More Options Needed for a Shot at the Good Life

Like the Industrial Revolution’s mills, today’s workplaces are struggling to find skilled, experienced workers, says Jim Bessen, a School of Law lecturer, in his new book. Photo by Melissa Mullens

It’s a bold book that challenges President Obama, revered management guru Peter Drucker, and the punditocracy. But Jim Bessen’s new volume says that what these folks are calling for—greater college access and graduation—while necessary, is not enough to spread prosperity, a message that’s gotten him quoted nationally, from the New York Times to The Atlantic to WBUR, BU’s National Public Radio station.

Instead, the School of Law lecturer argues in Learning by Doing: The Real Connection Between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth (Yale University Press, 2015), the United States must also focus on on-the-job-training and better vocational education, particularly at community colleges, if workers are to have the skills necessary to obtain good jobs.

“I think funding for colleges is great,” Bessen says. “But I think what we have had for the past 10 or 20 years has been sort of an imbalance where it’s been focused on 4-year colleges, and that’s just not the right solution for lots of prospective students, and for the kind of skills that need to be developed. My bigger argument is really that the major new technologies require a learning process that schools are ill-adapted to, at least for a while…because the knowledge is too new, it’s too uncertain. It keeps changing, so the schools can’t keep up.”

Bessen relies on both contemporary scholarship and historical experience, examining how skills in new technologies were learned by earlier generations of workers, for example, during the Industrial Revolution. He outlined his book’s argument in a BU Today interview.

BU Today: If colleges and universities are likely to be ill-adapted, perhaps for decades, to transferring skills that could lessen inequality, what do you suggest we do?

Bessen: We’ve had a major loss of middle-class jobs. It’s basically people who had skills, many of which were acquired on the job rather than in school, but those skills have become obsolete. There’s a new generation of skills that are in demand, like licensed practical nurses, with new ways of working, requiring a combination of training and skills learned on the job. Experimenting with work-study programs, where community colleges are linked up with local employers, is very helpful.

A second thing that’s helpful is certification. For labor markets to work well, employers need to know, this person has good experience. So you’re seeing a lot of industries setting up certification programs, and I think that’s positive.

A third thing is you want to have the maximum incentives for workers to learn on the job. Workers want to learn the skills, but they’re not sure what to learn and they’re not sure who can teach them. One thing that can sort of solve that chicken-and-egg problem is employee mobility, the ability to move from job to job. We’ve seen over the last 20 years the decline in employment mobility. It’s a bad sign.

Some people suggest the federal government should help pay for people’s job-related moves.

That may be helpful. I think other policies may be more direct. One thing that has been very big in Massachusetts has been employee noncompete agreements. There’s economic and legal scholarship that sees the ability of employees, particularly technical employees, to go from firm to firm to be a key aspect in the success of Silicon Valley. Massachusetts has allowed these noncompete agreements to be enforced, whereas California, for the most part, does not. California is right.

Your book says that special interests have lobbied against some of these policies you recommend. Who are these interests?

If you look at Massachusetts, it’s established firms. There are a couple of well-established, large tech firms, some of whom are also in California, who are very active and lobbying against the change in Massachusetts. These noncompete agreements now cover the majority of tech workers. They’re now starting to expand to yoga instructors and pizza parlor workers. The main reason they do this is because it makes it more difficult for someone to enter the industry if it’s hard for that group to hire talent.

What does history teach us about how technology is spread and how it benefits workers economically?

In the Industrial Revolution, mills set up all sorts of culture and education opportunities, and some of the mill girls themselves described this as like going to college. They did this so they could attract intelligent young women to work in the mills. Many workers could not do it; they left, so there was high turnover. It took decades to figure out systems to hire a labor force that was skilled, rather than have to train them.

We’re facing a similar difficulty. LPNs [benefited from] a different business model that made experience more valuable: the outpatient surgery center. Since the ’80s, we’ve seen this explosion in outpatient surgery clinics. Nurses are able to learn through their experience there because they’re dealing with a very narrow set of problems that repeat over and over again. After a few years, they’ve seen everything, and they know how to respond. That knowledge then allows them to play the frontline role.

In a hospital, you may have the physician analyzing things and calling the shots. What you have in these clinics is more of a triage system, where somebody comes in and they’re seen by nurses or medical assistants, who route them to the right sort of tests and the next stage. People are getting much better quality care at a much lower cost, but the thing that makes it work are these skills that have been acquired through experience.