[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
ELIMINATING BARRIERS TO
EMPLOYMENT: OPENING DOORS
TO OPPORTUNITY
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
AND LABOR
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD IN WASHINGTON, DC, MAY 21, 2019
__________
Serial No. 116-24
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Education and Labor
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via the World Wide Web: www.govinfo.gov
or
Committee address: https://edlabor.house.gov
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
36-599 PDF WASHINGTON : 2021
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR
ROBERT C. ``BOBBY'' SCOTT, Virginia, Chairman
Susan A. Davis, California Virginia Foxx, North Carolina,
Raul M. Grijalva, Arizona Ranking Member
Joe Courtney, Connecticut David P. Roe, Tennessee
Marcia L. Fudge, Ohio Glenn Thompson, Pennsylvania
Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan, Tim Walberg, Michigan
Northern Mariana Islands Brett Guthrie, Kentucky
Frederica S. Wilson, Florida Bradley Byrne, Alabama
Suzanne Bonamici, Oregon Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin
Mark Takano, California Elise M. Stefanik, New York
Alma S. Adams, North Carolina Rick W. Allen, Georgia
Mark DeSaulnier, California Francis Rooney, Florida
Donald Norcross, New Jersey Lloyd Smucker, Pennsylvania
Pramila Jayapal, Washington Jim Banks, Indiana
Joseph D. Morelle, New York Mark Walker, North Carolina
Susan Wild, Pennsylvania James Comer, Kentucky
Josh Harder, California Ben Cline, Virginia
Lucy McBath, Georgia Russ Fulcher, Idaho
Kim Schrier, Washington Van Taylor, Texas
Lauren Underwood, Illinois Steve Watkins, Kansas
Jahana Hayes, Connecticut Ron Wright, Texas
Donna E. Shalala, Florida Daniel Meuser, Pennsylvania
Andy Levin, Michigan* William R. Timmons, IV, South
Ilhan Omar, Minnesota Carolina
David J. Trone, Maryland Dusty Johnson, South Dakota
Haley M. Stevens, Michigan
Susie Lee, Nevada
Lori Trahan, Massachusetts
Joaquin Castro, Texas
* Vice-Chair
Veronique Pluviose, Staff Director
Brandon Renz, Minority Staff Director
------
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on May 21, 2019..................................... 1
Statement of Members:
Scott, Hon. Robert C. ``Bobby'', Chairman, Committee on
Education and Labor........................................ 1
Prepared statement of.................................... 4
Foxx, Hon. Virginia, Ranking Member, Committee on Education
and Labor.................................................. 6
Prepared statement of.................................... 7
Statement of Witness:
Bird, Ms. Kisha, M.S.S./M.S.L.P. Director, Youth Policy
Center forLaw and Social Policy (CLASP).................... 53
Prepared statement of.................................... 55
McCann, Ms. Laurie, J.D., Senior Attorney, AARP Foundation
Litigation................................................. 9
Prepared statement of.................................... 12
Pianko, Mr. Daniel, Managing Director, University VenturesS.. 31
Prepared statement of.................................... 33
Roos, Mr. Shayne, Senior Vice President, Achieva Support,
Achieva.................................................... 22
Prepared statement of.................................... 24
Additional Submissions:
Mrs. Foxx:
Prepared statement from Seyfarth Shaw.................... 126
Prepared statement from Accses........................... 135
Chart: Impact of Family Structure On Student Suspension
Rates.................................................. 139
Letter dated June 4, 2019 from Littler, Workplace Policy
Institute (WPI)........................................ 141
Prepared statement from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce..... 146
Jayapal, Hon. Pramila, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Washington:
Examining the Role of Job Separations In Black-White
Labor Market Disparities............................... 147
Chairman Scott:
Letter dated May 1, 2019 from Collaboration To Promote
Self-Determination (CPSD).............................. 161
Letter dated May 27, 2019 from Congress of the United
States................................................. 158
Letter dated May 29, 2019 from Collaboration To Promote
Self-Determination (CPSD).............................. 159
Link: National Disability Employment Policy.............. 167
Link: Advisory Committee on Increasing Competitive
Integrated Employment for Individuals With Disabilities
(ACICIEID)............................................. 167
Link: The State of Age Discrimination and Older Workers
In the U.S. 50 Years After the Age Discrimination In
Employment Act (ADEA).................................. 167
Questions submitted for the record by:
Omar, Hon. Ilhan, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Minnesota
Chairman Scott........................................... 175
Responses to questions submitted for the record by:
Ms. Bird................................................. 177
Ms. McCann............................................... 178
Pianko................................................... 180
Mr. Roos................................................. 181
ELIMINATING BARRIERS TO
EMPLOYMENT: OPENING DOORS
TO OPPORTUNITY
----------
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
House of Representatives,
Committee on Education and the Workforce,
Washington, D.C.
----------
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:20 a.m., in
Room 2175, Rayburn House Office Building. Hon. Robby C.
``Bobby'' Scott [chairman of the committee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Scott, Davis, Grijalva, Courtney,
Sablan, Wilson, Bonamici, Takano, Adams, DeSaulnier, Norcross,
Jayapal, Morelle, Wild, Harder, McBath, Schrier, Underwood,
Hayes, Shalala, Levin, Omar, Trone, Stevens, Lee, Trahan,
Castro, Foxx, Roe, Walberg, Grothman, Stefanik, Allen, Smucker,
Banks, Walker, Cline, Fulcher, Taylor, Watkins, Wright, Meuser,
Timmons, and Johnson.
