Our View: Fresh start for training

• Advocate Opinion page staff
• Published: Jul 6, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The goal of upgrading the education and skills of Louisiana workers is a huge one, and even the most enthusiastic boosters of the new Louisiana Workforce Commission will agree that progress will take time.

But we hope the new structure — replacing the old Department of Labor in state government — will be the start of fruitful new partnerships among business, labor and education groups in Louisiana. 

“We must match the needs of employers to our training programs, and guarantee companies that their hires will be trained and ready to work on day one — or we will retrain them for free,” Gov. Bobby Jindal said.

There was little opposition to Jindal’s workforce proposals in the recently concluded session of the Legislature — the main bill passed the Senate and House with almost no dissent — but the governor and other top officials acknowledged that making a real difference will be a long-term endeavor.

The Labor Department became the Workforce Commission and Labor Secretary Tim Barfield’s title is executive director. Barfield will remain a member of the governor’s Cabinet.

The commission will continue to carry out functions of the old department, such as administering the unemployment insurance and worker’s compensation systems, in addition to taking on the expanded role in work-force development.

The new commission is intended to oversee a system in which businesses can have more input into job training needs. Barfield said the program would be much more driven by regional needs, although a new Workforce Investment Council will continue to provide input at the state level, replacing the old committee established in the administration of Gov. Mike Foster. The council also will oversee the Occupational Forecasting Conference that is intended to give state officials data on trends in the state’s work force.

The new structure is more than just “a cosmetic name change,” according to Adam Knapp, president of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber. He said the chamber would step up its efforts to become involved in work-force training programs through the more locally focused structure created by the act.

That local emphasis was a big goal of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, which pushed for a job training program more like that in Texas. The head of that state’s Workforce Commission told LABI members earlier this year that almost all the significant decisions about training programs are made at the local level, rather than through a state agency.

That’s a big change in itself. Louisiana is a state where decisions tend to flow from the State Capitol down instead of the other way around.

In theory, local input always was available through local work-force boards, and the Foster administration made an effort to integrate training programs that would help people become more productive. But Knapp, Barfield and others involved in work-force issues for some time say the new structure will help.

We hope so, and commend the administration for this new effort and for Knapp’s pledge to become a booster of better training programs in the Baton Rouge region. Nevertheless, we appreciate the difficulties of changing the course of the lives of tens of thousands of workers who might never have graduated from high school and who toil in low-paying jobs.

The nation as a whole faces serious challenges in this area, and Louisiana lags the nation in many fundamentals such as educational attainment. Basics such as low-cost transit so that people can get to work are lacking in the state, and that’s before we get into the challenges of the areas hit worst by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.