The sound of the words is clear and almost comforting. Well done. Who could be opposed to that? Politicians utilize it in Rose Garden announcements, convention addresses, factory floors, and union halls. At gatherings in Washington and Brussels, economists nod in agreement. When surveyed, workers overwhelmingly state that they desire the same things that the framework promises: equitable pay, benefits, and schedules that allow them to organize their lives. Nevertheless, the atmosphere feels different than the press releases portray when strolling around the type of mid-sized American manufacturing town that the policy is purportedly intended for. The new plants are more subdued than anticipated. Although they are less common, shift jobs now pay more than they did in the past. The training courses are all booked. Less so is the path to permanent employment. There is a discrepancy between the ground and the rhetoric.
In its current form, the Good Jobs Economy agenda is less of a single program and more of a collection of initiatives bound together by a common belief: if the government provides sufficient public funding, establishes appropriate tax incentives, and links subsidies to wage and apprenticeship standards, private companies will react by producing middle-class, long-lasting jobs. Using clean energy, the Inflation Reduction Act attempted to achieve this. The CHIPS Act attempted to use chips to do this. Through regional workforce collaborations, the Good Jobs Challenge attempted to achieve this goal. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law attempted to do this through broadband, roads, and bridges. The theory was sophisticated. It has been more difficult to execute.
The ineffectiveness of the subsidies is not the issue. They do so in specific, quantifiable ways. In Tennessee and Georgia, wages in federally funded battery factories are higher than they would otherwise be. Enrollment in clean energy trades apprenticeships has increased. Certain localities, such as Syracuse, portions of Arizona, and some areas of Ohio, have experienced real increases in job quality that would not have occurred in the absence of the federal effort. The issue is what happens when the corporate calculus shifts, the subsidies diminish, or the political climate changes. Businesses that are subject to shareholder pressure typically comply with their requests. They make cuts. They use automation. The portions of their workforce that don’t suit the new cost structure are contracted out.
Beneath the policy, there is a structural mismatch that no one is willing to identify. The majority of American cities lack high-productivity, innovative enterprises that can hire a significant number of skilled workers at premium rates, and they are unlikely to do so. According to the Good Jobs concept, underemployment can be resolved through retraining. Often, it doesn’t. After completing a six-month coding bootcamp in Macon, Georgia, a laid-off retail employee does not find a $90,000 software job waiting for him.
With a new credential and the same employers, he returns to the same job market that he left behind. The outcome is what economists have begun to refer to as “ghost employment”—credentialed workers trapped in positions that don’t utilize their training in places where there aren’t enough businesses to properly recruit them.
Technology continues to make math more difficult. Automation and artificial intelligence are advancing manufacturing, logistics, and services more quickly than retraining programs can keep up. A federal agency creates a workforce program based on skills that are deemed essential in 2024; by 2026, the underlying job has been partially automated. That is a pacing issue rather than a program design flaw. The American workforce policy institutions were designed for a slowly evolving economy. These days, the economy fluctuates on a weekly or even daily basis. Many well-meaning policies are silently drowned in the space between those two clocks.
Additionally, the global component is often overlooked in American political discourse. A U.S. company that produces batteries, solar panels, or even some types of advanced semiconductors faces competition from Chinese, Vietnamese, and Mexican businesses that use labor cost structures that are essentially different. According to the Good Jobs framework, American businesses must pay higher wages in order to compete with competitors who do not. That occasionally works, especially in protected industries. Frequently, it doesn’t, and despite the incentives intended to maintain them domestically, the companies either lose market share, aggressively automate, or eventually relocate production components offshore.
In discussions with plant managers and workforce leaders throughout the Midwest and South, it’s difficult to ignore the lack of interest in the politically challenging discussions that the agenda truly calls for. Aggressively promoting job quality entails acknowledging that some entry-level positions will vanish in the process. Investing in long, unglamorous infrastructure that doesn’t result in ribbon-cutting pictures, such as community colleges, regional economic development, dependable child care, and transit, is necessary to create long-lasting middle-class jobs. The language of decent jobs has proven much easier to both main political parties than the institutional patience that the rhetoric requires. As a result, the program has high poll numbers, is expensive, and yields results that no anyone is entirely happy with.
The question of whether the nation wants more employment, better jobs, or an honest assessment of the trade-off between the two will determine whether or not that pattern breaks. The Good Jobs Economy will probably continue to operate as it has until that discussion takes place. generating real victories in particular locations. causing many others to be really disappointed. and producing precisely the kind of conflicting image that doesn’t neatly suit either side of the political debate.