Staff Present: Katie Berger, Professional Staff; Nekea
Brown, Deputy Clerk; Ilana Brunner, General Counsel; Emma
Eatman, Press Assistant; Carrie Hughes, Director of Health and
Human Services; Eli Hovland, Staff Assistant; Bertram Lee,
Policy Counsel; Katie McClelland, Professional Staff; Richard
Miller, Director of Labor Policy; Max Moore, Office Aid; Udochi
Onwubiko, Labor Policy Counsel; Veronique Pluviose, Staff
Director; Carolyn Ronis, Civil Rights Counsel; Banyon Vassar,
Deputy Director of Information Technology; Courtney Butcher,
Minority Director of Coalitions and Member Services; Bridget
Handy, Minority Legislative Assistant; Amy Raaf Jones, Minority
Director of Education and Human Resources Policy; John Martin,
Minority Workforce Policy Counsel; Hannah Matesic, Minority
Director of Operations; Kelley McNabb, Minority Communications
Director; Jake Middlebrooks, Minority Professional Staff
Member; Casey Nelson, Minority Staff Assistant; Brandon Renz,
Minority Staff Director; Alex Ricci, Minority Professional
Staff Member; Ben Ridder, Minority Legislative Assistant; and
Meredith Schellin, Minority Deputy Press Secretary and Digital
Advisor.
Chairman SCOTT. The Committee on Education and Labor will
come to order. I want to welcome everyone to the committee and
note that a quorum is present, and also note that 100 years ago
today, May 21, 1919, U.S. Representative James R. Mann, a
Republican from Illinois and Chair of the Suffrage Committee,
proposed the House resolution to approve the Susan B. Anthony
Amendment granting women the right to vote. The measure passed
the full House 100 years ago by a vote of 304 to 89, 42 votes
above the required 2/3 majority.
Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chairman?
Chairman SCOTT. The gentlelady from North Carolina.
Ms. FOXX. A short point of person privilege.
We were told this morning by the leading Republican in the
House that the first bill was introduced by a Republican from
California back in the 1800s. So we are very proud of our
leadership in this effort.
Chairman SCOTT. I thank the gentlelady.
The Committee is meeting today in a legislative hearing to
hear testimony on eliminating barriers to employment, opening
doors to opportunity.
Pursuant to Committee Rule 7c, opening statements are
limited to the Chair and Ranking Member. This allows us to hear
from our witnesses sooner and provides all members with
adequate time to ask questions.
I will recognize myself for the purpose of making an
opening statement.
Today's legislative hearing will examine barriers keeping
Americans out of the workforce, and also to identify
legislative solutions to expand opportunity.
Despite the overall strength of the economy, too many still
face a range of obstacles to employment, including
discrimination, that undermines opportunities to take part in
the benefits of work. For example, older workers, workers with
disabilities, disconnected youth, and returning citizens are
often left behind in today's economy.
Our witnesses here today will help us understand the
challenges facing each of these groups and how Congress can
help solve those problems.
For older Americans age discrimination is a significant
barrier to opportunities, and when older workers lose their
jobs they are far more likely than other workers to join the
ranks of the long-term unemployed.
In 1967, Congress enacted the Age Discrimination in
Employment Act, or ADEA, to prohibit age discrimination in the
workplace. The ADEA is an integral part of the civil rights
legislation enacted during the 1960s to ensure equal
opportunity in the workplace, along with the Equal Pay Act of
1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When
Congress passed the ADEA it recognized that age discrimination
was caused primarily by the unfounded assumption that age
impacted ability. Unfortunately, protections for older workers
were undercut by the Supreme Court's decision in Gross v. FBL
Financial Services, which imposed a higher burden of proof of
age discrimination. This 5-4 decision overturned precedent by
requiring individuals to prove that age discrimination was the
sole motivating cause for the employer's adverse action rather
than just a motivating factor of the employer's adverse action.
The plaintiff in that case, Mr. Gross, is in the audience
today. Mr. Gross, welcome.
The Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act, or
POWADA, is a legislative fix that would restore the pre-2009
evidentiary threshold applied to age discrimination claims.
Reinstating the mixed motive test aligns the burden of proof
for age discrimination with the same standards for proving
discrimination based on sex, race, religion, and national
origin.
I want to thank the lead co-sponsor of this important
legislation, the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Sensenbrenner,
for his continued commitment for fighting against age
discrimination.
Individuals with disabilities also have long suffered from
barriers to competitive integrated employment. Today an 80 year
old provision in the Fair Labor Standards Act, known as Section
14(c), empowers employers to obtain a certificate which allows
them to pay workers with disabilities a sub-minimum wage. More
than 130,000 employees with disabilities are employed under
14(c) certificates. While intended as transitional employment,
at least 95 percent of individuals with disabilities who enter
sub-minimum wage jobs never obtain competitive employment even
though with appropriate support most could in fact earn at
least the minimum wage.
We have the responsibility to eliminate 14(c), written in
1938, under the belief that individuals with disabilities were
necessarily significantly less productive than individuals
without disability, and presumably unable to earn even the
minimum wage.
