This is Hear Me Out. I'm Celeste Hedley. Federally funded job training is one of those ideas that sounds really great on paper.

It's helping workers gain new skills, keep up with the pace of technology and ultimately stay employed and remain

functioning members of the economy. In practice though, the benefit of these

programs is a little muddy. Workers who got trained through the 1998 Workforce Innovation and

Opportunity Act saw little if any growth in their wages and the in-demand jobs they

trained for aren't necessarily in demand because lots of people want them.

It's often poor-paying, grueling dead-end jobs that the government helps to fill.

All of this leads us to ask, federal job training work or should we reset our expectations?

What a lot of employers want is a steady supply of new workers who they don't have to pay very much and they want someone else to pay for the

training they don't want to have to like pay out of their own pocket to train their workers

they would rather the government do it for them.

Kevin Carey of New America joins me out Out in just a moment. Stay with us.

Welcome back to Hear Me Out. I'm Celeste Hedley. The U.S Employment Service was created in 1933.

It was part of FDR's sweeping New Deal programs. The function of this agency has always been mutable, let's say.

During the New Deal, this agency hired people for public works projects

that helped the economy recover from the Great Depression.

But during World War II, the U.S. began coordinating work details for

prisoners of war brought here by U.S. forces, and though its official policy has long been

to not discriminate against black and brown people when making job

referrals, uses policy in the 40s required that referrals defer to employers racial

preferences as well as quote community custom or past hiring practices and quote you can

probably imagine what that ended up looking like in the Jim Crow South. There's a lot

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