Britain is in the longest recession since the Second World War. Mass unemployment is back. The road to recovery could be long and bumpy. On the fiscal front, the deficit could be higher than the 175 billion British Pounds forecast for 2009-10. Bringing the deficit under control will require higher taxes and lower public spending. In an effort to…

Economic competitiveness is today's most critical issue. Keeping the United States competitive in the world marketplace means the difference between a rising standard of living for everyone and the disappearance of what is taken for granted as a way of life. Developing human capital is the route toward successful competition, as some examples…

This paper identifies federal social policy concerning tax credits as it applies to work force training--its history, participants, implications, and impact. The paper outlines five programs--the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit (TJTC) program of 1978, the National Individual Training Account Act of 1984, the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) of 1983,…

Canada has traditionally supported a high level of unemployment benefits and retraining programs for its displaced workers. From the 1960s onward, legislation and attitudes in the business community have been geared toward retraining of workers for high-tech workplaces and the replacement of low-skill jobs with high-skill jobs. With increased…

The transformation of Singapore from a stagnating colonial port city in the late 1950s into a newly industrialized city-state in the early 1990s was the outcome of planned adjustments to changing internal and external conditions. Training and retraining programs played a role in these adjustments. Although full employment prevailed in 1979, the…

A model for assessing unemployed workers and providing useful information for counseling these workers for further training and retraining was developed and tested in Chicago with a sample of 25,000 subjects over a two-year period. The model, called the Manpower Assessment and Placement System (MAPS), was designed to give one-day turnaround time…

This document is a transcript of a fact-finding hearing conducted to evaluate the prospective impact of robotics (the use of sophisticated programmable or computer-controlled robots to perform routine and repetitious tasks) on employment in this country. Testimony and prepared reports were given by John Andelin, assistant director of Science,…

The need for a national policy for the development and use of human resources is evident. One part of the human resource development issue centers around the needs of adult workers who are unemployed or threatended with unemployment because of structural changes in the labor market. The issue of retraining adult workers was examined in detail in…

A task force examined New York State's role in providing resources and information to employers desiring to upgrade the skills of their current workers. The following were the task force's 12 major findings: (1) upgrading the skills of New York's existing work force is vital to the state's economic future; (2) all workers need opportunities for…

This report presents the views expressed at the Labor/Higher Education Council's National Meeting, the theme of which was "Education and Work: Redefinitions and New Strategies." Section 1 includes two keynote speeches: "Priorities for Economic Investment in People, Technology, and Public Works" (Ira Magaziner) and "Organized Labor's Stake in the…

This publication analyzes relationships between various forms of learning and economic performance at the regional level and provides rather strong evidence of the importance of individual and firm-level organizational learning for regions' economic performance. Chapter 1 is an introduction. Chapter 2 maps out a conceptual framework for the…

The Defense Conversion Adjustment (DCA) Demonstration, administered by the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Work-Based Learning, consisted of 19 demonstration projects that used three approaches to alleviate the negative impacts of defense cutbacks on communities, firms, and workers: community planning, dislocation aversion, and worker…

This book examines the causes of worker displacement in the United States in the context of national economic change. It discusses the promising, through scattered, efforts already underway to help dislocated workers and outlines more far-reaching steps that can be taken with assistance of the federal Job Training Partnership Act of 1982. The book…

In the spring of 1985 a task force comprising private sector representatives was convened to formulate recommendations regarding the development of an overall policy framework for employment and training and related systems in Virginia. The task force was asked to focus their efforts on the following policy areas: training and retraining the adult…

The recent frenzy over education--that is, children and schools--has obscured an adult learning crisis that will really put this nation's economy at risk between now and the beginning of the next century. The postindustrial economy demands a new kind of learning enterprise, focused on adults rather than children, on learning rather than education,…