The H.R. 873, the Transformation to Competitive Employment
Act, is a bipartisan proposal that reflects this responsibility
and phases out the 14(c) sub-minimum wage nationwide over a 6
year period. The bill provides $300 million for the Department
of Labor to award grants to states and 14(c) certificate
holders to help workers with disabilities transition into
competitive integrated employment. It includes the grant to
subsidize wages for the few who cannot, in fact, make at least
the minimum wage but still desire to work to the best of their
ability. It also incentivizes states and businesses to work
with good faith towards implementing competitive integrated
employment for all workers with disabilities.
One of today's witnesses, Shane Roos, will show how his
organization proactively transitions their employees into
competitive integrated employment settings. Their success
demonstrated that it is both feasible and socially beneficial
to remove most of these individuals from segregated settings.
Finally, today's hearing is an opportunity to explore the
benefits of investing in millions of young Americans who are
disconnected from school or the workforce. The research
indicates that approximately 11 percent of young people aged
16-24, that is about 4.5 million people, are neither employed
nor in school. Studies show that disconnected youth can cost
nearly $400,000 in earnings over their lifetime and cost our
communities $25 billion in healthcare, public assistance, and
incarceration costs every year.
Once again, this is a missed opportunity for individuals
and our economy, which is partly why we refer to these specific
young people as ``opportunity youth''. The Workforce Innovation
and Opportunity Act of 2014 increased opportunities for youth
with significant barriers to employment by requiring 75 percent
of funding for youth activities to be spent on out of school
youth.
As this Committee considers reauthorizing this key
workforce development law, we must prioritize strengthening
evidence based programs, such as summer jobs programs, that
help underserved youth remain connected or reconnected to the
education and employment. According to at least one study, a
summer jobs program in Chicago actually saved more money by
reducing crime and other social pathology, saved more than it
cost.
So similarly, we must ensure that returning citizens must
have the support needed to reenter the workforce. Today,
roughly one in three Americans has a criminal record. More than
600,000 Americans return to their communities from
incarceration each year and they face a majority of employers
who are unwilling to hire them. That barrier is particularly
challenging for men of color who are disproportionately
incarcerated.
In 2013 a National Institute of Health report found that as
incarceration increases, African Americans face greater
obstacles to employment compared to white Americans, creating--
and I quote from that study--''a new form of institutional
racism with wide reaching economic benefits''. The EEOC even
responded to this discrimination a few years ago by issuing
guidance that a blanket policy of denying employment for
persons with any criminal record without an individualized
consideration, such as seriousness of the crime, the relevance
to the job, and the time since the conviction, that if you have
a blanket policy against hiring people with a criminal record,
that could result in a finding of illegal employment
discrimination. But if we follow the evidence, we will find
that supporting employment for many returning citizens yields
widespread benefits, including increased earnings for
individuals, cost savings through reduced recidivism,
strengthened public safety, higher taxpayer revenues, and, of
course, a source of good workers in today's tight job market.
Today's hearing is an opportunity for us to consider the
barriers to employment that impact a wide range of communities,
as well as our responsibility to use our legislative mandate to
remove these barriers.
I look forward to the testimony of our witnesses who can
help inform this Committee on eliminating barriers to
employment. Doing so will mean that America's workers will be
better off, our economy will be stronger, and our communities
healthier.
I want to thank our witnesses for being with us today, and
yield to our Ranking Member Dr. Foxx for the purpose of making
an opening statement.
[The statement by Chairman Scott follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hon. Robert C. ``Bobby'' Scott, Chairman,
Committee on Education and Labor
Today's legislative hearing will examine barriers keeping Americans
out of the workforce and also identify legislative solutions to expand
opportunity.
Despite the overall strength of the economy, too many still face a
range of obstacles to employment, including discrimination, that
undermines opportunities to take part in the benefits of work. For
example, older workers, workers with disabilities, disconnected youth,
and returning citizens are often left behind in today's economy.
Our witnesses here today will help us understand the challenges
facing each of these groups and how Congress can help solve those
problems.
For older Americans, age discrimination is a significant barrier to
opportunities. And when older workers lose their jobs, they are far
more likely than other workers to join the ranks of the long- term
unemployed.
In 1967, Congress enacted the Age Discrimination in Employment Act,
or the ADEA, to prohibit age discrimination in the workplace. The ADEA
was an integral part of civil rights legislation enacted during the
1960s to ensure equal opportunity in the workplace, along with the
Equal Pay Act of 1963, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
When Congress passed the ADEA, it recognized that age discrimination
was caused primarily by the unfounded assumption that age impacted
ability.
Unfortunately, protections for older workers were undercut by the
Supreme Court's decision in Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc.,
which imposed a higher burden of proof for age discrimination. This 5-4
decision overturned precedent by requiring individuals to prove that
age discrimination was the sole motivating cause for the employer's
adverse action, rather than just a motivating factor in the employer's
adverse action. The plaintiff in that case, Mr. Gross, is in the
audience today. Welcome, Mr. Gross. The Protecting Older Americans
Against Discrimination Act (POWADA), is legislative fix that would
restore the pre-2009 evidentiary threshold applied in age
discrimination claims. Reinstating the mixed-motive test aligns the
burden of proof for age discrimination with the same standards for
proving discrimination based on sex, race, religion, and national
origin. I want to thank the lead co-sponsor of this important
legislation, the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Sensenbrenner, for his
continued commitment to fighting age discrimination.
