The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“Workforce Development (Executive Session)” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Senate section on pages S3463-S3466 on June 13, 2019.
The Department provides billions in unemployment insurance, which peaked around 2011 though spending had declined before the pandemic. Downsizing the Federal Government, a project aimed at lowering taxes and boosting federal efficiency, claimed the Department funds "ineffective and duplicative services" and overregulates the workplace.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
Workforce Development
Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I am on the floor again today to talk about developing the American workforce. Why? Because it is such a big issue back home in Ohio and around the country.
Pro-growth Federal policies, including tax cuts, have really worked. I just had another group of Ohio small businesspeople visiting me today, telling me how they have taken those tax savings and used them to invest in their workers, invest in machine and technology, helping to create more economic growth. It is working.
The most recent report released by the Commerce Department shows that the economy grew by 3.1 percent in the first quarter this year. That is significant. By the way, it is about twice what was projected for that same quarter prior to tax reform being put into place. So we are doing about twice as well as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office thought we would be doing at this point.
Official unemployment is now 3.6 percent. That is tied for the lowest in 50 years. We continue to see solid wage growth, including better wage growth--which is really exciting for me--among people who are not, as I said, supervisory employees; in other words, blue-collar workers, a 3.4-percent increase in wages. That is after about a decade and a half of flat wages when you take inflation into account. Finally, we are seeing a real increase in wages.
I hear from our small business owners back in Ohio how this is working for them, but I also hear something else, which is that they are looking for workers.
The good news is, the economy is growing. There is a demand for workers, but that is not the whole story. We are still seeing a lot of individuals who are missing out on the benefits of a growing economy, not working, and not even looking for work. I have visited dozens of factories and businesses over the past year, and I keep hearing the same thing: We just don't have enough skilled workers to fill all the positions we have in order to keep on growing, to keep expanding as a company. Yet, in Ohio and elsewhere, we do not have enough working-age adults participating in the labor force.
So how do we solve this problem? How do we bring this together? How do we take people off the sidelines and into work? By the way, I am told it is over 8 million men right now not working at all; meaning, they are not looking for work; they don't show up in the unemployment numbers. Labor force economists call this the labor force participation rate. It is relatively low. It has fallen in the past decade, meaning there are a lot of unemployed Americans not even looking for work, not being recorded in those official Department of Labor unemployment numbers.
It is so low that if our labor force participation was simply at its normal prerecession level--so go back 10 years and what was normal for decades before that. If you just went back to that labor force participation rate, our country's unemployment rate would not be 3.6 percent today. Guess what it would be. More like 8.3 percent. If we had an 8.3-percent unemployment number out there, all of us would be pulling out our hair thinking, how do we deal with this? How do we get more people back to work again? That is essentially what we have.
Again, of particular concern to me are those who are of working age, 8 million men, between the ages of 25 and 54, who are not working. We need to get these people off the sidelines and back into the workforce, where they can have the dignity and self-respect that comes from work and where our businesses can have their talents. We need them to have our economy continue to grow.
To achieve this, I think there are a number of challenges we have to address. First, we do need to focus on what is called the skills gap. This skills gap is essentially a mismatch between the skills in demand today and the skills our workers have. This labor force out there that is not finding the work doesn't have the skills that are needed to get the jobs that are available. It is a widespread issue. It is holding back our economy from fulfilling its full potential. In the most recent skills gap study from 2018, Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute highlighted this skills gap. The study found that it may leave an estimated 2.4 million positions unfilled between 2018 and 2028, with a potential negative economic impact of $2.5 trillion. This skills gap is real, it is hurting our economy, and we have to figure out how to address it in more innovative ways.
One way to address it is to have more robust training for the jobs that are going unfilled. Pretty simple. Often, of course, these are technical jobs. These are trade jobs, plumbers, welders, nursing assistants, IT jobs like coders. Economists call these jobs middle-
skilled jobs. What they mean by that is that typically these are the kinds of jobs that don't require a college education, but they do require some training after high school. That is what is really missing right now. That is where this skills gap can be closed.
The best known training you have probably heard about for these kinds of jobs is called career and technical education, CTE. For those who are older, you might think of vocational education. CTE programs are doing great work all over the country.
I have seen this a lot firsthand in Ohio. I am a big fan of career and technical education, so I visit our CTE programs--Butler Tech near Hamilton, OH, and Max S. Hayes High School in Cleveland, OH.
I cofounded and cochaired something here in the Senate called the CTE Caucus, alongside Senator Tim Kaine. We have meetings here. We have conferences here. We try to encourage more career and technical education back home. It is important. But the training we need goes well beyond these great high school programs. Shorter term technical workforce training programs post-high school are another key way to help close the skills gap. Think of the many workforce training programs that might be offered in your community college. We need to encourage more of those.
