For U.S. Border Workers, 'Job Training'
Requires More than Learning English
Ryan Hess and Cecilio Morales

Improving your English is not enough to get a decent job. That at least seems to be the essence of a federal court settlement last month.

At issue was the complaint by El Paso, Texas, widget workers — most all of them Spanish-speaking — that, although they proved they were entitled to federal Trade Adjustment Assistance, they had been shunted off to remedial English-language instruction rather than on-the-job training or bilingual technical courses.

Whether it was a well-intentioned mistake or merely bureaucratic thinking gone astray, the effort was an expensive miscue. According to an audit by the Department of Labor's inspector general, as much as $106 million was wasted on efforts that yielded $5- and $6-an-hour jobs.

The workers' river-fording town (population 560,000), junior partner of Ciudad Juárez (population 1.1 million) just across the Mexican border, is home to the binational maquiladora system, introduced in 1963, that taps low-wage Mexican labor to assemble U.S. components into finished products. The products can be branded "Made in USA" because they’re produced in twin U.S. and Mexican plants

Described by advocates as the "ground zero" of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, El Paso lost thousands of jobs to the pact. Some 6,472 workers qualified for assistance in the first two years of the program alone. The job market got so difficult that some U.S. workers reportedly crossed the border south to work illegally in Mexico.

Aided by other interest groups, the Asociación de Trabajadores Fronterizos (Association of Border Workers) filed two related suits against the U.S. Department of Labor in 2002 and 2004. These challenged federal regulations allowing state and local agencies to provide remedial English-language classes as "training."

The current Trade Act requires on-the-job training as a first priority and demands program officials set themselves the goal of helping the U.S. workers to replace in their new jobs at least 80 percent of the wages they earned in their old ones, although the goal is not required by regulations.

Local training officials defended themselves against the audits, pointing out that trade adjustment was originally meant for middle-aged, middle-class, English-speaking factory workers of the Northeast and Midwest. (Those workers, incidentally, suffered their own economic debacle after the 1974 Trade Act, one from which average wages have never recovered in inflation-adjusted terms.) The local job training officials explained that the people they served in El Paso were younger, less educated and had fewer skills.

Auditors may have had a basis to claim the workers completed, on average, the ninth grade, instead of the third as the locals claimed.

Still, we're speaking of El Paso sweatshop workers with considerably less than a high school diploma, as opposed to workers in foundries and assembly lines feeding the Rust Belt smokestacks, in essence high-wage unionized employees, many with at least some college education.

Somewhat more troubling is the observation by federal auditors that at least some of the El Paso workers, whose peers would later sue, were "interested in the needs related payments, not employment." The disproved and hoary "welfare queen" defense cannot stand the federal government in particularly good stead.

Plenty of lens cleaning is needed all around. Fortunately, the parties agreed before a judge that the ultimate effect was undesirable. Educated or not, job-related skills should have been imparted.

“Hispanic workers who lose good jobs due to overseas competition often end up in minimum-wage jobs that they could have gotten even before federal taxpayers invested thousands of dollars in so-called training,” said the Asociación in court filings.

The settlement now calls for a $6 million, two-year training program to be run by the Upper Rio Grande Workforce Development Board in El Paso. In addition, the U.S. Employment and Training Administration must now issue new "guidance" that defines what makes programming suitable to be considered training for trade adjustment purposes.

A draft of the guidance says remedial education, when provided as a stand-alone training program using TAA funds, will be allowable only when assessments show an individual already holds valuable occupational skills but needs some basic education, such as improved English-language skills, to obtain a job.

“Now all trade-dislocated workers will be given an opportunity to train for replacement jobs as Congress intended. The government is finally responding to the problem,” concludes Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney for the liberal interest group Public Citizen, which supported the worker organization’s case.

(Ryan Hess and Cecilio Morales are editors of the Employment & Training Reporter in Washington, D.C., and may be reached at editor@miipublications.com)

© 2006 Hispanic Link News Service
1/23/06
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