In a June 6 guest commentary, “With study and changes, SA Ready to Work can succeed,” Jorge R. Urby, the former campaign manager for the city of San Antonio’s Ready to Work program, wrote that implementation “has been less than stellar” and a comprehensive review should be conducted to turn things around.
The shortfalls are tracked by the official numbers of San Antonians enrolled in Ready to Work, as well as those who completed training and have been placed in quality jobs. But the city’s experiment is not in crisis. Rather, it shows demonstrable development with some reasonable expectation of continuing improvement.
San Antonio is engaged in the greatest local effort for workforce reform in the country. If such a reform were easy, it would have been accomplished somewhere else already.
The focus of workforce reform is how to improve the employment relationship between workers and employers. Yet work is a nexus of many players who engage each other in the employment field: from families to education and training providers, community organizations and unions, employers, trade associations, economic growth promoters and business investors, and support services, which include childcare, public transit, housing and the criminal justice system.
Reform starts with the facts that pay is too low, many of our fellow residents have disrupted their education (for a variety of reasons), career opportunities are difficult to access, and major employers already have established recruitment and training policies to serve their needs.
Reform means realigning these players to meet the city’s goal to raise San Antonians into middle-class careers. That, in turn, requires the players to reorient themselves to Ready to Work’s opportunities by engaging with it.
After two years, much is known about problems that need solving.
The key to improvement is social learning among the engaged players. Ready to Work has created several avenues for continual review and analysis, and to test solutions and innovations.
The prime partners — Workforce Solutions Alamo, Alamo Colleges District, Project Quest, Restore Education and the city of San Antonio — have worked together with Ready to Work as a “community of practice” to help speed up the intake of applicants, assign coaches to develop an applicant’s career plan, initiate training and raise the training completion rate.
Ready to Work also has target sector-based employer “collaboratives” to help it adjust the training programs to align with employer demand for specific skills and occupations, and bring employers into the hiring process earlier.
These efforts take time to organize and cultivate voluntary buy-in from the players. In short, successful reform is not a technical fix but a never-ending process of continual improvement through disciplined learning from experience.
What needs to be learned now about outcomes that fail to meet expectations? The workforce pipeline is being realigned. For low-income participants, median wages now are over $20 an hour with benefits. That’s a successful investment of tax dollars per person.
Ready to Work is still learning. The new on-the-job program promises to boost quality jobs and the newly expanded registered apprentice programs that will create family-supporting job opportunities.
A key indicator of the failure is the gap between training completions and job placements. The employment relationship critically depends on employers to hire Ready to Work graduates into good jobs. Over 400 companies have done so, but typically they employ just one person. A handful of prominent employers have hired up to 10 people.
Some workers have taken jobs with pay that is too low or before they finish training. In short, more employers from the targeted industries need to more deeply engage the reform goals by changing their own workforce practices. The long-run success of the city’s workforce policy depends on them.
Stephen Amberg is professor emeritus of political science at The University of Texas at San Antonio.
A version of this op-ed appeared in the San Antonio Express-News.
