to offer apprenticeship contracts,
but most large ones do, partly as a matter of pride, partly be-
cause they view a highly skilled work force as a key to competi-
tive survival.

Many Americans decry the German sorting process, claiming it
tracks kids into irrevocable life decisions, while the American
system creates ever-open choices for its students. This comparis-
on may be comforting for those who resist change, but both sides
of it are distorted.

Fully one-third of German university-trained engineers came up
through their apprenticeship system and then attended university,
a path that would be virtually unthinkable for most U.S. en-
gineers. More to the point, the American system, unlike any of
those in Northern Europe, places kids into different "tracks"
based on estimates of student ability as early as kindergarten,
assigning work of different difficulty to kids thought to have
different abilities. This kind of tracking is far more devastat-
ing to children and is simply not practiced in Europe.

Once employed, moreover, German youth can look forward to a life-
time of support for continuing training from both their employers
as well as generous unemployment benefits and training subsidies
from the government should their jobs be lost.<In Japan, child
poverty is almost unknown, and the support for education from
families is legendary. Japanese educational achievement, not just
among those going to college, is probably the highest in the
world. The Japanese high school student has completed as many
hours of school as the average American college graduate, and
probably knows a good deal more math and science. By law,
Japanese school teachers are the highest paid civil servants in
the land. As in Germany, standards are explicit and very high,
the American practice of tracking at an early age is rejected
and, from elementary school on, students are informed about the
kinds of work people do.

But there are important differences from Germany. The formal vo-
cational education system plays a much less important role in
Japan. Major Japanese employers want entry-level employees who
can learn to do anything they might be asked over a working life-
time. For the Japanese employer, demonstrated ability to learn is
most important. Americans tend to think ability is in the genes.
The Japanese think ability is mainly the result of effort and op-
portunity. While we mouth the slogan that "all kids can learn,"
they act as if they believe it.

The result is the best educated front-line labor force in the
world. Admission to high schools in Japan is competitive.  Big
firms recruit entry-level labor from those high schools that have
demonstrated they can supply graduates with the needed skills. So
students work hard in middle school to get into the high schools
that match their job ambitions. When these kids reach the end of
lower secondary school, about the age of 16, recruiters approach
school principals with their hiring requirements. Little wonder
that these kids work hard in high school, too, whether they want
to be an engineer or an assembly line worker.

Once out of school, Japanese kids, like their German counter-
parts, can look forward to a lifetime of continuous education and
training. When we visited Toyota two years ago, freshly minted
high school graduates working on the assembly line were being
provided what in the United States would be a college-level
course in digital electronics as part of the on-the-job training
program that every line worker gets. In Germany, a successful ap-
plicant for a license to open a business in most fields must be
qualified as a master teacher of that subject.  Similarly, in big
Japanese firms, one of the most important qualifications to be-
come a foreman is the ability to teach the skills required by
one's team members.

Much of what is accomplished by law in Germany is accomplished
voluntarily and by custom in Japan (though with strong leadership
from government). But the results are very much the same.

In contrast, the United States has no national education stan-
dards and actually requires less than an eighth-grade level of
literacy for the majority of kids who go to college - and for al-
most all who enter the work force from high school. The United
States pays its teachers at the bottom of wage scales for workers
with college degrees and invests less in its elementary and
secondary schools than most other industrial countries, saving
its big investment for the college-bound.  Germany and Japan pay
their teachers well and put much more of their human investment
capital into their future front-line workers.

While this country has no system at all for the transition from
school to work, these two countries begin that transition in ele-
mentary school, and enable the vast majority of their adolescents
to acquire strong academic skills, strong vocational skills and,
most telling, actual employment in leading firms by the time they
are 18 or 19. In the United States education and training of most
front-line workers ends when they are first employed - when
training is just beginning for most German and Japanese workers.

That's what our competition does. We do not have to train our
workers the way they do and probably should not. But the price of
not doing it at all will be low wages for American workers and
declining income for the United States.<

Ray Marshall, secretary of labor under President Carter, holds a
chair in economics and public affairs at the University of Texas,
Austin. Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Educa-
tion and the Economy. They are authors of "Thinking for a Living:
Education and the Wealth of Nations," (Basic Books).02:20 11-
01C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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