Individuals with disabilities have also long-suffered from barriers
to competitive integrated employment. Today, an 80-year-old provision
in the Fair Labor Standards Act, known as Section 14(c), empowers
employers to obtain a certificate, which allows them to pay workers
with disabilities a subminimum wage. More than 130,000 employees with
disabilities are employed under 14(c) certificates. While intended as
transitional employment, at least 95 percent of individuals with
disabilities who enter subminimum wage jobs never obtain competitive
employment even though, with appropriate support, most could make the
minimum wage.
We have a responsibility to eliminate Section 14(c), written in
1938 under the belief that individuals with disabilities were
necessarily and significantly less productive than individuals without
disabilities and presumably unable to earn the minimum wage.
H.R. 873, the Transformation to Competitive Employment Act, is a
bipartisan proposal that reflects this responsibility and phases out
the 14(c) subminimum wage nationwide over a six-year period. The bill
provides $300 million for the Department of Labor to award grants to
states and 14(c) certificate holders to help workers with disabilities
transition into competitive integrated employment. It includes a grant
to subsidize wages for the few who cannot, in fact, make at least the
minimum wage, but still desire to work to the best of their abilities.
It also incentivizes states and businesses to work in good faith toward
fully implementing competitive integrated employment for all workers
with disabilities.
One of today's witnesses, Shayne Roos, will show how his
organization proactively transitioned their employees into competitive
integrated employment settings. Their success demonstrated that it is
both feasible and socially beneficial to remove most of. these
individuals from segregated settings.
Finally, today's hearing is an opportunity to explore the benefits
of investing in the millions of Americans of young Americans who are
disconnected from school or the workforce.
Research indicates that approximately 11 percent of young people
aged 16 to 24--about 4.5 million people--are neither employed nor in
school. Studies show that disconnection can cost youth nearly $400,000
in earnings over their lifetimes and cost our communities more than $25
billion in health care programs, public assistance, and incarceration
costs every year.
Once again, this is a missed opportunity for individuals and our
economy, which is partly why we refer to these specific young people as
``opportunity youth.'' The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of
2014 increased opportunities for youth with significant barriers to
employment by requiring 75 percent of funding for ``Youth Activities''
be spent on out-of-school youth.
As this Committee considers reauthorizing this key workforce
development law, we must prioritize strengthening evidence-based
programs, such as summer jobs programs, that help underserved youth
remain connected or reconnect to education and employment. According to
at least one study, a summer jobs programs in Chicago actually saved
more money by reducing crime and other social pathology, saved more
than it cost.
Similarly, we must ensure that returning citizens have the support
needed to re-enter the workforce. Today, roughly one in three Americans
has a criminal record. More than 600,000 Americans return to
communities from incarceration each year. They face a majority of
employers who are unwilling to hire them. That barrier is particularly
challenging for men of color, who are disproportionally incarcerated.
A 2013 National Institute of Health report found that, as
incarceration rates increase, African Americans face greater obstacles
to employment compared to White Americans, creating--and I quote from
the study--a new form of institutional racism with wide-reaching
economic effects.
The EEOC even responded to this discrimination a few years ago,
issuing guidance that a blanket policy of denying employment for
persons with any criminal record without an individualized
consideration, such as seriousness of the crime, the relevance to the
job, and the time since the conviction, could result in a finding of
illegal employment discrimination.
If we follow the evidence, we will find that supporting employment
for returning citizens yields widespread benefits, including increased
earnings for individuals, higher taxpayer revenues, cost savings
through reduced recidivism, and strengthened public safety,
Today's hearing is an opportunity for us to consider the barriers
to employment that impact a wide range of communities as well as our
responsibility to use our legislative mandate to remove these barriers.
I look forward to the testimony of our witnesses who can help to
inform this Committee on eliminating barriers to employment. Doing so
will mean that America's workers will be better off, our economy will
be stronger, and our communities are healthier.
Thank you to the witnesses for joining us today. I now yield to the
Ranking Member, Dr. Foxx, for the purpose of making an opening
statement.
______
Ms. FOXX. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for yielding time.
This hearing is supposedly about barriers to employment,
not opportunities for Federal spending, Federal involvement,
and Federal power. We could use a little truth in advertising
today.
It seems our colleagues on the other side have done their
level best to have a hearing about employment without
addressing the role of education; or, put another way, skills
development. That shows two things. First, a fundamental
disregard for why this Committee exists to do what it does,
education policy and workforce policy in tandem, side by side,
cause and effect. Second, it shows a tone deafness about the
current state of the American economy. We have historic job
growth, historic wage growth, and a historic number of job
openings. Employment opportunities abound, but the skills gap
persists and grows.
Looking at individual policies outside of the role of
education is not the way to approach this question of opening
doors for Americans. It is the siloed, piecemealed approaches
that have gotten us here. When will we learn?
The American dream was founded on the premise that
individuals are free and capable of improving their lives, of
living better, and climbing higher than their ancestors before
them. As representatives of millions of people who still cling
to these hopes, anything Congress can responsibly do to help
increase opportunity for all Americans in the workforce,
especially those with disadvantages, it ought to do. But
history has shown us it is not the Federal government, but the
innovation and initiative of individual Americans themselves
that has successfully broken down barriers.
