Job training is a pervasive aspect of American life. Wage and salary employment is the single largest source of aggregate personal income in the United States. Every person holding a job has benefited from job training. Although most job training in the United States is undertaken by private employers in their normal course of doing business, each year hundreds of thousands of Americans in precarious economic conditions use publicly funded job training as a path to employment. The focus of this book is on the government role in job training. To place this examination in perspective, the book also includes reviews of private job training efforts and an international comparison of government job training programs. The chapters review the effectiveness of major federal job training programs, examine important features of current programs, and speculate about directions for future job training programs. This book is directed mainly to employment policymakers and practitioners at the local, state, and federal levels. The exposition is relatively concise and nontechnical. However, sufficient detail is included in footnotes and references to make the book a useful resource for students, researchers, consultants, and policy scholars.

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Policies to regulate and support labor markets in the United States have mainly been an initiative of the federal government. Historically, states and localities were reluctant to act independently to build up worker rights and protections for fear of competitively disadvantaging resident industries with added costs. Federal constitutional authority to raise revenue and control commerce among the states governed development of labor market policy in the United States. Labor market support initiatives usually have been forged in difficult economic times with contributions and compromise from the full political spectrum. This paper examines the development of employment policy in the twentieth century by viewing the interplay of federal, state, and local partners. The programs considered include unemployment insurance, training, youth programs, and the employment service. Some attention is also given to governmental policy that influences the geographic mobility of labor. Intergovernmental relations in labor market policy have resulted in a system that performs a wide variety of functions, varies greatly at the local and state levels, but maintains important federal standards nationwide.

We thank Kevin Hollenbeck who contributed sections on programs for youth. We also thank Craig Schreuder, Gerard Hildebrand, Thomas E. West, and our colleagues on the staff at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research for useful suggestions on ways to improve the manuscript. Summary statistics were carefully compiled by Linda Richer. Claire Black and Nancy Mack provided excellent clerical support. Any remaining errors are our own. Opinions expressed are also ours, and do not necessarily represent the views of the W.E.

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