Last fall, I had the privilege of visiting Ukraine when the country was holding its parliamentary elections. The colorful campaigns—and a general lack of faith among the middle-class Ukrainians I met that the process would improve their lives—offered special insight into the country.

My electoral timing is good again on my current trip to India. Karnataka, the state in which Bangalore is located, will hold elections May 10. The emphasis that India puts on education as a key to growth is evident from the campaign manifesto released by the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In that document, the party pledges to establish cyber-cafes in every village. The goal is to take the IT energy evident in Bangalore to the countryside. Based on the number of billboards in rural areas advertising computer and business classes, it is clear that plugging poor—often destitute—people into IT prosperity is a priority.

The national government also is getting in on the act. Over the weekend, Indian Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said that if the country puts as much effort into human capital development as it does into attracting investment and increasing productivity, it could add 1 percent to 2 percent to the country’s already rapid annual growth rate.

One program under way is the National Skill Development Mission, which is designed to help prepare Indian students for the job abilities they’ll need beyond what they get through classroom instruction. Chidambaram also said the country must increase the number of primary school students entering college from the current 11.6 percent to the world average of 23.2 percent, or the developed-country average of 54 percent.

In addition to this activity, the Indian Human Resource Development Ministry announced on April 20 that all central educational institutions should offer reservations for positions in upcoming courses to members of “Other Backward Classes.” This mandate is the result of an Indian Supreme Court order to increase educational opportunities for poor Indians.

Now, apply simple math to these moves and you see the talent potential in India. After visiting the country for even a day, you notice that there is no one-child policy here, as there is in China. Kids are ubiquitous. The Indian population is estimated to hit 1.2 billion by 2011.

In a country this huge, there already are big and growing middle and upper classes. From those strata, India is producing some of the world’s top engineers and scientists, many of whom graduate from U.S. colleges and universities. When lower-income Indians are given a better chance to join their ranks, there will be even more young professionals in Bangalore eager to take advantage of the country’s proliferating IT opportunities.

Almost every 20- or 30-something Indian I met during my weeklong visit to Bangalore had some kind of IT job—and so do some of the American expats I encountered. U.S. companies will continue expanding operations here. In a visit to Bangalore on April 24, Accenture CEO William Green said the company intends to increase employment in its Indian operations to 50,000 from 37,000 within a year.

These developments present an opportunity for the United States. For Accenture, IBM, Microsoft, Dell and dozens of other U.S. companies, India is source of innovation and a growing market. The products and profits they generate here are good for the United States.

But the U.S. must also meet the challenge posed by India’s strong talent pool. U.S. students must be prepared not only to work harder in school but also learn how to be more creative in science, engineering and all other disciplines. It’s the best way for America to maintain its edge in global competition.

Of course, the U.S. also is in the midst of an election season. It would be refreshing to hear our candidates, from the presidential to congressional and state levels, engage in an intelligent dialogue about how the country could improve its educational and workforce development systems to help all Americans participate—and prosper—in the global economy.

Instead, we’re subject to their efforts to score political points by trashing trade liberalization and touting tax cuts. A challenge—and opportunity—of the magnitude represented by India requires a thoughtful political debate. There’s still plenty of time to have one.

Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama created a political firestorm when he waxed philosophical at a San Francisco fundraiser about the plight of the working class—a group of Americans under constant threat of job loss.

“It’s not surprising that they get a little bitter; they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment,” he was quoted as saying.

Leaving aside the potential offense the remarks could give to people whose faith or firearms are genuinely important to them, Obama may be on to something when he says that many American workers are bitter.

But it’s unlikely their economic fears are assuaged by what they hear from presidential candidates, including Obama, or from elected officials. Helping those who have been left behind by global economic competition and technological advancement requires a complex policy approach based on management, labor and government cooperation.

It will take the combined efforts of those three entities—along with presidential leadership—to modernize U.S. workforce training programs, streamline health care and wage assistance for displaced workers, and develop a portable benefits system so workers don’t lose their safety net when they lose their jobs.

