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Over the last few years, the media has blared warnings that a “skills gap” among American workers is preventing full economic recovery.

According to this narrative, the problem is not an inadequate supply of family-sustaining jobs; it’s a workforce lacking in skills, training and education. The skills gap thesis has been spread by influential pundits like the New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman, top CEOs like Caterpillar’s Doug Oberhelman, and PIMCO hedge fund owner Bill Gross, who declared, “Our labor force is too expensive and poorly educated for today’s marketplace.”

In my home state of Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has repeatedly given lavish coverage to a November 2011 comment by Tim Sullivan, former CEO of Bucyrus International and special advisor to Gov. Scott Walker on workforce development: “We don’t have a jobs crisis in Milwaukee, we have an education crisis.”

But in a study released this week called “The Skills Gap and Unemployment in Wisconsin: Separating Fact From Fiction,” urbanologist Marc Levine, a professor of history and economic development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, applies a data-laden sledgehammer to this notion. And while Levine’s report focused primarily on Wisconsin, his critique of the “skills gap” notion has national implications.

Levine’s report decimates the skills gap thesis one point at a time:

• False: The skills of the workforce somehow dropped sharply between 2007 and 2009. Numerous studies by Nobel laureates, highly regarded economics institutes, and two former chairs of presidential councils of economic advisers all conclude that a sudden dropoff in workers’ skills over two years is utterly implausible as an explanation for massive unemployment. In the words of economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, “It is not the right workers we are lacking, it is work.”
• False: There is a vast pool of high-skilled jobs waiting to be filled. As Levine commented in the report, “Even if every unemployed person were perfectly matched to existing jobs, over 2/3 of all jobless would still be out of work.”
• False: Employers are trying in vain to attract skilled workers. If a “skills shortage” truly existed, employers would raise wages to attract workers with the special skills they seek. Instead, wages have fallen in Wisconsin since 2000, including in occupations like welding, where there is a supposed shortage of workers, Levine pointed out.
• False: Understaffed employers must make do with the skilled workers they have. A shortage of sought-after workers would lead employers to increase these workers’ hours. However, the report says, “average weekly hours worked in manufacturing have remained unchanged since 2000, while the average weekly overtime hours have actually declined by 12.8 percent since 2000.”
• False: New high-skill jobs have been created. Overall, Wisconsin retains a jobs deficit of 243,000, based on job losses since the Great Recession plus new positions needed for entrants into the labor market, according to a study by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy. Though Scott Walker came into office in 2011 famously promising the creation of 250,000 jobs during his four-year term, Wisconsin has ranked 42nd in job creation out of the 50 states. (more…)

Governors like Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Chris Christie of New Jersey have justified their attacks on public workers and their unions as necessary to balance state budgets. Indeed, they and copy-cat officials, mainly Republican but frequently Democratic, and a hallelujah chorus of pundits have insinuated that a bloated, overpaid state and local government workforce caused the record string of deficits over the past four years.

It’s a good story, conveniently reinforcing right-wing hostility to government. But there’s one little problem. It’s dead wrong. The facts simply don’t support it. That shortcoming may not stop the right-wing crusade, but it’s important for anyone concerned about state and local government to know.

And they can find the research neatly, graphically summarized in “The Wrong Target: Public Sector Unions and State Budget Deficits,” by Sylvia Allegretto, Ken Jacobs and Laurel Lucia of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics and the Labor Center, both at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Voter fraud is virtually nonexistent in America, but this imaginary crime still serves to justify a wave of onerous new voter registration laws—often requiring a state-issued photo ID—that Republican legislators have rapidly spread across the nation. The implications for the 2012 elections are huge.

“The overall idea is pretty obvious,” says Frances Fox Piven, author of three books outlining America’s unusually harsh and restrictive voting laws. “Both parties expect close elections in 2012, and if you peel off just a couple percentage points, you can determine the outcome.”

Piven points to Wisconsin, where protests over a law passed earlier this year rendering public-employee unions toothless were followed by the imposition of a restrictive voter ID law by Gov. Scott Walker and Republican majorities in the state legislature. “We saw labor protests of unprecedented size and intensity over limiting their voice as workers,” Piven says. “And then [protesters] were greeted with a law to limit their power electorally, too.”

