Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 16, 1993 TAG: 9302160334
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
TWO-PART PROGRAM
THE ANSWER to job loss throughout Southwest Virginia is a recognition that job loss is not an incurable illness but a symptom of an avoidable condition. The solution should not be to find our way back to yesterday but to open the door to tomorrow. This will require an energetic program to achieve three things - one for today, two for tomorrow.1. For today:
A massive jobs bank to identify current opportunities and projected needs. People with both skills and need now should be encouraged to relocate and to accept reasonble stopgap employment to help bridge the gap to a better future.
2. For tomorrow:
A major effort in education and retraining, matching new skills with changing opportunities.
A renewal of the entrepreneurial spirit, by providing support and encouragement for those unemployed with certain designated skills and interests to band together in the formation of new businesses. Working with both federal and local loans, the new enterprise would bring together out-of-work managers, technicians, laborers, people with service skills and newly retrained specialists of all stripe.
Once formed in businesslike teams, some members may eventually go on to other jobs as growth occurs, join other entrepreneurial teams or begin new careers. Some may remain with the new business in a competitive effort to help meet newly identified production and service needs of both the region and beyond. Each new business formed would be like seed corn planted to meet the harvest of the future.
Like any good corporation, such a two-part program should be established with a clear purpose, goal and philosophy. After all, education is the essence of growth and retraining is the spirit of change. The entrepreneurial spirit is the very heart of the American identity, the American experience. Both of these are reminders of an old concept we forget too easily: that the only constant in a world of change is change itself. CLAYTON BRADDOCK NEWPORT