Though in the past we seemed to agree more on what the
barriers to success are and how to remedy them, today Democrats
see barriers as opportunities to increase Federal power.
Republicans see barriers as opportunities to enable individual
empowerment.
If we really want to lift the barriers that stifle
Americans trying to enter and thrive in the workplace, we need
to propose remedies that reduce the skills gap and prepare
individuals to fill the plethora of available high-quality jobs
in this country. It cannot be over emphasized that all
education is career education. We will get nowhere in our
efforts to close the skills gap and fill these millions of open
jobs if we do not make postsecondary education reform the focus
of our efforts. Apprenticeships, earn and learn opportunities,
stackable credentials, a fair and full view of what
postsecondary education is and should be. This is the key to
opening doors to opportunity and prosperity, not a more
reactionary Federal government.
The promise of higher education is broken, and Federal law
perpetuates this failing system. By reforming the Higher
Education Act to leverage employer expertise, allow for
innovative ways to gain skills and stackable credentials, and
encourage lifelong learning, Congress can help close the skills
gap and unleash the economic potential of Americans nationwide.
Our previous efforts, like Strengthening the Career and
Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, and WIOA,
provided lucrative results for the American worker by
supporting his or her progress and development. These policies
have asserted that the answers are closer to home than an
influx of government spending and programs. We have recognized
that education and workforce development are one in the same in
the past and we must do the same going forward.
As legislators working to remove the barriers to economic
and employment success for all Americans, especially the
disadvantaged, it is critical that we keep this approach in
mind. Our success is an individual success and removing
barriers should mean less government overreach and involvement,
not more.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
[The statement by Mrs. Foxx follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hon. Virginia Foxx, Ranking Member, Committee on
Education and Labor
This hearing is supposedly about barriers to employment, not
opportunities for Federal spending, Federal involvement, and Federal
power. We could use a little truth in advertising today.
It seems our colleagues on the other side have done their level
best to have a hearing about employment without addressing the role of
education. Or put another way, skills development. That shows two
things. First, a fundamental disregard for why this Committee exists lo
do what it does--education policy and workforce policy, in tandem,
side-by-side, cause and effect. Second, it shows a tone-deafness about
the current state of the American economy. We have historic job growth,
historic wage growth. and an historic number or job openings.
Employment opportunities abound, but the skills gap persists and grows.
Looking at individual policies outside of the role of education is
not the way to approach this question of opening doors for Americans.
It's these siloed, piecemealed approaches that have gotten us here.
When will we learn? The American dream was founded on the premise that
individuals are free, and capable of improving their lives, of living
better and climbing higher than their ancestors before them. As
representatives of millions of people who still cling to these hopes,
anything Congress can responsibly do lo help increase opportunity for
all Americans in the workforce. especially those with disadvantages, it
ought lo do. Bui history has shown us that it is not the Federal
government, but the innovation and initiative of individual Americans
themselves, that has successfully broken downbarriers.
Thoughin the past we seemed to agree more on what the barriers to
success are and how to remedy them. today, Democrats see barriers as
opportunities to increase federal power. Republicans see barriers as
opportunities lo enable individual empowerment.
If we really want lo lift the barriers that stifie Americans trying
to enter and thrive in the workforce, we need to propose remedies that
reduce the skills gap and prepare individuals lo fill the plethora of
available, high-quailty jobs in this country. It cannot be
overemphasized that all education is career education. We will get
nowhere in our efforts lo close the skills gap and fill these millions
of open jobs if we do not make postsecondary education reform the locus
of our efforts. Apprenticeships. Earn and learn opportunities.
Stackable credentials. A fair and full view of what postsecondary
education is and should be. This is the key lo opening doors lo
opportunity and prosperily,110/ a more reactionary federal government.
The promise of higher education is broken, and federal law
perpetuates this failing system. By reforming the Higher EducationAct
to leverage employer expertise. allow for innovative ways to gain
skills and stackable credentials, and encourage lifelong learning,
Congress can help close the skills gap and unleash the economic
potential of Americans nationwide.
Our previous efforts like Strengthening the Career and Technical
Education for the 21s, Century Act and WIOA provided lucrative results
for the American worker by supporting his or her progress and
development. These policies have asserted that the answers are closer
to home than an influx of government spending and programs. We have
recognized that education and workforce development are one in the same
in the past, and we must do the same going forward.
As legislators working to remove the barriers to economic and
employment success for all Americans, especially the disadvantaged. if
s critical that we keep this approach in mind. Our success is an
individual's success. and removing barriers should mean less government
overreach and involvement. not more.
______
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. Without objection, other Members
who wish to insert written statements into the record may do so
by submitting them to the Committee Clerk electronically in
Microsoft Word format by 5:00 o'clock on Tuesday, June 4, 2019.
I will now introduce our witnesses.
Our first witness is Laurie McCann, who is a senior
attorney with the AARP. Her principal responsibility includes
litigation and an amicus curiae participation for AARP on a
broad range of age discrimination and other employment issues.
Shane Roos is the Senior Vice President of ACHIEVA Support
located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a nonprofit organization
that serves thousands of people with disabilities and their
families each year. He oversaw ACHIEVA's vocational
transformation, including the shuttering of five sheltered
workshops and the phase-out of their 14(c) certificates.
Daniel Pianko is Co-Founder and Managing Director at the
University Ventures. He leads the firm's investments in
education related ventures.