These issues deserve a prominent place in political discourse. They’re not getting it. True, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi halted the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, a top priority for President Bush, in order to “put the leverage back into the hands of America’s working families” and force Bush to consider Democratic economic proposals.

Chief among them is an expansion of Trade Adjustment Assistance for workers who are adversely affected by trade. Another is a second economic stimulus package that focuses on an extension of unemployment benefits.

But when Pelosi and Bush tangle, they usually fight over Bush’s insistence on making his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent. Democrats say they are a sop for the wealthy.

Bush only brings up Trade Adjustment Assistance when he is looking for support for trade agreements. The administration has shown little interest in it otherwise. But Democrats tend to talk more about cushioning the hurt of unemployment than they do about how to help all workers—including those who already have jobs—improve their skills and their standard of living.

On the campaign trail, Obama has devoted at least one speech to workforce training. But the rest of the time, he stokes worker anger about tough economic times rather than outline ways to help them move their career arc higher. He’s consistently pitting workers against management.

“What we can’t do is sign trade deals that put the interests of multinational corporations ahead of the interests of our workers or our environment,” Obama said in an April 15 speech before building trade unions.

In reality, international companies depend on a strong workforce. The firms’ success is inextricably linked to their employees’ success—and for that matter, unions’ success. Despite his rhetoric about uniting management and labor, Obama rarely explores how to leverage that relationship for the good of the economy and individuals.

Sen. John McCain is not necessarily providing much hope for struggling workers either. In a major speech on economic policy April 15, he concentrated on tax breaks—an issue that won’t bring immediate comfort to those whose factory is moving to Mexico or China.

He did outline worker retraining and unemployment insurance reforms. But those policies came up in paragraphs 33 through 35 of a 43-paragraph speech. People who are worried about how to improve their skills to get a better job had to wait a while for McCain to get around to them.

Bush, Pelosi, Obama and McCain could do a better job of addressing workers’ fears.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich often is a headliner at Washington conferences. His draw is not just his hefty “formerly” title but also his skill at making policy entertaining—no mean feat in a city full of sharp people who nevertheless can lose their audience in the weeds of legislative and regulatory detail.

Gingrich was at his big-picture best as the keynote speaker at the National Association of Workforce Boards Forum on Monday, February 25. He called training crucial to economic growth because it creates “engaged” and productive workers who can compete with India and China.

“If we cannot train the American workforce and we cannot have the most dynamic economy in the world, we will no longer be the leading country in the world,” Gingrich said.

He recommended that individualized training take place regularly over a worker’s lifetime. It should be largely carried out over the Internet rather than in classrooms and adapted to cultures and languages. It must be a flexible and agile system because there’s no way to predict what the U.S. workforce will need in a few years—say, 2015.

“We’ll be lucky to know that in 2014,” he said.

Gingrich’s message was well-received, even though he criticized community colleges— and the rest of academia— as being the wrong institution to provide leadership in changing the U.S. workforce training system because it is too sclerotic.

It was likely that many in the audience represent community colleges on local Workforce Investment Boards, the public-private entities that manage the approximately $3 billion federal training system.

Nonetheless, Gingrich received a standing ovation at the end of his presentation—in part because he offered to be a bridge from the group to Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona.

Even though McCain, the Republican front-runner for president, has addressed training issues on the campaign trail, he is viewed with some suspicion by workforce boards. Training funds have tended to take a hit when McCain launches his budget-cutting offensives.

But the current Democratic majorities in Congress aren’t exactly raising the training flag. Last year during the appropriations process, no House member put Workforce Investment Act funding in the top 10 of his or her priorities in letters to the appropriations committee, according to David Bradley, CEO of USA Works.

The Democratic Congress restored about $1 billion in cuts that the Bush administration proposed for training, but it acquiesced to a $250 million rescission in Workforce Investment Act programs.

