December 2, 2009

The divergence between Wall Street prosperity and Main Street suffering has reached a deplorable state.  Being a robber baron has never been so lucrative and risk-free, while being an unskilled worker — the fate of millions — has turned into a life sentence to poverty.  The government has been topping off the fuel tanks of banking institutions with all the go-juice they can carry, yet we see no zip in the economy that counts to most people — the job market.

I believe the government should support resurrection of the jobs-training programs of the sixties and seventies, where the US Dept of Labor subsidized wages for trainees in small businesses. In 1978, I was a 21-year old dad with a high school diploma, a wife and a kid. The recession of the late seventies had us living in our car.

Then I got a job as a bag-boy at Meister’s Buy Rite in Ashland Oregon, at $3.25/hour. Thanks to the 50% subsidy, Dick Meister got an employee for six months at the rate of $1.65/hr and I learned the grocery business. Eighteen months later, I was a Retail Clerk’s Union Cashier making $7.90 an hour.

A year after that, I went back to college, and three years later, on to UCLA law school, where I graduated in 1986. Since then, I’ve been admitted to the California and Oregon state bars, and have worked for big and small law firms, as a prosecutor and as a Federal Public Defender. Since 1995, I have been a solo practitioner with a practice that focuses on Internet law and technology. I make every effort to give back to the community through pro bono work and public involvement, and have always been grateful for that first leg up, back in 1978.

In summary, direct government spending on job training gives us the most “bang for buck,” and subsidizing small businesses to hire new employees is exactly the kind of bridge that benefits employers and employees, and can lead to sustainable growth.

The Chamber of Commerce is going to tell the White House what “small business” supposedly thinks government should do to remedy the collapse on Main Street.  American Rights at Work is trying to get the Chamber to listen to real people, so I put the gist of this post into a letter that they’re sending to the Chamber.  You can do the same, and if what I said here makes sense, just cut and paste it into the text box at this link, and they’ll take care of the postage.

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