Kisha Bird is the Director of the youth policy at the
Center for Law and Social Policy, or CLASP. She has expertise
in youth development, workforce development policy, reentry and
career pathways, with a focus on equity, opportunity, youth,
and individuals impacted by the criminal justice system.
We appreciate all of our witnesses for being here and look
forward to your testimony.
Let me remind you that we have read your written statements
and they will appear in full in the record.
Pursuant to Rule 7d and Committee practice, each of you is
asked to limit your oral presentation to a 5 minute summary of
your written statement.
Before you begin your testimony, please remember to press
the button in front of you on the microphone so it will turn on
and Members can hear you. As you begin to speak, the light in
front of you will turn green. After 4 minutes the light will
turn yellow and you will have 1 minute remaining. When the
light turns red, your 5 minutes have expired and we ask you to
please wrap up.
We will let the entire panel make presentations before we
move to Member questions. When answering a question please
remember, once again, to activate your microphone.
I will first recognize Ms. McCann.
TESTIMONY OF LAURIE MCCANN, J.D., SENIOR ATTORNEY, AARP
FOUNDATION LITIGATION
Ms. MCCANN. Thank you.
Chairman Scott, Ranking Member Foxx, and Members of the
Committee, on behalf of our nearly 38 million members, and all
older Americans, AARP thanks you for inviting us to testify on
employment barriers facing older works and H.R. 1230, the
Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act, or POWADA.
It is simply good business to recruit and to retain talent,
regardless of age. The 50+ segment of the workforce is the most
engaged cohort across all generations, yet older workers
continue to face numerous obstacles to employment, barriers
that cannot be fully addressed in one hearing.
Today I will focus on the most significant barrier older
workers face, age discrimination. Age discrimination in the
workplace remains disturbingly pervasive. Three in five older
workers report that they have seen or experienced age
discrimination on the job. Fifty-six percent of all older
workers are pushed out of their long-time jobs before they
choose to retire, and only one in ten of those workers will
ever again earn as much as they did before. Discrimination in
hiring is common, but less visible, and much harder to prove.
Experimental studies document that employers are less likely to
call back older applicants for an interview and women face even
more age discrimination in hiring than men.
There are many best practices employers can and do adopt to
help prevent discrimination, but such efforts are no substitute
for strong legal protections. Unfortunately, courts have failed
to interpret the Age Discrimination and Employment Act as a
remedial civil rights statute, but, instead, narrowly interpret
and erode its protections. Exhibit A is the Gross v. FBL
Financial Services decision, which came out 10 years ago next
month. Joining me here today is Mr. Jack Gross, the plaintiff
in that case, which created the need to pass POWADA.
Mr. Gross is now a happy retiree, who spends his time with
his wife of 51 years and his grandchildren, but he still wants
to stop his name from being associated with the pain and
injustice inflicted on older workers by age discrimination.
Those are his words.
After working for more than 30 years and steadily rising
within the ranks of the company, Jack's employer underwent a
merger and reorganized. Many older workers were offered a
buyout, and those who didn't take it, including Jack, were
demoted and essentially replaced by younger workers. Jack, then
54, went to court and the jury agreed that age discrimination
had been one of the motives behind his demotion. He was awarded
about $47,000 in lost compensation.
But when his case was appealed to the Supreme Court, the
Court ruled that the ADEA requires a much stricter showing of
causation than other kinds of discrimination. It was no longer
enough to prove that age was one of the motivating factors
behind an employer's conduct. The Court held that older workers
must prove that age was a decisive, but for cause for the
employer's actions.
The Gross decision has made it far more difficult for older
workers to get their day in court and to prevail. Courts have
used Gross to weaken other wage discrimination protections and
the damage has not stopped with the ADEA. The Supreme Court and
lower courts have extended the harmful reasoning of Gross to
other civil rights laws. In 2013 the Supreme Court imposed the
Gross standard on Title VII retaliation cases. While the
Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the availability of the
mixed motive framework under the American Disability Act or the
Rehabilitation Act of 1973, several lower courts have extended
the damage to disability discrimination.
POWADA alone won't fix all the problems. Much more needs to
be done. For instance, Representative Grothman introduced a
bill last year that would protect more older workers from age
discrimination by extending the AEDA's coverage to more
employers. But POWADA would fix the enormous problem created by
the Gross decision and its progeny, a legal standard that is
stacked against workers and backtracks on the promise of the
AEDA and other civil rights laws.
POWADA does not expand civil rights, it is a limited
straight forward restoration of the same standard that was in
effect before 2009. The bill has long been bipartisan and was
developed as a consensus between civil rights and business
groups.
Discrimination is discrimination, and POWADA would make
Congress' intent clear, that no amount of unlawful
discrimination in the workplace is acceptable. Congress should
pass POWADA as soon as possible.
Thank you again for inviting AARP to testify and I would be
happy to answer any questions you may have.
[The statement of Ms. McCann follows:]
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Chairman SCOTT. Thank you.
Mr. Roos.
TESTIMONY SHAYNE ROOS, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, ACHIEVA SUPPORT,
ACHIEVA
Mr. ROOS. Good morning and thank you to Chairman Scott and
Ranking Member Foxx for allowing me this opportunity to come
before you today in support of the Transformation to
Competitive Integrated Employment Act.