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Buoyed by Connecticut’s enactment this month of the nation’s first state law guaranteeing paid sick days to most workers, more than 200 organizers for paid family leave and paid sick days pushed for national legislation this week as they gathered in Washington, D.C.

Their movement is picking up steam, despite the obstacles in Congress and in many states to passing any legislation helping workers. The organizers, most linked to either Family Values @ Work or the National Partnership for Women and Families, came from 23 states and the District of Columbia. Though success with federal legislation in this Congress is unlikely, they anticipate passage of paid sick day legislation in the coming months in Seattle, Denver, New York City, and possibly both Massachusetts and, in a weak form, Georgia.

The failure of many employers to provide paid sick days, and the failure of the country, alone among advanced industrial countries, to mandate such protection causes great personal hardship. Torrie Moffett of Milwaukee, for example, lost four jobs in five years because she had to take time off to address school problems of her mentally ill child. None of her employers paid for sick leave or protected workers against dismissal for taking days off for sickness, as much of the new legislation mandates.

New research by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research indicates that even at workplaces with paid sick days, nearly half of workers report that management has policies that could lead to dismissal for taking too many sick days.

Workers without paid sick days often simply can’t afford to take time off even when they are ill, often with contagious diseases they could spread to co-workers or customers and clients, according to a June report from the Economic Policy Institute. Just missing three days from illness in one month, an average worker without paid leave—making $10 an hour—would be on the verge of falling below the poverty line, EPI reports.

Paid leave is good not just for workers, says Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values @ Work, but also for the economy as a whole and even for employers. Studies of San Francisco after several years of mandated paid sick days shoed that six out o seven employers reported no problems and job growth was faster than in five surrounding counties, Bravo says. And PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm, ranked the city the third best for business. Employers benefit by keeping skilled staff.

Instead of such regulation killing jobs, Bravo says, research shows that paid sick days lead to job retention and stability, particularly important in an economic recovery. “The jobs killer,” Bravo argues, “is lack of paid sick days.” Both paid sick days and, to a slightly lesser degree, paid family and medical leave, score strong public support in polls, typically at or above 60 to 70 percent approval of legislation setting such standards. For example, in a 2010 National Opinion Research Center survey, 75 percent of those polled supported a mandate for a minimum number of paid sick days, with 61 percent strongly supporting it.

That makes it a bit easier for core advocate groups, like women’s, public health and labor organizations, to build the broader coalitions—including many business owners—that have so far been the key to legislative victories.
Newly proposed federal legislation would guarantee up to seven days of paid sick time for all employers of 15 or more workers. Other legislation would set up an insurance fund financed by payments from employers and employees to compensate for family and medical leave.

High-earning workers and public-sector workers are more likely to have some protection now than low-wage private sector workers, but legal guarantees can reinforce those policies.

Also, Bravo says, “You may have paid sick days, but when you go to a restaurant, you don’t want to be served flu with your fries. Everyone has a stake in it.”

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This entry originally appeared at In These Times.

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David Moberg, a senior editor of In These Times, has been on the staff of the magazine since it began publishing in 1976. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy.

When it comes to jobs, Republicans and the Right unfailingly roll out the same solution no matter what the economic situation nor how many times it has failed: more tax cuts for the Job Creators in Corporate America and the investor class.

The Democrats, for their part, have also tended to promote the same mantra on unemployment without regard to the lack of job opportunities or how serious America’s job shortage has become.

Unemployment is back over 9 percent again and we risk falling into another recession, much as the United States did when President Roosevelt prematurely pulled back on stimulus and job-creation programs in 1937.

In particular, President Obama and the congressional Democrats have relentlessly focused on the need for greater educational attainment and skills re-training for those with new college diplomas or community college certificates. But this solution fails to address the lack of job openings that new graduates are already facing. (more…)

By Roger Bybee
Milwaukee Freelance Writer

While President Obama and most Congressional Democrats are allowing the Republicans to define America’s most urgent crisis as the budget deficit, the nation’s job deficit grows more dire day by day with no clear, forceful direction coming from the White House.

