Workforce Developments

Four day / 40-hour work week is popular, has unexpected benefits

When gas hit four dollars a gallon around the country in the first half of 2008, private and public employers began experimenting with ways to cut costs for themselves and their employees. Travel was replaced by web meetings. GPS units were installed to help drivers find the most efficient route with the fewest left turns.

And for many, the forty hour work week was squeezed into four days. This change is turning out to be popular with employees and has unexpected benefits as well.

Employers are saving money as they expected, as are workers who commute twenty percent less than they used to. The reduction in driving and air conditioning is reducing pollution too. The state of Utah estimates they'll reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6,000 metric tons annually due to Friday shutdowns.

What's more, Utah employees with the extra day off are using their free time to volunteer more.

Turns out, less is more. With all these benefits, the four day / forty hour work week just might be here to stay.

For more ideas on how to green your workplace, check out these links from Earth911, Low Impact Living, Planet Green and Scientific American.

Photo by Corbis Images

Work sharing: a smart alternative to layoffs

If you're an employer going through tough times and you're thinking about laying off workers, take a moment to consider the work sharing alternative.

Think about this: when the economy turns around and your business picks up again, the best and brightest of the people you laid off will have moved on and you probably won't be able to get them back. You'll have to start out fresh with new, untrained workers who will take some time to get up to speed on your operations.

Seventeen state unemployment departments offer work sharing programs, also sometimes called "short time compensation" programs. Louisiana also has one on the books, but it hasn't been implemented.

These programs allow you to reduce your employees' hours and only pay them for hours worked. Unemployment pays your employees partial benefits on the balance of hours. This way you get to keep your skilled employees but reduce labor costs, while the state saves money because they don't have to pay out full unemployment benefits. Employees get to keep their job, their earnings and their benefits. It's a win for everyone.

It also takes some of the pressure of the downward spiral in the labor market and its wider ripple effects. That's one less person pounding the pavement competing for fewer jobs, one less person without health care benefits, one less family struggling to get by.

Marketplace Money did a story on work sharing this past weekend, which is how I learned it isn't available in every state.

The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) recommends creating a federal work sharing program, and I'd have to agree. In his analysis, Neil Ridley of CLASP found that too few employers know about work sharing. As a result, it's under-utilized, although that's changing as the national unemployment rate nears ten percent. Better, more widespread use of work sharing programs could reduce unemployment, CLASP argues. 

If you're an employee and you think you may be at risk of being laid off, check the list below to see if your state offers work sharing. If it does, let your HR department know - they may not be aware of it. If your state doesn't offer work sharing, write to your state representatives and tell them to get with the program.

Here's the list of states with work sharing programs - I've included links to the programs where I could find them. If you find links for the other states, please let me know!

Arizona
Arkansas
California
Connecticut
Florida
Iowa
Kansas
Maryland
Massachusetts
Minnesota
Missouri
New York
Oregon
Rhode Island
Texas
Vermont
Washington

Photo: "Big Pete" Ramagos, rigger at work on the TVA Dam in Douglas Dam, TN, 1942

NCLR's Customer Service Initiative

On Wednesday I explained why the National Council of La Raza is engaged in workforce development and the basics of our approach. Yesterday I wrote about NCLR's Health Care Careers Pathway Initiative.

In today's post, I would like to outline NCLR’s efforts in the customer service and retail industry. Like health care, this industry is heavily Latino-dominated. Almost 15% of customer service representatives, 12% of retail salespersons, and 17% of telemarketers are Latino. Yet few of these individuals are adequately trained to meet employer and customer demands. NCLR's Customer Service and Retail Initiative was created to address the needs and demands of our corporate partners who face a shortage of trained and skilled bilingual customer service professionals.

With support from The Home Depot, NCLR created a program through which bilingual Latinos are trained to become qualified, skilled customer service representatives. NCLR has partnered with the National Retail Federation Foundation (NRFF) for this initiative to utilize its curriculum and certification for participants. NRFF certifications are recognized in the retail industry and allow program participants to demonstrate their credentials to employers. 

Most of the Affiliate organizations implementing this program offer a one- to two-week job readiness training (mostly focusing on soft skills) and then a two- to four-week specialized training program in the customer service and retail industry, incorporating the NRFF curriculum. Each year, this initiative trains at least 100 bilingual customer service professionals.

In the future, NCLR is looking to expand this initiative to the green jobs industry, as many Latinos are employed in construction and maintenance industries, allowing for a natural progression to green jobs.

