In his campaign acceptance speech last week, John McCain focused on worker retraining in a way Republican candidates rarely do.  McCain has understood throughout this campaign that how he responds to the plight of workers harmed by the global economy will be critical to his election chances.  In a March 24, 2008, editorial in the Washington Post, McCain's senior policy advisor included modernizing unemployment insurance and training programs as a critical component to McCain's plan to turn around the economy. Now this important issue is urgent.  Last week the Labor Department reported that unemployment has jumped from 5.7% to 6.1%, a five year high, as employers slashed jobs.  If such economic trends continue, McCain will have trouble winning the battleground states and the election.
Yet worker retraining is a perfect area for McCain to demonstrate his concern for workers and his key theme of bipartisan leadership.   Workforce development is an area that has been under the radar for the past few years. Efforts to reauthorize the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), the federal umbrella law for job training programs, have been stymied.  WIA reauthorization, unemployment insurance reform, wage insurance and trade adjustment assistance reform are ripe issues for the next president and Congress to discuss and address.Perhaps the most significant domestic policy work of the past eight years was the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education law.  President Bush and Ted Kennedy worked together for a bipartisan education plan.  Of course NCLB is not without controversy and McCain has to be careful associating himself with work of the past eight years; his strategy is clearly to separate from it.   Bipartisan leadership was clearly shown with that law.  That is the model for McCain.  Worker retraining is the next stage of educational training.  Rather than teaching high school kids, its teaching adults who have lost a “job that won’t be coming back, skills so they can get a job they won’t lose,” as McCain would say. Yet workforce investment policy remains stuck in partisan gridlock in the Congress.  McCain did well last night to outline some specifics about his philosophy for worker retraining.  He discussed community colleges, which are important, though the Bush administration has also focused on them.  One key line that has been underreported is his mention of filling the gap between an unemployed worker’s lost salary and that person’s new wage while that person trains for the new job.  That sentence signals support for an idea supported usually by Democrats - wage insurance - insuring a worker’s income against job loss.  This is a significant phrase for a GOP candidate to utter.   Federal spending on worker training has fallen dramatically over the past generation to the lowest spending per capita among the major industrialized nations and McCain did not spell out how he would improve worker retraining without violating his pledge to cut government spending. Still, McCain needs to do more to address the economic anxiety workers face.  Rising unemployment numbers make this issue all the more urgent.  Workforce policy is not only outdated, but stuck in the kind of bipartisan gridlock McCain wants to be elected to fix. This is an untapped area that he should move quickly to fill.