This morning my testimony will include the story of my
organization's transformation away from the use of a 14(c) and
the successes realized as a result of that transformation.
My name is Shane Roos. I am the Senior Vice President of
ACHIEVA Support, promoting employment opportunities for people
with disabilities is a personal passion, has been a primary
focus of my career. I view employment as being the centerpiece
of a community life.
ACHIEVA was founded in 1951 by a group of family members
who all desired the same thing, to ensure their children with
disabilities had the same chances in life that all children
should be given. Their commitment helped to establish a
nationwide movement that changed the long history of isolation
and segregation of both children and adults with disabilities.
For several decades ACHIEVA has been providing employment
supports for people with disabilities and we have always taken
a diversified approach to achieve competitive integrated
employment outcomes.
Until recently, however, we had relied heavily on sheltered
workshops and the use of a 14(c) certificate. In 2014 we began
to examine our scope of employment services relative to the
mission, vision, and core values of our organization. We
determined that they did not align. In a community where
disability should be a distinction that makes no difference,
people should not be earning less than minimum wage with little
or no access to the greater community.
So in late 2015 our boards of directors unanimously adopted
a resolution whereas we would divest ourselves of all facility
based services that segregate people from the richness of local
community life. While it took time, planning, investment, and a
reallocation of resources, all five of ACHIEVA's workshops were
shuttered within 3 years of the adoption of the resolution.
Even more importantly, both of our 14(c) certificates were
phased out within 2 years. And despite the rhetoric that
implies when workshops close there are no other alternatives,
the successes of those people once languishing in our workshops
tell a different story.
Today just over 100 people formerly in one of our workshops
and earning a sub-minimum wage are now enjoying the richness
and benefit of competitive integrated employment. Those jobs
span across 53 unique employers with an average starting rate
of $8.25 per hour. An additional 65 people are employed by one
of ACHIEVA's 3 business. The average hourly rate earned in
ACHIEVA's business operations is $8.93 an hour. These same
people were once earning an average wage of $1.90 per hour
under a 14(c) certificate. Current earnings represent a 370
percent increase in hourly wages.
Transitioning away from a 14(c) is not without its
challenges. Many of the people currently in workshops
transitioned into them directly from high school and they have
remained there ever since. The workshops and the associated
meager earnings are all they and their families have ever known
because people were not truly being prepared for a transition
to competitive integrated employment.
Passage of the Transformation to Competitive Employment Act
in and of itself sets a new standard. It answers the question
as to whether or not people with disabilities should be paid
less than minimum wage. That answer is no. The Act sends a
message that all people with disabilities who choose to be
employed have the same rights and opportunities as people
without disabilities. It also addresses those challenges by
first and foremost offering technical assistance to current
14(c) holders. They will need to understand and buy into why it
should be done and develop a competency as to how it can be
done in order to successfully transition away from the use of a
14(c).
Transformation of this kind does not occur overnight. The
Act allows ample time to create and implement an exit strategy.
Technical assistance and financial supports provided by the act
should be used at the onset to develop a vision of how things
will look 6 years down the road, establish realistic deadlines
for implementation, and design a comprehensive communication
plan. Having those three components in place prior to execution
minimizes the fear of the unknown for your internal and
external stakeholders and holds organizations accountable in
terms of meeting your strategic benchmarks.
I support the Transformation and Competitive Employment
Act, and ACHIEVA is a proud member of ANCOR, the American
Network of Community Options and Resources, who support the
Act.
While there may have been a place for such a law when it
was created in 1938, this discriminatory practice that
undervalues the abilities and contributions of a person with a
disability is no longer acceptable.
And while I will always stand tall behind ACHIEVA's
decision to discontinue the use of our 14(c) because we felt
that it was simply the right thing to do, my experience over
the past few years has shown me that all too many current
certificate holders will not take that approach under their own
volition. They instead will lean on falsehoods, such as a
person's lack of options or eliminating one's choice to defend
a model of sheltered employment and sub-minimum wage. And it is
for that very reason that the adoption of the Transformation to
Competitive Employment Act is so inherent to promoting
competitive integrated employment opportunities for all.
Thank you.
[The statement of Mr. Roos follows:]
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Chairman SCOTT. Thank you.
Mr. Pianko.
TESTIMONY DANIEL PIANKO, MANAGING DIRECTOR, UNIVERSITY VENTURES
Mr. PIANKO. Thank you, Chairman Scott, Ranking Member Foxx,
for the opportunity to testify.
My name is Daniel Pianko and I am Co-Founder and Managing
Director of University Ventures. Our portfolio company has
reduced barriers to employment and make higher education more
affordable by pioneering new approaches to learning and helping
employers think differently about how and where they discover
talent.
America is facing an unprecedented mismatch in the supply
of and demand for talent. Even in this robust economy, college
degrees are not delivering the skills required to get a good
first job. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to
empower Americans through education, to get one of the 7
million open jobs that are out there. But higher education just
isn't working for too many. It used to be that the American
companies would hire recent high school and college graduates
and then prepare them for specific jobs. These programs have
virtually disappeared.
Today, employers expect new hires to already have specific
skills. Gallup and Inside Higher Ed found--and this is probably
the most important statistic--that while 96 percent of provosts
believe that they are academically preparing students for the
world of work, only 14 percent of hiring managers believe that
colleges are successfully preparing their graduates for the
workforce. The result is over 40 percent of college graduates
end up in jobs that do not require a bachelor's degree, and 2/3
of those underemployed graduates will still be underemployed
five years later.
