"Work in Progress"-Career Ladders for Low Wage Workers
Monday, May 22, 2006SUSIE GHARIB: Almost 20 percent of the American workforce makes less than $9 an hour and that percentage is likely to get bigger. Government forecasters are projecting large job growth for occupations with low or very low wages. But some employers are trying to help their workers break out of that trend. As we continue our series "Work in Progress," Washington bureau chief Darren Gersh looks at how career ladders can give workers a boost.
DARREN GERSH, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: It`s exam time for dawn lease. If she passes this test, lease will become a PCA, patient care assistant, for Dean Health System. Dean developed the in-house training program and supplements it with 40 hours of class work at a local technical college. Dean pays employees while they take the PCA classes, giving a single mother like Dawn Lease a chance to move from scheduling patients to helping them.
DAWN LEASE, PATIENT CARE ASSISTANT, DEAN HEALTH SYSTEM: It is so much more interesting, just the gratitude that you get from the patients you take care of and just the ability to know that other people can count on you.
GERSH: Dean Health System created the patient care assistant program because it had to. In the late `90s demand for skilled health care workers was rising along with an aging population, but the local technical colleges weren`t turning out grads fast enough. Dean diagnosed a labor shortage. Connie Matheson developed the PCA program to meet a critical business need, but she quickly realized this was more than just a training program.
CONNIE MATHESON, PCA PROGRAM DIRECTOR, DEAN HEALTH SYSTEM: And what we have ended up with is a program that has met our patients` needs, our physicians` needs, and has created what we didn`t anticipate, what was this very nice career ladder for people who had no other means to get into the patient care arena.
GERSH: For low-wage workers, career ladders like this are getting harder to find. Manufacturing used to provide lots of opportunities on the assembly line for step-by-step advancement, but that work is being overtaken by service jobs that tend to have less room to move up. Economist Laura Dresser says jobs that once offered a foot in the door are no longer on the company payroll.
LAURA DRESSER, ECONOMIST, CENTER ON WISCONSIN STRATEGY: Right now if you clean a building, almost always you work for a building services firm. In fact, you don`t even clean the same building every night. In fact, you`re not even there to get noticed by someone. And even if you were, they probably don`t know your name and they certainly don`t have an employment relationship with you.
GERSH: Dresser studied low-wage workers in Wisconsin in the late `90s. Even in a booming job market, after five years, half of them remained stuck earning the same low pay. The national data looks about the same.
DRESSER: And now you find increasingly for white men and for other groups that you start in a low-wage job and five, 10 years later, you`re still working in that low-wage job or a different low-wage job, and so you have more and more people working in what I think of as sort of low-wage careers.
GERSH: Some companies, unions, and community groups are trying to change that by rebuilding career ladders, but it won`t solve the problem.
DRESSER: The problem is that we have so many bad jobs in many sectors, so many bad jobs relative to the number of good jobs. You can build a ladder, but not that many people are going to get to climb it.
GERSH: For those who do, every step up makes a difference. Dawn Lease passed her test and got a $2 an hour pay raise and better benefits.
LEASE: It just means that I can go to sleep at night and not have to worry about how I am going to put gas in my car the next day.
GERSH: Lease`s next training will be drawing blood and doing lab work. She says she hopes to keep moving up. Darren Gersh, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Madison, Wisconsin.