We need to be sure that the Federal Government is playing a role here to hold up career and technical education generally but also to ensure that these training programs are given the same opportunities that we give to 2-year and 4-year colleges and universities. One impactful way to close that skills gap is through Pell grants.
Currently, we use Pell grants to help expand access to college-level education to Americans. You have to meet the criteria, which is basically an income criteria. For lower income families in America, if you want to go to a 4-year college or university and you otherwise qualify, you can get a Pell grant to do it--not a loan, a grant. That is great, but, unbelievably, you can't get that same grant if you want to go to a 15-week, 14-week, 13-week, or 12-week training program to learn how to be a welder or a coder or a hospital tech. To me, that makes no sense.
Our bipartisan JOBS Act, which I cowrote with Senator Tim Kaine, would allow us to use the Pell grant for these shorter term job-
training programs with an industry-recognized credential at the end of the process. That is what employers are looking for. That is what these people need, young people and mid-career people who are looking for a job. Under current law, you are eligible for an associate's or a bachelor's degree but not to enroll in a CTE program under 15 weeks. It doesn't make any sense, and the JOBS Act would fix that.
By the way, these kinds of workforce training programs provide students with academic and technical skills knowledge and training that are necessary today to fill the 21st-century jobs we have. They encompass the kinds of high-quality and rigorous job-training programs that are easily transferrable to the in-demand jobs we have. Whether it is learning HVAC installation, how to operate factory machinery--which, by the way, often involves computer skills--or how to be a programmer or a coder, these programs teach students the practical, transferable skills that keep our economy moving.
I have seen firsthand how this can work in my home State of Ohio. Most recently in May, I had the opportunity to deliver the commencement address at two of our community colleges that specialize in these types of programs--Sinclair Community College in Dayton and Marion Technical College in Marion County. I was happy to go to these graduation ceremonies.
First, both schools were great partners in helping us develop the JOBS Act, and these schools are getting it done. They are giving students what they need, the tools they need to be able to succeed in today's workforce.
Second, I am always inspired by attending commencements at our community colleges. At these two colleges, as an example, I saw individuals as young as 15 years old walk across the stage. This one young man was getting his associate's degree that he started at a career and technical education program in high school before he got his driver's license. I also saw individuals as old as 74 years old. I saw the whole range. And they weren't just graduating; they were commencing a new stage of their lives that will be filled with opportunity because they are getting jobs.
That is why the JOBS Act is so important. It has the potential to help thousands more students, like the ones I met at Marion and Sinclair, in gaining the skills necessary to be their best and to get a job.
(Mr. YOUNG assumed the Chair.)
At the same time, we know that addressing the skills gap will not fully solve the challenges we face in raising our labor participation rates. Another is overcoming the scourge of addiction we have seen in Ohio and elsewhere around the country, from both opioids and, more recently, crystal meth.
Opioids, prescription drugs, heroin, and fentanyl have hit us really hard in Ohio. I see my colleague from Indiana is here on the floor. He sees the same thing. It has torn our families apart. It has devastated our communities. It has forced a lot of able-bodied adults out of the workforce while they struggle with their addiction.
We have begun to make some progress on this front. After 8 straight years of rising overdose deaths--8 straight years; every year more people dying from overdoses, to the point where we are losing 72,000 Americans a year--finally, we saw a drop in the last year. In Ohio, we had a 21.4-percent decrease based on a study that was done by the Centers for Disease Control. This is the last data we have from the most recent numbers. We will see. We expect to have some new numbers soon for all of 2018. We will see. That is good. A 21.4-percent decrease is good. The problem is, it started from such a high-water mark.
Frankly, what I am hearing this year, 2019, is that some of these overdose rates are increasing in some areas of Ohio. But we have seen some progress. Again, according to the studies that have been done, we are reducing the overdose deaths, but we still have so many people who are addicted, and we still have this issue of how to get them into the workforce.
The bills we have passed here in the Congress, like our CARA legislation--the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act--and the Cures legislation, have really helped. The STOP Act has helped to try to keep this deadly fentanyl, which is the opioid that is killing most people, out of our country. There is $3 billion in increased funding that has gone out from this Congress over the past few years to deal with education, prevention, treatment, longer term recovery, and providing Naloxone--this miracle drug--to reverse the effects of an overdose. Those are good, and we are making some progress but not enough yet--not enough. Our work is far from finished.
What I see happening in Ohio is that as we are making progress on the opioids, we are seeing crystal meth beginning to increase--pure crystal meth--methamphetamines coming from Mexico, across the Mexican border, into our country. Back in the day, we had meth labs in Ohio, in Indiana, and in other States represented in this Chamber. Those meth labs are pretty much gone now. People aren't making it in their own homes or in communities in Ohio. Instead, they are buying it on the street because it is cheaper and more powerful to buy pure crystal meth. That is not a good thing. It is a bad thing because it is indicating that the crystal meth is spreading.
