Efficient

Workforce Development

Efficient

China and America share a lot in common. We both have long standing and intertwined relationships with imperial island colonizers. We both love chicken wings. Most of our compared populations learned how to be funny by watching a combination of Friends and South Park for different reasons. But, for the sake of this essay, the one thing where we are incredibly similar is we are both terribly inefficient at workforce development. The United States of America and the People’s Republic of China are two of the three most populated nation states in the history of the world. In our own individual contexts, we both have a surplus of humans. There are twice as many children aged 0-2 years old in America than there are people in Ireland of any age, total. There are more people in China that don’t like spicy food than there are people, total, in the European Union.

When America was pushing westward into the frontier of first nations territories and hunting grounds everyone from Pontiac to Tecumseh and Sitting Bull to Crazy Horse all shared the same dread; no matter how many we kill or scare away, ten more ships land on the East Coast and pour more Europeans into the chasm of potential and brutal expanse that was the American West. The book White Trash by Nancy Isenberg accounts in detail that America’s wealth for its first hundred years was divided between the enslaved and the indentured. Labor has always been a source of immense pride in American communities and a huge part of our national identity, but its misapplication is also a massive scar on our national psyche. The value of a human and that human’s relationship to production and their place in society is as important a conversation today as it has been for the last two hundred years and will be for the next century.

In China, the value of a person is weighted against the benefit that they provide to the ruling class. If you’ve ever wondered why Chinese laborers continued to attempt to enter America, even after the Anti-Chinese Labor Act was passed, you needed to only look at what they were attempting to leave behind. The allure of self-determination is undeniable when you compare it to being just another slave in the service of an emperor, warlord, and landlord. This was a huge part of the Communist Party’s rise in the early 20^th century and why the People’s Liberation Army attracted so many in the countryside to join its ranks and help take control of Beijing by 1949. They weren’t using “Liberation” to hide their evil intentions as much as they were using it as a recruiting and marketing tactic to ask the indentured and the enslaved peasant class to leave their master’s and break their own chains. They just didn’t know at the time that there would be a different type of chain to to take their place.

The biggest issue with the well intentioned is that they rarely have a better plan and whatever revolution that does take place ends up resulting in nothing more than a bad copy of the regime before. In the second half of the twentieth century, under the rule of Mao Ze Dong, China’s working class was subjected to horrible experiments of agricultural and industrial transformation that left tens of millions starving to death in cities and rural areas alike. These policies put China’s first generation of Communist Party leadership in a position where tearing down culture and established societal norms was the only way to break the inevitable counter revolution from mounting a challenge to their power. Waiting in the wings, the second generation of CCP leadership would make the decision to emulate, not revolt against, the merits of market-based Capitalism.

The common theme through all these changes and reforms and revisions and revolutions was the suffering of the working class in China. Under the Deng Xiao Ping model of “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics”, China started to once again leverage its most abundant and least expensive natural resource: Human Beings. Massive labor projects were undertaken, and bodies were thrown up against the machine of economic development. Everything from the primary and secondary education systems, the household registry system and the College entrance exam structure is designed to keep labor available and to force people to do the things the ruling class needs, where they need them to be done. China is incredibly effective at appearing to be much more put together and polished than they are. It goes back to a basket of Chinese philosophies, military strategies and idioms that essentially amount to the idea that if you appear bigger than you are, than most adversaries won’t bother attacking you. The problem and the reality in China are that via the results of the one-child policy, their workforce is dying. Every parent of every single child worked their entire life to make sure that child got an education that was good enough to ensure that the one child would have enough economic stability to provide for the parents in their old age. That, combined with the Central Planning that promoted rural people moving to the cities and the creation of more engineers, government officials and scientists than welders, plumbers and food service workers, China is on the precipice of one of the steepest declines of workforce availability in the history of the world. Inefficient.

America has an inefficiency issue that is a bit more… American. Nothing is planned. Nothing is forced or quota’d or required of anyone. We let the invisible hand have far too much control over how and when we need or don’t need labor. Workforce development has been an issue of debate and stump speeches for as long as I can remember, but it’s questionable as to whether those debating workforce development have ever really needed labor or have ever really labored themselves. We tend to just let our youth fail themselves into success or, more likely into lifelong, cyclical debt/credit traps and bad decisions. Some of the more successful workforce development programs are only successful because there is a user of labor within a geographic adjacency that supplements the funding for workforce development if you develop the kind of workforce that benefits the service of the capital that funded it.

My recurring theme of anything that is pushing me to run for anything is the idea that not everything needs to turn a fucking profit. Workforce development should be wasteful and, in some places, even reckless with budgets. We should cherish our youth. We should give them the benefit of failing in a controlled environment. Specifically, our workforce development programs should be designed to help the youth of America figure out exactly what they DON’T want to do as quickly as possible. When the number one purpose of workforce development is to help the owners of the means of production make more money, you will overwhelmingly end up with management and ownership that resent the labor class, as well as a workforce that will most likely end up hating their job, their lives, while having little to no hope in the future. Inefficient.