It’s more of the same in the Bush budget this year, which calls for about a $1 billion cut in training programs. The president has said that he will not accept any discretionary domestic spending above the limits he has set.

Last year, even Republicans who pledge to support workforce funding increases stood with the president when he vetoed a bill that would put more money into the Department of Labor’s budget.

“They can’t have it both ways,” Bradley said.

With partisanship rising to even higher levels than normal in the midst of a presidential campaign, gridlock is likely to impede this year’s budget process. So, advocates are going to play defense.

The message they should send to Congress, Bradley said: “No cuts, period, on workforce.”
 
Broader reform of the Workforce Investment Act has languished. Congress has not reauthorized the law since 2003. Democratic leaders have indicated it will not happen this year either, according to Bradley.

Among the reasons: A Republican push for faith-based delivery of training programs, Democratic desires to wait for a Democratic presidential administration, and objections from organized labor. In addition, there’s little time available on the congressional calendar.

Meanwhile, employers in several parts of the country—including Wisconsin, Ohio, Arkansas, Washington state and Kentucky—are collaborating with government and educational institutions through an initiative called “career pathways” to develop training programs to produce workers they need in manufacturing, health care and other sectors.

“Washington [D.C.] needs to learn from the examples of states,” said Julian Alssid, executive director of the Workforce Strategy Center. “Most people in the country don’t realize there are resources that can help them in their search for new and better jobs.”

An emphasis by Gingrich’s former colleagues on Capitol Hill and by the presidential candidates could do a great deal to raise the urgency of the issue.

Most of the time, corporations and unions have an antagonistic relationship. Organizing efforts are often cast as a zero-sum game. The more power the unions gain, the more business costs will rise and profits will decline. The unions say that if their membership grows, more people will enter the middle class.

In the midst of this fear and loathing, the presidential campaign offers a chance for candidates to turn their amorphous calls for change into actual, bold proposals. As I write this entry, I’m not sure how Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, has fared on Super Tuesday. But he likely will remain viable for a while, regardless of how many states he won or lost.

Here’s something Obama, as the primary purveyor of change, could propose in the area of people management. He’s garnered the backing of many unions and tens of thousands of union members. Perhaps he should propose a way for them to change the atmosphere in labor relations by reaching out to management in an area that directly affects their future–training.

This is a topic on which labor has built a solid reputation. Unions take pride in ensuring that their members are up to industry standards in many different trades. Companies are desperate to find qualified employees, or failing that, to bolster the skills of the people who do fill their open positions.

An example of how a company and union have worked together can be found at Boeing. The manufacturer churns out one 737 aircraft every day. In putting together the mammoth products, technicians work on 92,288 pieces of equipment at Boeing operations in Oregon and Washington alone. Many of these are precision machine tools that cost from $300,000 to more than $1 million.

Boeing realized a couple years ago that its workers didn’t have the appropriate skill levels to handle these complex machines that produce planes that must be perfectly constructed to ensure safety. So, in 2004, Boeing established Craft College.

Over the past three years, about 4700 students have attended 803 classes, according to Jim Fleming, project manager and an instructor at Craft. Fleming, who spoke at the Training 2008 Conference & Expo in Atlanta on February 4.

Management and employees worked together to identify required skills and develop a curriculum. “That’s what made this a success,” says Larry Tibbels, a project manager in Boeing’s quality through training program. “We have union buy-in and acceptance of the courses.”

The training benefits the company, of course, because it brings up to speed workers who had minimal skills when they were hired. “If you’re going to survive in this world, you’re going to have to develop your own training,” says Mike DePew, a senior manager of equipment services at Boeing.

If a lack of human capability causes a machine breakdown, it’s costly for Boeing. “We can’t have line stoppers,” Fleming says.

The skill upgrades boost the careers of Boeing employees, too. Training increases job satisfaction because they are acquiring the background that not only will help them at Boeing but also make them competitive in the job market.

“From the day you start working to the day you retire, you’re building your resume for your next opportunity,” DePew says.

If labor and management work together at more companies, those opportunities will grow.