By the way, these drugs are causing more law enforcement concerns than ever because, like cocaine, this is a stimulant. They call it a psychostimulant, which creates more violent crimes and more challenges for our law enforcement officials.
We have to ensure that we continue this downward trend in overdose deaths and address the crystal meth issue, which I will be talking about more over the next couple weeks, with some ideas on crystal meth.
Another factor that undermines our efforts to develop our workforce is the increasing number of people with a felony record. Having a felony record can be a heavy burden to bear when trying to find employment. Far too often, we see the downward spiral that occurs when inmates are released back into the community without any kind of job training, any kind of a way to deal with their mental health or drug abuse history or their addiction. So people find themselves out of a job and then committing crimes again to get by. This often goes hand in hand with the issue of addiction, as so many people are jailed for nonviolent drug offenses related to opioids, meth, and other drugs.
Fortunately, we are making some progress in getting these individuals the help and treatment they need, thanks to some actions we have taken here at the Federal level as well.
The Second Chance Act, which was signed into law about a decade ago, is helping. I was the coauthor of that back in the House and a coauthor again this year for the reauthorization of that legislation. It provides Federal grant money to State and local entities to help people, when they get out of prison, get their lives back together--
again, provide job training in prison, as they get out of prison; that transition--and help them deal with issues they have, including mental health and addiction.
In so many cases, that has been remarkably successful in reducing the recidivism rate--the number of people who go back into the system. Unfortunately, about two-thirds of those who get out of prison get rearrested within 2 or 3 years.
So there is a great opportunity here, if you use these programs, to keep these people out of the system and to get them back on their feet, back with their families, and back at work.
Last week, I was able to see firsthand how groups at the State and local level are using some of these Federal resources to create strong and effective pipelines to get individuals off the sidelines and back into participating in the workforce.
In Cincinnati, I had the opportunity to attend a graduation in supply chain logistics for 11 women incarcerated on nonviolent drug offenses. These 11 women now have a skill, a tool, to be able to go out and get a job in this 21st-century economy we have. In Cincinnati in particular, we have a lot of supply chain jobs that are available. They are excited about it.
I also visited one of the companies where a few of these women are going, where they hire a lot of second-chance folks, people who are returning citizens. They have had great success. These workers are grateful. They show up on time. They are local. We need more companies to take that person who has been down on his or her luck, gone through a program, and is ready to work. A lot of these women were repeat offenders of low-level crimes, and they had circulated in and out of prison for years.
This program is run by the Hamilton County Office of Reentry, which in 2010 was established in part from grant money from the Second Chance Act we talked about. Again, in coordination with local partners, this office of reentry has run programs like this that have given incarcerated individuals a chance to reenter society and the tools and support they need for gainful employment. That is one of the reasons we have the opportunity out there to reduce this problem with so many people out of work altogether. There is great potential here to get people back to work.
In May, I attended a roundtable with a number of workforce development nonprofits in Northeast Ohio, Cleveland, OH, including the Boy and Girls Club, Habitat for Humanity, and Youth Opportunities Unlimited.
Bloom Bakery is an example of an entity that is taking advantage of some of these Federal opportunities in the Second Chance Act. Their parent, a nonprofit, received a Second Chance Act grant that allowed them to help ex-inmates reenter the community. During their time at Bloom, individuals have a chance to contribute to the operations of the bakery, learn culinary skills, learn how to bake, learn how to deal with people, because it is a retail outlet, and also learn how to be good in the service industry.
I had the opportunity to meet a number of these individuals. Ashanique Johnson was one person I talked to. She talked about how Bloom was really a second chance for her, how she intended to use what she was learning there to find long-term success in the culinary field.
I also met with TreShon Bankhead. TreShon is a participant in another program, one of their sister programs that train healthcare professionals. He is currently working at University Hospitals as a nursing assistant and is pursuing a degree in nursing. It was great to see that. Again, it is a second chance for him.
Meeting them, hearing their life experiences, and seeing what they have accomplished underscore the need to continue to provide these opportunities so they can get ahead in life and so our economy can have them in the workforce.
Let me conclude by saying that when it comes to our economy, more participation is better for everybody. We want more people coming out of the sidelines, coming out of the shadows, and getting to work.
Let's make sure all Americans have the tools they need to go to work and to find success. Let's close that skills gap by doing the career and technical education programs that we have talked about but also providing more help at the Federal level. Rather than the help going to just colleges and universities for a degree, let it go to the short-
term training programs so they get a meaningful certificate and can go to work right away. Let's help get the JOBS Act passed to be able to do that. Let's help individuals overcome their addiction. Let's help people stay out of jail and stay with their families and get to work. Let's give every single American the opportunity to get the tools they need to achieve their God-given potential.
Thank you.
I yield back.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
