We're Going to Need a Bigger Raft to Fight the Jobs Crisis

In the Financial Times today, business leader Mortimer Zuckerman grimly summarizes the crisis in American jobs and wages.

For example:

Full-time workers used to comprise more than 70 per cent of the American retail workforce; now at least 70 per cent are part-time. The retail and wholesale sector has cut a million full-time jobs since 2006 while adding more than 500,000 part-time jobs. It is hard to believe that after the 20th-century labour struggles for the 40-hour work week, the 21st-century battle is a fight for enough working hours to make a living.

Like so many of us, though - I include myself - his appreciation of the severity of the problem bumps up against the meagerness of his program for doing anything about it.

What must be done to avoid a descent to a low-wage, part-time America? There are a whole raft of programmes:

invest in infrastructure and high-speed internet connections;multiply the government funds for training programmes and tie them to unemployment;

increase investment on education especially vocational training and post-secondary education;

strengthen science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) in high schools and recruit and train teachers to broaden access to computer science in high school;

create an additional supplementary category of 20,000 annual visas for foreigners with the science and technology skills that are in short supply;

improve the attractiveness for foreign companies to locate here through a simplification of regulation.

If that's the "raft" we're going to leave a whole lot of people in the water.

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David Frum

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