The adjusted growth rate for the first quarter of the 2011 “recovery” fell to be a miniscule 1.8 percent, sharply sliding from a more vigorous 3.1 percent in the last quarter of 2010. Private-sector jobs grew by a feeble 38,000 last month. Meanwhile, the most meaningful unemployment statistic is not the commonly cited 9 percent, but the “U-6” rate which includes those who have given up seeking work and those stuck in part-time jobs while wanting to work full tim. The U-6 rate now sits at 15 percent five years into the economic crisis. (more…)

By Roger Bybee
Milwaukee Freelance Writer

Next to Republican governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, it would be very easy for Democrats to look more sympathetic to union rights, the needs of working people and the ever-shrinking middle class.

The Democrats lost 63 House seats and six Senate seats in the 2010 mid-terms in the industrial midwest as key Democratic constituencies stayed home. Now would seem to be a great opportunity for the Democrats to rebuild their relationship with unions and their supporters in the insecure middle class.

The party could seize this opening by promoting an agenda stressing the creation of public jobs via desperately-needed infrastructure re-building and that the privileged top 2 percent of corporations ought to bear a fair share of the tax burden needed to maintain services and balance state budgets. The agenda’s premise: The primary victims of the recession should not suffer more due to cuts in services they desperately need (e.g., education, healthcare). (more…)

by David Moberg
Senior Editor, In These Times

The People’s Budget lays out a surprisingly popular vision of the future.

A national budget tells a lot more about a country and its politics than simply where the government’s money comes from and where it goes. As President Obama rightly stressed, it is also “about the kind of future we want …[and] the kind of country we believe in.”

But as happens so often in the United States, the political and media establishments distort the public debate by accepting the right-wing’s framing. In this case that means the issue is simply deficits and spending cuts, not national needs and adequate revenue. In this context, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the architect of the Republican budget plan, gets taken seriously when he proposes—with echoes of Vietnam—that we destroy Medicare in order to save it.

Consequently, the public is confused. More significantly, the corporate media give progressive alternatives short shrift, even though opinion polls show the public often supports such measures.

The United States could do much better with more active and—yes—even bigger government, partly because many of the things our society needs, the government can do more efficiently, fairly and effectively than private individuals and businesses in a market.

The corporate press, acting in its own self-interest, is loathe to report this fact. (more…)

By Mike Elk
Union Organizer

Imagine if Republicans in Congress threatened to defund the Supreme Court because they didn’t like one of its decisions. Well, that’s almost what’s happening right now, as Republicans in Congress threaten to defund the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a quasi-judicial independent body tasked with prosecuting and enforcing labor law.

The whole controversy started when Boeing decided to not open a planned production line at a union facility in Puget Sound after workers went on strike in 2008. In 2007, Boeing announced it would create a second production line to produce three 787 Dreamliner planes a month in the Puget Sound, in addition to the production that was already occurring in Puget Sound. Then in October 2009, it was announced the company would move the second production line to a nonunion plant in South Carolina. Later, a Boeing official told the Seattle Times that Boeing moved the plant because of the strike and the union presence in Puget Sound.

Last month, NLRB General Counsel Lafe Solomon ruled that the decision to move production to a nonunion facility after a strike violates the ability to strike and collectively bargain enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act. This ruling stands in precedent with a long history of legal cases showing that threatening to move facilities if workers strike is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act (for more information on this precedent, see this factsheet released by the Board). (more…)

By Mike Elk
Union Organizer

Last Friday, two van loads of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 7-669 members, who have been locked out of the Honeywell uranium facility in Metropolis, Ill., for nine months, traveled through the night to join the ongoing protest in the Wisconsin State Capitol.

“After all the support we have seen from around the country, it would be a disservice not to join our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin and give some of that support back,” said Darrell Lillie, president of the USW local. “Without collective bargaining rights, workers in both the public and private sector would be devastated and lose their voice in the workplace.” (more…)