For more information about NCLR's Career Pathways Initiative, please feel free to contact me, Surabhi Jain, Workforce Development Specialist, at sjain@nclr.org or (312) 523-2047. Please also consider attending the 2009 NCLR Annual Conference in Chicago this weekend. The Workforce Development Track offers free workshops on youth workforce development program, green jobs, workforce investment systems, and corporate diversity, as well as a town hall on the current economic state of the nation. Besides this, there are eight other workshop tracks on topics ranging from policy to health to women's issues.  Click here to learn more.

NCLR's Health Care Career Pathways Initiative

Continuing my blog post from yesterday, I will talk about the National Council of La Raza's (NCLR) Career Pathways Initiatives. 

NCLR is currently operating its Career Pathways Initiative in the two of the most Latino-dominated industries:  health care and customer service and retail. Today, I will talk about the health care initiative and tomorrow, about the customer service and retail initiative.

As some of you may know, 13.6% of people in health care support occupations employees are Latinos. Most of these jobs are in lower-end health care occupations such as home health aides and nursing aides. However, Latino representation in more advanced positions such as registered nurses (4.7%) or diagnostic technologists and technicians (5%) is extremely low.

Traditionally, Latinos have not excelled in postsecondary education because of a lack of supportive services available to them, including extra tutoring, English language skills development, child care support, housing, transportation, and mental health services. NCLR incorporates bridge programs, contextualized curriculum, and vocational English-as-a-second-language (ESL) programs to help participants graduate from each level in the program and advance to the next.

NCLR's Health Care Career Pathways Initiative focuses on advancing Latinos with limited or no English skills to advanced health care careers.  The current program looks at moving participants through different levels of training, from ESL and vocational ESL courses to becoming a certified nursing assistant, (CNA) a licensed practical nurse (LPN), and a registered nurse (RN). Beyond this, participants are pushed to achieve a baccalaureate in nursing and attend graduate school. This is done through intensive case management and supportive services. Moreover, the program provides entry and exit opportunities at all levels of the program.

The pre-LPN A and pre-LPN B bridge programs provide extra tutoring and support to those participants who are not ready or able to make the jump to the next level.  The chart below describes how individuals move through the program:

The initiative has successfully trained over 200 Latinos at the LPN and medical assistant levels in the last three years. The average wage gain for program participants is 150%. Besides providing career mobility opportunities for low-skill, low-income Latinos, the initiative is also increasing the number of bilingual and bicultural Latinos in the health care industry so that linguistically appropriate health care becomes more available to Latinos, a population that is expected to compose one-third of the nation’s population by 2050. The NCLR Health Care Career Pathways Initiative was also awarded the U.S. Department of Labor's 2008 Recognition of Excellence Award.

Now that you know about the health care initiative, in tomorrow's post, I'll provide information about NCLR’s Customer Service and Retail Initiative.

Guest blogger Surabhi Jain is a workforce development specialist at NCLR.

National Council of La Raza and workforce development

Why is the nation's largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization interested in workforce development?  Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the most important and basic reason is that Latinos have the highest labor force participation rate in the United States (68.7%), yet they earn the lowest median weekly wages at only $545 per week.

As a result, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) is actively involved in workforce development and making efforts to improve the economic opportunities available for Latinos. NCLR's mission is to improve opportunities for Hispanic Americans, and it achieves this mission through applied research, policy analysis and advocacy, providing a Latino perspective in five key areas—assets/investments, civil rights/immigration, education, employment and economic status, and health. 

NCLR works through its network of nearly 300 community-based Affiliate organizations in 41 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia to reach millions of Hispanics each year, and it has offices in eight cities in the United States, with headquarters in Washington, DC.

The Workforce Development (WFD) component of NCLR seeks to ensure the Latino community’s ability to contribute to and share in the nation's economic opportunities. Due to limited educational skills and employment in low-skill, low-paying jobs, Latinos tend to dominate the lower income strata of the economy.

NCLR's efforts focus on increasing Latinos' entry into high-wage, high-skill jobs by creating career pathways and promoting career mobility. WFD bridges the education and skills gap to advance Latino workers to more advanced, upwardly mobile careers.

To undertake this work, NCLR leverages its expertise and resources and establishes impact-oriented relationships with Affiliates and strategic partners in areas with significant or growing Hispanic populations.  Together, NCLR and its Affiliates serve as the link between local employers, direct service providers, and job seekers within their communities, and they collaborate to support local sustainability.

