A Failure of Opportunity

A Failure of Opportunity

Professional development opportunities are big business. An industry trade organization reports that American corporations spent over $160 billion on workforce training and development in 2012, an average expenditure of over $1000 per employee. That sure seems like a lot of money, an incredible investment in employees’ personal development and professional growth by employers who may or may not see the impact of that investment directly.

Yet how often do those professional development dollars flow to the school bus driver, the warehouse worker, or the shop floor employee of a food services company? Rarely. Managerial and supervisory training programs occupy the number one content area in workplace training, with mandatory and compliance training second. In other words, when corporations spend money to train the working classes in their organizations, it is because they are required to do so by law.

At Books@Work, we routinely talk to employers who want to find ways of reaching lower-level workers, but who don’t have the resources or models to do it. A school superintendent told us that he couldn’t wait to get up in front of the staff in his district and announce, “This one is not for the teachers. It’s for the classified staff.” The impact of such a statement on bus drivers, custodians, clerical staff and others who have never been afforded professional development dollars can be profound, as it signals the company’s commitment to seeing their employees as people capable of achieving, not merely cogs in the wheel.

The professional development spending gap is just another way in which the American working classes are denied the promise that hard work is supposed to offer in this country. In an op-ed earlier this week, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof highlighted the “crisis in working-class America”, contending that the coincidence of birth does more than anything else to determine success. Like so many others, Kristof’s friend, 64 year-old Rick Goff of Yamhill, Oregon was dealt a bad hand as a youngster, and he never fully recovered. Unlike his contemporaries in the middle and upper classes, he didn’t have the resources to rise above the mistakes he made along the way. The result is a cycle of poverty, addiction, and hopelessness that now extends to Goff’s children – a daughter in a halfway house recovering from a heroin addiction, and a son in prison. And the costs to the Goff family, and to society as a whole are staggering. Kristof describes something we see over and over again – a failure of opportunity, not a failure of potential.

Kristof contends that the start of a solution to such complex and heartbreaking patterns is “empathy” that in turn gives life to a host of public policies ranging from early childhood interventions to higher wages. But in our contentious political climate, such public policies are often dead on arrival, empathy or no. In such a climate, we must also examine the role that the private sector can play in providing real opportunities for members of the working classes to move beyond their current plight and toward their potential.

Professional development spending on lower-level workers is just one piece of this puzzle, of course. It is hardly a structural solution, and it reaches only the gainfully employed members of the working classes. Still, it offers a glimpse of what is possible when opportunities are extended to those traditionally denied them.

The woman who asks her kindergarten-age son to point out sight words in the novel that she is reading for a Books@Work seminar, and the woman who reads an assigned short story aloud to her daughter may not have the resources to pursue a college education. But by sharing books with their children, they are paving the way for a future in which the circumstances of birth may not contribute so heavily to financial and emotional outcomes. It is a start.

Books@Work is many things, but at its heart, it is a program that promotes economic advancement through the development of soft skills and exposure to higher education. Until our politicians adopt the empathy that Kristof promotes, we need more corporate leaders to display empathy by taking the working classes seriously – as capable learners, valued employees, and especially, as worthy of investment intended to propel them toward better paying jobs.

Image: Coit Tower Murals, San Francisco, WPA Federal Art Project, California School of Fine Arts faculty & students, via Frank Fuijimoto, Flickr.


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Rachel Burstein

Rachel Burstein

Rachel Burstein is a Research Associate for EdSurge and former member of the Books@Work team.