According to the Maine Department of Labor, Division of Labor Market Information Services, Maine has experienced a steady decline in manufacturing jobs over the past decade, jobs that historically had the highest wages and benefits. Over the past 4 years, Maine lost 19,000 manufacturing jobs, leading the nation per capita. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national re-employment rate for workers displaced from manufacturing jobs is lower than the overall reemployment rate for dislocated workers. The loss of manufacturing jobs is particularly difficult to absorb in rural areas of Maine with unemployment rates in Aroostook, Piscataquis, Somerset and Washington counties running significantly higher than the statewide average.
The Workforce Investment Act, National Emergency Grants and Trade Adjustment Assistance provide critical services in response to the crises of both individual and major dislocations. However, in many areas of the country, including rural Maine, the level of economic distress is so deep, that existing dislocated worker programs face ongoing challenges helping workers transition to and maintain new jobs and careers when grants end.
Newly dislocated workers often take whatever jobs are available to re-enter the workforce and pay their bills. Many dislocated workers do not take advantage of re-training opportunities because they cannot live on the unemployment benefits they would receive while going to school. Part time workers have had limited access to unemployment benefits. In many instances, training reflects the availability of particular training programs or the personal choice of the worker instead of the true needs of the market.
According to an article by Katherine Boo (New Yorker, March 2004) "The most common employment found by those who receive intensive federal training is temporary work—which also happens to be the most common employment found by displaced workers who receive no training at all." Consequently, the jobs that dislocated workers obtain during the term of a grant are often not a long-term solution.
In the recent large dislocations in the Maine pulp and paper industries, the impact of age and education level posed additional challenges. Most of the affected workers were between the ages of 45 and 53 and had worked at the mills for 20 to 30 years or more. The majority had no postsecondary education and needed remedial education in basic academic skills to consider new occupations or as part of their training for new work. A number of workers in training for heavy equipment operation, for example, needed remedial work in math to be able to manage load calculations and maintain logs. Those who did have some additional education were able to make a smoother or quicker transition to a new field of work, such as health care or social services. GNP dislocated workers who were surveyed in 2004 indicated that they perceived their top two challenges to re-employment to be obtaining wages and benefits comparable to their pre-dislocation employment and not wanting to leave the area or relocate. The resistance to relocation was attributed to the high cost of living in other areas and the value of being near family and friends. It is also true that for the majority, their personal “wealth” is found in their homes that have appreciated in value over their lifetimes through the improvements they have made in them and from the general appreciation of housing values. These stranded assets, temporarily reduced in value by the widespread decline in purchasing power associated with large dislocations like GNP, are often sacrificed in a desperate attempt to find work elsewhere. While many of these workers subsequently took positions at reopened mills, “downward mobility” is a real threat to those who had high wages in declining industries.
Consequently, the long-term structural changes in the Maine economy, the continued volatility in the manufacturing and paper industries and the challenges to job and wage retention that continue to impact workers throughout the rural regions of Maine, are calling for enhanced solutions and new mechanisms for both individuals and communities. Two critical concepts include sustainable employability and local economy building.
Sustainable Employability
Workers are becoming increasingly isolated as the relationship with their employers becomes more tenuous and ever shorter in duration. The trends to outsourcing, flexible staffing arrangements and independent contractors create a more distant relationship between worker and employer and individuals are increasingly left to manage their work lives for themselves.
Consequently there is a need for a shift in conceptual thinking that recognizes the realities of the new economy for individual workers. Workers need to focus on their individual competitiveness in the contemporary economy and recognize that they need new capacities to be successful—essentially they need to build their capacity for sustainable employability. As the words plainly suggest, sustainable employability is an expression of an individual’s employment readiness and competitiveness—currency in the labor market in both senses of the word. Being ready to compete for a new job, all of the time, is a burden of living in a volatile, fast-paced, globalized economy in the absence of income security or the prospect for long-term attachment to any one employer.