I can drown you in anecdotes. Everyone has an example that supports their worldview. My experience, however, is a little more robust given what I’ve experienced in my life. My father was a tool and die maker because his mother refused to allow him to serve in Vietnam and arranged an industrial apprenticeship for him so he would avoid the potential of combat. He hated every minute of his time in a machine shop and found every other distraction known to man to try and deal with his resentment of having a life chosen for him. In the steel industry, much like hospitality and food production, you meet a lot of people who “end up” in their jobs; they got pregnant early, they had problems managing their credit reports, they are in recovery, they are an excon, they are running from something, they are running to something. At no point in their stories do you hear, “I had the chance to decide what I wanted to do and tried out a bunch of options in a controlled setting and was able to make a decision based on what I like to do, the amount of money I want to make in my lifetime and the conditions under which I want to work.”

When my wife decided to start a restaurant in America, I owed her a debt. In China, I wanted to make beer, and she supported me. She stood up to corrupt officials and thugs with me. She sold an apartment to finance our little gamble, and she was with me every step of the way through our highest successes to the lows of staying up all night to make sure I wasn’t alone while I was being held against my will halfway around the world in a medical detention center. When we signed over full control of the company under threat and duress to ruthless private equity funds, she was there. We mailed the last of the documentation surrendering control of the company we founded and sacrificed everything for at a UPS window outside of Rapid City, South Dakota. We immediately went to Black Elk Peak and climbed through a snowstorm because I was hell bent on seeing the grave of Valentine McGillycuddy, buried with honors by the Lakota Nation after he retired from the Indian Affairs Office. She was there. She’s always been there. Once we figured out how to get our feet under us after licking our wounds a bit, she decided to follow her passion of Chinese cooking. I would find her equipment at auction, help her hire and train new staff and help her do property searches and arrange for pop-ups and residencies at the best restaurants and bakeries in the city of Cleveland. For every ten people we interviewed for various kitchen and front of the house positions, you met someone that truly loved working in kitchens and had hope for their future. Most people are transitioning or feel stuck. It was similar in the welding and metal fabrication worlds and the brewing worlds.

My time in the brewing industry took me around the world. Some people feel like they “have to” work. On rare occasions you met people that also wanted to work the job they had. The highest ratio of have-to’s and want-to’s were always German. Germany does not have an expendable amount of population to throw against the machine of the market. They also happen to be an annoyingly efficient people by cultural and societal standards. I think my desire to understand efficiency is due to my heritage of “being German” rubbing up against my time as an American in Germany. When you identify as something but have no real experience in the current version of that place, it’s easy to say something like, “I’m German American” everywhere in the world except when you are actually in Germany. It sounds weird in Germany. When you are standing in it, you realize how little you have in common with it. I adapted fast though and fell in love with how passionate Germans are about the idea of doing things the right way. It’s even more fun when you realize they can also be wrong about what the right way really is.

My time working with groups like Krones Engineering and Dohler International exposed me to their system of apprenticeships in blue collar positions. The breakdown is roughly 50/50 between youth who chose a path that would take them to university versus a path that would take them through an apprenticeship to learn a trade. I’m an Americanist, if that is a thing, and I believe that Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America have amazing systems that work for their populations, but cut, copy, pasting those systems or ideas to America will always lead to failure. America always needs a custom solution because our experiment is weird and beautiful. But my time working with Germans always made me wonder what system would be more efficient for America’s unique problem with workforce development.

That brought me to the idea of creating a program that could be an alternative to how cool college really is, even though it comes with immense debt and all too often a degree that doesn’t correlate fully with the careers that college graduates find themselves in. A program where Juniors and Seniors in high school can apply for a tour of the trades, in which participating companies would host students for 4-6 weeks over a circuit of up to twelve trades over two years. Students would get high-school credit and up to $8 an hour in the form of a bond that would be liquidated upon finishing the program, to work inside of different trades for short bursts. They would get an overview of the business, what the work entailed and spend time with hands on mentors. After the tour of trades students would apply for their top final four trades and participating companies would host applying students for six months for each of the final four. Students would receive $7 an hour from the participating businesses as well as $8 an hour from a state fund, amounting to $15 dollars an hour paid via the program on a week delay every two weeks. The biggest problem related to retention in labor conditions is new workers feeling regret and anxiety connected to how the job was marketed versus the reality of the work. When students have an opportunity to work in a field knowing that it’s a finite period, they would be more likely to complete the six-month exposures. There would be an audit of each participating business at the end of each six-month cycle and reviews and assessments of each student would be filed by the participating businesses in correlation.

Following the two-year final four exposures, students would rate their final four occupations from most to least desirable and enter a statewide draft where any companies looking for certified graduates would bid on them based on demand. The employer would be getting a team member who already decided what they didn’t want to do and cultivated a reasonable understanding of the work and the industry they chose. Certified graduates would start with not only the wages made during the training program but also their bond from the first two years as high school participants. We would see a workforce develop that had more exposure to invested mentors and enthusiastic employers with less personal debt and more of an opportunity to value their labor and their future. Efficient.

Now imagine they also qualified for Medicare for All W-2 employees?