Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, June 18, 1990                   TAG: 9006180269
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/1   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

PANEL URGES OVERHAUL OF U.S. JOB TRAINING

The United States also will lose the economic race with other countries unless business, schools and government take radical steps to boost worker skills, concluded the report.

"Most workers receive no education or training beyond high school," the report said, adding that existing state and federal training programs are "haphazard, incoherent and bureaucratic."

"What we are facing is an economic cliff of sorts. And the front line working people of America are about to fall off it," the report said.

Front-line workers include clerks, secretaries, machinists, drivers, farm hands and others who are not usually college educated.

The report offered a blueprint for changing the way schools, business and government prepare workers for an increasingly complex economy.

Among its recommendations is a requirement that U.S. companies devote at least 1 percent of payroll to skills training and a mandate that no one under 18 be allowed to hold a job until earning a certificate proving mastery of basic academic skills and work qualities.

It also recommended that states, with federal assistance, create "local youth centers" for ensuring that all dropouts ages 14-21 earn mastery certificates. The report estimated such centers would cost $8.2 billion a year.

The report warned that many with limited skills face the loss of jobs as U.S. businesses struggle to cut labor costs to stay competitive with foreign companies.

"Higher skills means the jobs stay at home," the report said.

Seventy percent of U.S. workers "will see their dreams slip away" unless society increases the commitment to improved skills, the report said.

The study was produced by the 34-member Commission on the Skills of the American Work Force. The panel included top business, education and labor executives. Its chairmen were former U.S. Labor Secretaries Bill Brock and Ray Marshall and Ira Magaziner, an international business authority.

The report was based on about 2,000 interviews conducted at over 550 companies and agencies since last July in the United States, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Japan and Singapore.

While U.S. businesses spend some $30 billion training workers, only one-third is spent on non-college educated employees. About 15,000 companies, less than 1 percent of the total, provide over 90 percent of corporate-based training in the United States, the study said.

By contrast, the report found foreign education systems far more committed than U.S. schools to preparing all students for successful careers, not just the college-bound.

And the approximately 100 foreign corporations in the study were generally more inclined to avoid layoffs and provide worker training than U.S. companies.

The study was funded with $500,000 in grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, New York state and Towers Perrin, a New York-based consulting firm.

The commission was created by the National Center on Education and the Economy, a Rochester, N.Y.-based group whose president, Marc Tucker, was another principal author.

The report's central theme was that U.S. schools and businesses should strive to "professionalize" front-line workers and bolster skills so they will need less supervision. In turn, companies will become more efficient, sell more, expand and employ more people at higher wages.