TDC’s concept of sustainable employability acknowledges that knowledge applied to work is increasingly specialized and perishable, and the performance of work is now more often role-based, project-oriented, collaborative, opportunistic, and demanding. In these circumstances, workers need to be able learners, socially adept team members, insightful organizational navigators, and skillful career managers. They have to be able to take tenuous employment relationships and run with them. Given these employment conditions, the only sensible recourse for today’s workers is to become rigorous, independent learners adept at teamwork. They also need to become open to possibilities and opportunities that present themselves in ambiguous ways. For this to occur, they need particular kinds of learning experiences—those that encourage independent inquiry as well as collaboration and those that stimulate original thinking and enterprising behavior.
In today’s employment market, individuals need to position themselves in an employment context, not a job context. Instead of presenting themselves to a potential employer as simply applying for a specific job, they create a more compelling presentation by describing their range of capabilities. Workers who understand and build the core capabilities of sustainable employability are more likely to remain employed, and any disruption to their employment will likely be of shorter duration, more infrequent and less disruptive. While technical and occupational skills are still necessary, they alone will not support sustainable employability.
Distinguished from (but encompassing) technical and occupational skills, sustainable employability capabilities are adaptive to a wide range of employment situations. Key capabilities include:
Adept Career Management:
While a key element of sustainable employability is building the necessary job qualifications that offer entry into the job market, today’s workers also need to be able career managers and labor market navigators. They need a full range of performance capabilities and perhaps more importantly, they need to understand those capabilities in the context of the broader labor market, how to obtain labor market information and how to present and apply their skills in varied situations. They need to stay up to date in the trends of the economy, their field and their company and how those trends could influence their prospects.
Commitment to Lifelong Learning:
Workers today will have many jobs during their work lives. Becoming adept learners committed to lifelong learning increases the likelihood of success and a lifetime of participation in the economy. Taking courses, reading periodicals and books about subjects pertaining to work, attending conferences and joining professional organizations and peer networks are all ways to gain new skills and stay informed about new developments. It is becoming increasingly more important for all workers to keep up with trends and changes within their fields.
Flexibility:
The pace of economic change is putting a premium on worker flexibility. The ability to translate a set of skills into new applications will be the difference between lifelong participation in the workforce and job displacement. While most people don’t like change, being able to “go with the flow” and adapt to changes in the work at hand is an important trait in order to remain employed throughout a lifetime. Adapting to change is more than an attitude; it is a mindset enlivened by knowledge renewal and aided by skills that have to be continually honed. People who are not able to adapt well to changes in their work and work environment increasingly find themselves left behind. Workers who are open to new ideas and new possibilities will be more valuable to businesses in this changing economy and will have a better chance of remaining sustainably employed because they are sustainably employable.
Creativity:
The development of creativity is critically important. Workers who are not creative will simply not be rewarded in this economy. Creativity can take many different forms. Most businesses today are looking for workers who can contribute to the company not just with their labor but also with ideas and their thinking. These are the people that are able to ride out major changes within companies and the economy. They are necessary to create the changes or processes that will allow organizations to adapt to new markets and conditions.
Collaboration and Teamwork:
Being able to collaborate and work with others at all levels of the organization is a critical aspect of employability. Individuals need to know how to balance the independence of self-directed work and learning with the ability to be collaborative and supportive in a team environment.
Technological Fluency:
At a time when a “generation” in personal computers is six months, when a “generation” in video technology is under two years, “fluency” cannot be formulated in terms of competence in any particular technology. The phrase technological fluency, developed by researchers at MIT, expresses an image of people who think in technological terms as easily as in their native language and who can adapt to new technologies as they emerge. The direct use of technological fluency to handle the hardware and software that might be encountered in the workplace is vitally important but only a small part of the reason technological fluency is urgently needed. The larger reason is that technology provides new modes of access to knowledge. Thus, another part of what is meant by technological fluency is fluency in acquiring knowledge.
Entrepreneurship:
Today’s economy puts a high premium on entrepreneurial skills even for employees within organizations. Entrepreneurial behaviors include a broad range of behaviors such as high energy, innovation, responsibility, dedication, independence, collaboration, flexibility, etc. Knowing how to approach a decision or manage a project as an entrepreneur would do, with the consideration of multiple scenarios and implications, with the highest level of commitment and dedication, and with responsibility for results, is valued at all levels of employment.