In my blog post tomorrow, I will outline NCLR's career pathways opportunities in Latino-dominated industries.

Photo by Jamie Grill/Blend Images/Corbis

Welcome guest blogger Surabhi Jain of NCLR

With the National Council of La Raza's big annual conference coming up this weekend, I thought it might be a good opportunity to find out more about their workforce development programs.

Joining Workforce Developments this week to explain it all is guest blogger Surabhi Jain, Workforce Development Specialist at NCLR.

Surabhi works on NCLR's Health Care Career Pathways Initiative and their Customer Service and Retail Initiative. Her expertise includes labor market research and analysis, industry and sectoral analysis, career pathways development, workforce development program management and program evaluation.

She has a master's in sustainable international development from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. She earned her bachelor's in economics at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University.

I'm handing the blog off to Surabhi for the rest of this week. She'll tell us more about some of the programs she works on, and why workforce development is important to NCLR.

Stay tuned.

Finding workforce development in my community garden

Late last year, the city where I live in the megalopolis that is Los Angeles County (one of almost 90) started its first community garden. I signed up quickly and was one of the lucky ones to get my own plot.

Then we had to build it. Beginning in January, volunteers like me spent countless hours on evenings and weekends clearing the long-vacant lot of rocks and roots, building the raised beds and filling them with soil and mulch, one wheelbarrow-full at a time.

Note to Michelle Obama: we were doing it before you made it cool.

The last of the beds have finally been finished, and nearly all the gardeners have planted their plots. We also have a fruit trees, and a demonstration garden in front showing how to landscape with drought-resistent native plants. After all, this is the edge of the desert. What's more, we are the first community garden in the state to be watered entirely with recycled water.

This spring and summer, I've eaten more home-grown Swiss chard, beets and mustard greens than you can imagine. Wonderful tomatoes. A bit less luck with green beans.

Now to this weekend and our garden's official opening and ribbon-cutting, with the mayor and a couple of city council members on hand for the show. Imagine my surprise when the mayor got up and started his remarks with this gem:

"It's interesting how things always come back around. Back in the 1970s there was a program called the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, or CETA."

Apparently one of the mayor's early jobs was managing community gardens for CETA, where laid-off workers could get work experience, earn some money and grow food for themselves and their families.

Here are the lessons I took away:

• Workforce development is not a dead-end career. You could eventually become mayor.
• Maybe CETA wasn't such a bad program after all.
• Good ideas like community gardens will always come back in fashion.

How to create a map for your website

I recently attended a workshop on grant writing where one of the topics of discussion was how funders decide to award a grant to an organization. Many times the number of supporting organizations is a factor in deciding to award grant money to an applying organization. A map can be an excellent tool to show the world who your community partners and supporters are.

In this post, I'm going to show you a quick way to create a map of your partners/supporters for your website. 

I've go two methods for you to look at. The first method is to use the method from Google's maps page called "My Maps." Go to http://maps.google.com and click in the upper right corner below Google's logo where it says, "My Maps." From this page you can type in a location and make a map with markers for each address on your map. Your markers can include information about your partners, including contact info and even a photo. This map can be embedded into your website by clicking the word "Link" in the upper right of the map. 

If you don't already have one, you'll need to set up a Google account. You don't need a Gmail address to do it - use your regular email address and follow the instructions.

The second method is for those who have a spreadsheet of the addresses and want to create a whole page with links to those who are partners of your organization. To do that you will need a little more knowledge about html so you may want to contact your webmaster for help. To get you started though, take a look at some of the following bookmarks I've collected on this subject:

One of the best examples of how this is done is on the Digital Inspiration blog.

My inspiration for this post was from the 10,000 Words blog.

Recently Chris Peters and Mano Marks wrote on TechSoup (a source for free/low-cost software for nonprofits) an article on How to Use Google Maps and Google Earth for nonprofits. The topic is very relevant to all workforce agencies as well.

You can also check out Aardvark maps, a great all-in-one map creating web page.

Contributor Bryan Lundeen works for the Solano County (California) Workforce Investment Board

Congress kicks off workforce funding bill markups

And so it begins.

The House of Representatives began marking up legislation to fund workforce programs in the Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations bill on Friday. There's not a lot of detail available yet, but The Workforce Alliance is doing their usual great job of getting the word out quickly. You can read the details here or get an overview from their Federal Policy Director Rachel Gragg in this video (what could be better - workforce development on YouTube!):

Right now the bill includes golden oldies like Youthbuild ($100 million) and training and supportive services for dislocated workers ($1.4 billion) and some hot new hits like green jobs ($50 million), community services jobs ($615 million) and a "Social Innovation Fund" to scale up new community-based solutions ($35 million). Total amount across Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and related agencies: $160.7 billion for fiscal year 2010. This table gives all the details.

