Seattle's Forgotten Middle......

A lot of attention these days is being paid to the needs of research universities and the highest paying jobs at high tech and biotechnology companies. But the vast majority of workers in the Seattle region have worked in middle skills job with family wages and good benefits. These are the folks that have been hit the hardest by the deep recession and the folks whose wage recovery is the key to our recovery. And there simply isn’t going to be a recovery if these hard working people are unable to get the skills that are required by the jobs that are growing as the economy begins to slowly lift off.

The vast majority of jobs in the Seattle area are skilled professional and technical positions that range from health care on First Hill and throughout the city to aerospace, construction and manufacturing jobs in SODO and the Duwamish, and to office occupations such as accounting and office management in the city’s big downtown business and financial service industries.

The jobs we lost going into the recession are not the same ones that are going to get us out of it. Nobody has been hit harder by the great recession than the middle wage skilled workers in these companies and organizations. People such as John Woeck, for instance, who worked for seven years as an electrician just as his wife lost her job of 14 years, exhausted his savings, and was almost out of unemployment funding to support their three children. Vinita Vigil, enrolled at Seattle Central Community College, worked for a digital graphics company before she was laid off. She was the primary source of income for her family of five, and she was forced to sell her house.

One of the most distressing features about today’s recession is that Seattle has thousands of job openings at the same time it has high unemployment. Economists say this is because the recession accelerated the decline of some industries, such as housing construction, at the same that that others requiring far different skills, including health care, emerged stronger. Some economists predict that this disconnect is likely to grow as the economy continues to develop jobs that require specialized skills. And the difference for those who have lost their jobs could be fine-tuning of their skills in a job training program that takes six months to two years to complete.

Construction, real estate, and financial service workers have seen jobs with their expertise disappear, while skilled work in health care, accounting, fashion design and I-T remain unfilled. A State’s Workforce Training and Education Coordinating Board 2010 survey of employers indicated that the vast majority of these job openings require a post-secondary vocational certificate or degree. The survey indicated that 62% of employers hired people and 26% or 10,500 firms in King County were unable to find skilled employees.

Fortunately, there is a solution. The Community and Technical College Worker Retraining Program was designed to get people who lost their jobs in declining occupations back to work in new and growing fields. Even in the depth of the recessions, three out of four graduates were able to find work within 6 months of completing their programs.

John Woeck retrained from work as an electrician in the housing industry to job in the heating, air-conditioning and ventilation industry. He was also able to convince his employer to hire two of his classmates. Vinita Vigil was able to find work in the ….. and now has an income to support her family.

This year, in order to meet record demand from individuals and families such as the Woecks and Vigils, the state legislature bumped up funding for the program to allow the program to serve more 14,000 unemployed individuals across the state. However, the funding was for one year only and on July 1, the program will be forced to cut services nearly in half leaving thousands of unemployed workers stranded midway through their programs. This will leave thousands of jobs unfilled and perhaps create a bottleneck in the economic recovery of our region.

Dead Aid

Dambissa Moyo's small book, Dead Aid, makes a simple straight forward argument that aid to Africa has been a disaster holding Africa back from economic progress. The solution is the development of private capital markets by African countries to raise money and foster the credibility that will attract foreign investment capital. Unlike income from aid, private capital will not tolerate the siphoning off of funds for grandiose personal consumption by corrupt governments. In the absence of free or cheap aid, countries will have to create the economic discipline needed to compete in the global economy. Foreign donors would have to curtail aid and instead extend their altruistic instincts to taking down their own trade barriers to African products.

Moyo has been trashed as a shill for pro-western multinationals seeking to exploit African resources. She has been labeled by some, as a right wing economist reviving the Reaganesque aid policies of the eighties.

This characterization is dead wrong. Moyo argues that it matters little whether a country is capitalist or socialist, the important thing is how the country finances economic development. She argues that socialists countries can and do raise money in private capital markets and spends it on a socialist agenda. She points to European social democratic governments as examples.

Obviously, the whole argument rises or falls on the ability of African countries to tap private financial markets. Moyo argues that increased savings by Africans combined with the continued growth of current African markets will enable the markets to work.

However, the size of the capital markets needed to replace aid would challenge the current financial infrastructure in Africa. Furthermore, it would require Western countries to begin to curtail aid and focus on trade. American farmers would rather spend American money to subsidize their food and dump it on the African economy than open up trade to African products.

The next phase of the Moyo paradigm is the transition. How can the very small financial markets grow to the size to propel development while maintaining their credibility abroad. Can aid be curtailed gradually and directed towards creating the market and trade infrastructure to compete?

Trust

Ryszard Kapusckinsci is an amazing journalists who has an ability to get behind the journalistic story and reveal the humanity, myths and histories that lie behind it.

His book, the Shadow of the Sun, is a collection of his 40 years of experience in Africa. One of the most fascinating stories that he tells is "salt and gold". Development experts frequently conclude that one of the reason Africa has lagged behind the rest of the world is because the whole notion of trust needed for a free market has no precedent in Africa. Salt and Gold says otherwise.

"Between the people of the Sahara and the sedentary tribes of the Sahel and the green savanna there had existed for centuries in this part of Africa a form of commerce known as silent trading. The inhabitants of the Sahel traded salt and received gold in return. This salt, a highly coveted and priceless commodity was carried from the interior of the Sahara to the River Niger where the transaction took place. ' When the Negroes reach the river, they proceed as follows,' tells a fifteenth-century Venetian merchant, Alvise Ca da Mosto. "each of them forms a little hillock out of the salt he brought and marks it. Leaving the salty piles arranged in one straight line, they retreat a half day's travel time in the direction from when they came. Then the people from another Negro tribe arrive. They come on large boats, probably from nearby islands, disembark and place next to each mound of salt a certain amount of gold. Then they too withdraw, leaving behind the gold and the salt. When they are gone, those who bought the salt return and if they deem the amount of gold to be sufficient, they take it, leaving the salt; if not, they take neither the gold nor the salt and go away once again. Then the other ones come back and take those piles of salt that have no gold next to them.; next to the others they place more gold, if they consider it appropriate or leave the salt. In this manner they conduct their commerce, never seeing one another and never speaking. This business has been going on for a very long time'".