To achieve sustainable employability in today’s economy—to be effective, ongoing learners, building and maintaining their own competitiveness in the market—individual workers, and particularly dislocated workers in rural economies, need a support infrastructure that is fundamentally different from those that exist today. They need infrastructure that connects individual workers to learning, to each other and to the economy. TDC is currently working on the models for this new infrastructure.
Local Economy Building - Job Development in Rural Regions
Parallel to the shift in thinking needed for the development of the capacity of the individual, the development of sustainable economic communities also requires a cultural shift. After having worked in the Katahdin region for the past 3 years, TDC believes that traditional job development efforts cannot counteract the lack of economic diversification in rural areas. TDC envisions a world of vibrant and resilient community economies, each sustained by a network of locally owned, import-substituting businesses—that is, businesses that provide products or services that were previously provided outside the region and imported for local use.
Because local businesses seek first to meet local needs, they provide insulation from the ups and downs of the global marketplace. Because they are locally owned, they offer a rootedness that allows for community engagement, over time, in improving local quality of life. A community that cultivates a diverse web of such businesses faces a very different fate than one with distant ownership relying on export of a single, globally marketed product.
An important strategy for long-term job development in rural areas is local business development through a community action planning process, increased local purchasing and local entrepreneurship. The action research and planning process that TDC implemented in the Katahdin region offers a framework to engage in a program of community capabilities assessment, scenario planning, local purchasing and business analysis and response strategy formulation. For example, 12 community teams in the Katahdin region focused on healthcare, services, food, tourism, retail, etc. Each team assessed the region’s assets in each category and identified local business opportunities. This type of community mobilization develops a community's confidence and capacity to take ownership of its economic well being by providing a structured approach to developing the necessary thinking, assessment, analysis, and collaborative decision-making skills.
As part of its job development efforts in the Katahdin region, TDC also initiated a campaign to highlight current local businesses and promote their growth and expansion.
Many dislocated workers consider starting a new business as part of their transition back into the economy. Yet the current system provides limited support. Incubators have been shown to greatly improve the success rate of small business start-ups, but these tools have yet to play a major role in rural regions. Nationally, only about one in 500 start-ups has the support of an incubator and those that do participate are usually the high-tech, high-growth businesses that are least likely to facilitate long term job development for rural communities. Existing incubators seldom take on recently unemployed workers.
Another TDC concept that builds the technical, occupational and soft skill competencies that employers need in their workforce is TDC’s “learning company” design. Implemented as a core element of TDC’s work with disadvantaged youth, TDC’s “learning company” model is also adaptable to dislocated worker populations and in full alignment with Maine’s focus on the Creative Economy. A “learning company” is in the business of producing learning through the process of creating marketable products and services. The model of a learning company design accelerates the process of learning, reduces the personal, social and corporate costs of learning and increases the return on the investments made in learning. Two examples of TDC’s WORKS Enterprise® learning companies are Media WORKS Enterprise in Bangor where disadvantaged youth are employed in a design studio and Culinary WORKS Enterprise at TDC’s Loring Job Corps Center, where youth learn how to design, prepare and serve high quality meals in a demanding customer service setting. In addition to technical and sustainable employability skills, learning company models build skills in design, technology, customer service, and entrepreneurship, skills that are in high demand in the Creative Economy.
Summary
In summary, while many of the current programs for dislocated workers provide needed and valuable support, the demands of today’s economy, the trends to shorter-term and project-based employment, the shift to skill and role-based versus job-based employment—all demand a shift in response. New mechanisms are needed to help individuals manage their own work lives and build their capacity for sustainable employability. Similarly communities need new mechanisms to equip them for sustained economic viability that promote local purchasing, local business development, local entrepreneurship, and especially, local ownership. Finally, though essential, and challenging enough, this shift in response will not wholly succeed in positioning individuals, families, and communities to achieve economic well being today. The system of unemployment insurance needs to be reformulated to respond to the dynamics of the contemporary economy and sustain wage earners through the increasingly difficult transitions they face. Short of that, individuals working for a living will wager all that they have, day-in and day-out, in unlikely bet that they can either beat the odds or beat the clock when disruptions in their work lives occur.
-- Kathleen Coogan and Charles Tetro, September 2005