White House: Workforce development aimed at apprenticeships, future jobs
WASHINGTON — An executive producer of NBC’s “The Apprentice,” now better known as President Donald Trump, will host events in Wisconsin and in Washington next week promoting apprenticeship programs modeled on a scaled up version of an Obama administration workforce development law.
White House officials, including Ivanka Trump, Trump’s daughter, and Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, briefed reporters Friday on the planned workforce-themed week ahead. Trump will travel Tuesday to a Wisconsin technical college, hold a Wednesday White House roundtable with CEOs and later make a major policy announcement at the Labor Department and then host a Thursday White House session with eight unidentified state governors.
Ivanka Trump said the events are aimed at calling attention to the “skills gap” employers encounter — the difference between what people can do and what employers need — and at encouraging greater use of apprenticeship programs like one she recently visited in Berlin, Germany. She said IBM, Amazon and Dow Chemical are already collaborating with high schools and community colleges to train the work forces of the future they will need.
She added her father remains committed to creating 25 million jobs over the next decade in part by increasing women’s and minority employment in jobs requiring training in science, technology, engineering and math.
She said Acosta, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Mills and Education Secretary Betsy Vos have been looking at existing federal job-training programs to determine which work and which are redundant.
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Acosta noted that just three-tenths of 1 percent of American jobs involved apprenticeships, mainly in the building trades, where certifications are required and job skills are transferable. Community college-based programs can help workers with continuing education and allow them to keep pace with changing technologies, he said. Some available skills-based jobs have higher starting wages than those requiring four-year college degrees, he said.
President Barack Obama signed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act into law in July 2014, a bill that updated the Clinton administration’s 1998 Workforce Investment Act. In response to a question about how the Trump plan will be different, a participant on the call identified only as a senior administration official said the Trump plan is to use the Obama model and “scale it up.”
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The Trump effort comes as both unemployment and labor force participation have reached near all-time lows, producing job vacancies that can’t be filled. The apprenticeships would lead to jobs in the retail, medical and hospitality fields, among others, the officials said.
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In response to a question about Trump’s announced budget cuts to job-training programs, a senior administration official said “the problem is not money,” then added that cuts involving apprentice programs are not targeted.
“We expect to be very successful,” the official said.
Trump’s budget would cut job training from $2.7 billion to $1.6 billion, a 40 percent reduction, according to the analysis of the liberal think tank The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
While official Washington appeared to have other priorities, the White House intended last week to be all about infrastructure. It began with the rollout of a proposed privatization of the air traffic control program and included plans for $200 billion in public funding aimed at attracting $800 billion in private investment in road and other projects tied to tolls and user fees.