Why Can’t Workers Get the Skills They Need?
A conversation with authors Stephen Goldsmith and Kate Markin Coleman on how the US’s fragmented workforce development system hurts businesses and limits economic opportunity — and what’s needed to fix it.
Upskilling is hard work.
Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
This is one of a series of interviews by Bloomberg Opinion columnists on how to solve the world’s most pressing policy challenges. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Romesh Ratnesar: Even with a recession looming, the US labor market remains extremely strong, with unemployment at a five-decade low. At the same time, the rate of working-age Americans participating in the labor force is below pre-pandemic levels, despite a high number of job openings. One reason is that many low-income workers lack pathways to obtain the skills needed to move into good-paying jobs. You’re the co-authors of “Growing Fairly: How to Build Opportunity and Equity in Workforce Development.” Steve was mayor of Indianapolis and deputy mayor of New York City; Kate is a former executive vice president of the YMCA. How did each of you decide this was a policy area you wanted to spend time looking into?
Kate Markin Coleman, co-author, “Growing Fairly: How to Build Opportunity and Equity in Workforce Development”: I’m a Democrat and Steve is a Republican. As you can imagine, politics and policy are frequent topics of conversation in our household. And since at least 2019, one of those topics has been our shared concern about the impact of income inequality, the fact that we increasingly have a “two-sided” economy. So we made a decision that we wanted to look for policies and programs that had shown promise in getting more people into the pipeline, through the pipeline, and out of the pipeline and into good jobs.