Public Policy and workforce productivity

My Performance Management course is having its last class Thursday and we are covering how public policy can have an impact on workforce performance. As an instinctive libertarian, I hesitate to recommend that government get involved in the inner activities of a company. But there are definitely places where it can make sense if the government does it correctly and minimalistically (a big and often failing assumption).

One is training credits. I don't want the government deciding what to train former manufacturing workers in when their jobs migrate overseas. But training credits can work. Companies can develop their workforce in skills that will remain in the US. And perhaps research funding can be allocated towards new training models and economy-wide resources. Especially for workers who are already employed, independent training sources can also be supported, although again I would like to see it be private organizations (perhaps professional societies) with some government financial support. I would rather spend government money on retraining than long term unemployment.

There has been research that workers who are afraid to take risks tend to stay in dead end jobs out of fear (of losing health care, pension benefits, etc). They are more afraid to take risks when there is no safety net. Companies don't want employees to stay in these dead end jobs either because the employee is usually not the most productive at that position, but maybe not bad enough to warrant firing.

What we want is to create a balance between stability and mobility. Lets find a way to get workers moving around more and always moving up the skills-ladder. We can then encourage sending lower skilled jobs overseas and bringing in immigrants to do the ones that can't move overseas. All we need is a reliable mechanism to retrain workers in the new industries that the US has been so good at developing. And with an ingrained process to do this, maybe we won't be so afraid of losing our global economic influence and success.

Then on top of this, we can fund a few great futurists to predict the 20-50 year future industries and we can start the basic research and maybe even adjust K-12 education to get our future workforce ready for it. Get rid of the standardized tests in the No Child Left Behind model and start teaching creativity, critical thinking, information literacy etc.

Maybe this is just a pipe dream, but it is MY pipe dream ;-D.