On Capitol Hill, lawmakers have discussed the need to control health care costs and to make sure large numbers of workers are not priced out of coverage, but no comprehensive proposals have moved to the top of the legislative agenda.
The White House has promoted the notion of personal reemployment accounts, a stipend of up to $3,000 for unemployed Americans to use for retraining, child care, moving costs or other expenses associated with locating new work. Those who find a job within 13 weeks could keep the leftover funds.
Bernie and Teresa Geerling of St. Charles, Mo., are feeling the pinch of today's changing job market.
(Mary Butkus For The Washington Post)
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$17 AN HOUR
About This Series
This is the sixth and last in a series of occasional articles about changes in the middle of the U.S. workforce -- the disappearance of many jobs that pay near the national average of $17 an hour, with such benefits as health care and pensions. Previous articles addressed topics such as the growth in itinerant workers, the tough decisions faced by businesses trying to preserve jobs and the effects on black workers. To read the other stories, go to www.washingtonpost.com/business
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Another idea, championed by Brookings Institution economist Robert E. Litan, would provide wage insurance for workers whose jobs were eliminated. Under such a program, displaced workers who found jobs at lower salaries would have the difference made up, for a maximum of two years.
Last year, the Labor Department launched a pilot wage insurance program that would provide workers age 50 or older with half the difference between their old salary and their new salary when they're forced to take lower-paying positions following a layoff. Workers would also get a tax credit for 65 percent of their health insurance premiums. But the eligibility requirements are many -- the layoff, for instance, must come because of competition from abroad. As of August, only 715 workers nationwide had enrolled.
Some contend that such ideas only touch the edges of a looming crisis. While they may help individual workers in the short term, they don't address the larger difficulties faced by the workforce in adapting to the demands of 21st century jobs. For that, these labor market experts say, the educational system will have to continue to raise its quality and reach a broader population.
Thomas Bradtke, a manager at Boston Consulting Group, said that for the United States to retain its technological leadership and create new job-producing industries, it will have to keep coming up with a large share of the world's innovative ideas. At a time when other countries' students are routinely testing higher than American children in science and math, that's not a given.
"Education systems compete against each other in the long run," he said. "Right now the U.S. is still at the leading edge of innovation, but what if five or 10 years down the road, India has built up world-class universities?"
Carnevale, who was a member of the White House advisory committee on technology and adult education in the Clinton administration, argues that the country needs the equivalent of an industrial policy focused both on getting more people through college and on retraining them for new jobs.
Otherwise, "we could have a permanent working poor," he said. "They don't live in America; they kind of live under it."
The Geerlings are determined to avoid that fate. Teresa Geerling said she plans to work "as long as I have two arms and two legs."
Life for the couple has recently become more complicated, however. Until now, she could do without the health insurance at her new job because she was included in her husband's plan, which covers them both for $37 per month.
But Bernie Geerling, who still works at American Airlines as a baggage-handling supervisor, just got notice that he is scheduled to be laid off next month. He is hoping he can transfer to another slot at the airline somewhere else in the country, but union and company rules for such moves are complex. "With a little hope and a little prayer here and there, things will work out," Bernie Geerling said.
In the meantime, the Geerlings had to refinance their house after Teresa's layoff and have "gotten in a little over our heads" with credit card debt, she said. New carpeting and other major home-remodeling projects are on hold.
If her husband does not get a transfer, Teresa said, they will probably stay in the area but sell their well-tended house in a quiet residential neighborhood and move to something smaller.
"Scary's not the word for it," she said, reflecting on the growing number of workers she knows facing similar predicaments.
