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Show J2ftjl!fip0rt by Senator Orrin Hatch New job program Some time ago a young man visited my office in search of a job. He wasn't interested in working for the money, he told me; if necessary, he'd work for free. What he wanted was experience that would equip him for the future. My brief visit with this young man left me with a valuable perspective: money is no substitute for training. Government job training programs from past years that provided people with taxpayer-subsidized paychecks left those people no better off when the programs ended than when they began. A more sensible approach which was passed unanimously last week by the Senate aims at teaching job skills to people who currently lack them. Not just any skills will do it centers on teaching those skills employers demand. And no one could better say what skills employers demand than employers themselves. That is why training programs under the bill will no longer be designed by Washington, but by representatives of the private sector. When the private sector has a hand in the training, you can bet it'll train people for jobs it needs to fill. This approach signifies a new partnership between government and private industry. The goal of any job training program, after all, is to train people for jobs in private industry. Judging from some recent job programs, you'd think their goal was to spend all the tax dollars that were allocated to them, or to fill out all the government forms they were given. The bill passed July 1 by the Senate returns job training to its initial objective: it will be evaluated, and continued or abolished, on the basis of how many people it trains for private employment, how many of those people find jobs in the private sector, and how much it thus saves in government welfare costs. The bill repeals the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), except for the Job Corps program, wnich has already demonstrated this efficiency at job training in places like the Clearfield Job Corps Center. The bill involved all levels of government, from the federal, which will help fund it, to the local, which will administer the programs provided under the bill. At my insistence, the bill includes incentives for businesses to train women and minorities, and it also limits the amount of its funding that can be spent on administrative overhead. That means it will provide training opportunities for 1,500 more Utahns than are currently being trained. These Utahns, and thousands of other Americans, won't be "given a fish," as the old folk saying goes. They'll be taught how to fish. |