Read a statement on the bill from Appropriations Committee Chair Representative David Obey. TWA's brief summary of the bill is here.

Republican members of the committee are already beginning to complain that the dollar amounts in the bill are not sustainable. I'd say that in this economic climate, with national unemployment approaching 10% and levels well above that in many areas, we shouldn't limit ourselves to an amount that's "sustainable." Programs to get people back to work urgently need a big shot in the arm.

More work in Congress is expected this week, and will probably continue for some time. Stay tuned.

(If you can't see the embedded video, click here to watch it on YouTube.)

Great reentry resources

Emory University's Office of University-Community Partnerships works to integrate research and teaching in a way to benefit the greater Atlanta community.  They recently released a report, "Prisoner Reentry in Atlanta: Understanding the Challenges of Transition from Prison to Community."  Both the full report and a press release are available.

The very comprehensive report analyzes data showing where people go in metro-Atlanta when they get out of prison, what support services are available (including job training, mental health and substance abuse counseling), and the availability of affordable housing and jobs.

This study is part of the Urban Institute's national Reentry Mapping Network, which covers a dozen metropolitan areas around the country.

The study found that the formerly incarcerated face many challenges in finding employment. In addition to low levels of education and work experience, and the reluctance of employers to hire someone who has served time in prison, they also lacked the personal networks to help them identify and secure jobs. Those findings echo the experiences of government and community-based reentry service providers. 

Housing, however, was identified as the most immediate and pressing need for those who have been released.

These reports are great resources that all communities need, but most reentry programs don't have the resources to undertake on their own - check them out!

Racy Ming is manager of the Marin Employment Connection, the one-stop in Marin County, CA. She is also chair of the board for the California Re-Entry Program at San Quentin.

Can job training work without job creation?

Yesterday's New York Times had an article that, on the face of it, might have looked like bad coverage for the workforce development field. The title captured the tone: Job retraining may fall short of high hopes. 

The reporter talked to several laid off workers who've had less than stellar success after job retraining programs. Some have retrained only to find no jobs in their new field. Some have retrained for new careers, only to be laid off from that one. Some find themselves working for significantly less earnings than in their previous jobs, or less than what they thought their new career would pay.

The article cites a recent study from DOL's Employment and Training Administration that looked at 160,000 participants who entered WIA programs in 12 states between mid-2003 to 2005. The study concludes, among other things, that "The marginal benefits of training may exceed $400 in earnings each quarter." 

For any of us working in the field, this isn't news at all. Older workers who've been laid off often find themselves slipping down closer to the bottom of any new career ladder they train for. What's more, good jobs with family wages and benefits have been disappearing from the American landscape in recent years. How many defined-benefit pension plans are still left out there?

Job training can't work without job creation. And it can't just be any jobs, but jobs that replace earnings in a meaningful way. This study and the light being shone on it by the NYT is an opportunity for us to ask some important questions:

• We're doing what we can to train people for new careers, but are the jobs out there?
• Whose responsibility is to to create those jobs?
• Do those jobs pay enough in earnings and benefits to live on? To support a family? 
• If they don't, should we train people for those jobs?

ARRA (aka Obama's stimulus plan) is designed to begin to create new jobs and save the ones we have, but it's a short-term measure. What long-term policies and investments are needed to create good jobs that will last?

Job training image source: Housing Works

Resources to help you make sense of the health care policy debates

As the national debate on health care policy picks up steam, we're going to be inundated with a lot more noise and flashing lights. To make good decisions and have well-informed opinions, we need to get past the sound and fury to find good information.

Here are a few resources I've found helpful. I hope you will too.

Health Reform page at the Kaiser Family Foundation, with multimedia content, polls and more in-depth research.

Health Issues page at Rand Corporation, offering briefs, fact sheets and other short reports to members of Congress.

Health page at the National Conference of State Legislatures, with updates on how states are tackling the problem of rising health costs and rising uninsurance rates.

Health Reform Resource Center at the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute's PolicyWorks site, which looks at the issues from the point of view of health care workers. The workforce development angle!

Whenever legislation is finally introduced, you'll be able to follow it on OpenCongress.org, most likely on the Health page.

Readers, if you know of other resources with good data and information to help inform the health care policy debate, please share them!