The employability gap is best understood in micro terms.
Salesforce, for example, is a customer relationship management
software platform. Over 300,000 jobs are created each year for
individuals with Salesforce skills, yet virtually no colleges
or workforce programs teach students the fundamentals of
Salesforce.
In addition to hard skills, we have a soft skills gap.
Employers use soft skills as a prerequisite for employment.
Today's students though have less exposure to paid work as
adolescents, which means that a generation of new hires with
less ability to communicate effectively, adapt to the
workplace, or even know that they should show up on time. It is
imperative that we do away with the false dichotomy that
teaching job specific skills would mean a shift away from soft
skills. Technical skills and soft skills can and must be taught
together.
Today I will lay out four solutions that should receive
bipartisan support.
First, solutions for higher education are being developed
in the marketplace. Congress should encourage employer pay
models of education by allowing companies that prepare and
subsequently hire workers to be eligible for Federal funding
from programs like Pell and Workforce Innovation Act funds.
For example, Talent Path works with colleges to create a
direct pathway for students to employment with free software
education provided. Employers are effectively ending in-house
spending on entry level hiring and instead paying for full
stack last mile training programs that recruit, teach, and
place students in good first jobs. We call these employer pay
models and believe they will grow dramatically to fill the gap
between education and employment.
Second, existing funding mechanisms, like Federal work
study, should be reformed to better support the connection
between education and employment. The Federal Government is
spending almost $1 billion annually in work study to preference
on campus jobs that do not have a direct connection to work.
Federal work study should incent off campus work that has a
potential to lead to full-time high wage employment, or provide
funds for discipline aligned apprenticeship programs.
TekTonic, which operates the first Department of Labor-
approved apprenticeship program in software development,
creates an outsourced apprenticeship model that is partially
funded by WIOA dollars.
Third, Congress should use the Higher Education Act as a
tool to encourage more institutions to adopt work experience
into academic programs through the work college designations.
Work colleges, such as Paul Quinn and Berea, have proven that
work, when integrated into the curriculum, radically reduces
the cost of education while improving job outcomes.
Finally, Congress should look to dramatically reform the
Federal financial aid system, particularly when it comes to
graduate education. The Grad PLUS loan program has shifted from
access to undergraduate education to supporting graduates who
seek to transition into professional fields.
The pursuit of graduate education remains vital to talent
development in many high need areas, but Congress should have
some assurances that the Federal investment in Grad PLUS is
tied to employment in career aligned fields.
Congress has spent decades providing access to
postsecondary education, yet the chasm between employers and
educators creates huge barriers to entry to employment. Today,
it is more important than ever to ensure that completion of a
credential connects a graduate to employment and future
success.
Thank you for your time, and I look forward to answering
questions.
[The statement of Mr. Pianko follows:]
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Chairman SCOTT. Thank you.
Ms. Bird.
TESTIMONY KISHA BIRD, M.S.S./M.S.L.P., DIRECTOR, YOUTH POLICY
CENTER FOR LAW AND SOCIAL POLICY (CLASP)
Ms. BIRD. Chairman Scott, Ranking Member Foxx, and Members
of the Committee, thank you so much for the opportunity to
testify on barriers to employment.
I am Kisha Bird, the Director of Youth Policy at the Center
for Law and Social Policy, or CLASP, an anti-poverty
organization. We work nationally and with states and
communities around the country.
Today you have asked me to address barriers and solutions
that affect young people, including opportunity youth, young
people who are ages 16-24, are not in school and work, and
people impacted by the criminal justice system. In my written
testimony I also include other workers who face barriers.
Today I want to make four key points.
First, the economy is leaving out too many people. Despite
extremely low unemployment rates, millions of would be workers
are locked out of the labor market and millions more are stuck
in low wage jobs that cannot support a family. For example,
approximately 4.5 million young people are opportunity youth.
And people impacted by the criminal justice system are
unemployed at a rate of 27 percent. For black men and women who
have returned from incarceration, that figure jumps to 35.2
percent and 43.6 percent, respectively.
Second, the barriers to employment that face youth and
adults locked out of opportunity are structural. They arise
from systems and policies and not individual choices. So we
know the key structural systemic factors include mass
incarceration, racism and discrimination, segregation and
isolation from inner cities to rural communities, we know
policy and investment failures in the K-12, adult, and
postsecondary education systems and major gaps in access to
work supports, like childcare.
Third, the Federal Government is critical to addressing
barriers to employment in partnership with states, communities,
and business. The Federal Government, and in particular this
Committee, has a central role in dismantling barriers based on
race, gender, geography, income, and ability.
So Federal Education and Workforce Development funds are
investments in equity. They are the funds that build the equity
framework and infrastructure by focusing on effective
interventions, like career pathways, and disparately impacted
populations. But this crucial role has been weakened by the
erosion of budget investments. For example, while 36 million
adults need foundational skills, adult education at current
levels only serve 1.4 million annually, so we have a tremendous
gap in service.
And, fourth, and finally, we know what works and we know
where investments need to be made. So simply put, it is really
time to act.
So among the immediate steps that I would urge the Congress
to consider, are lift budget caps to make critical investments
in workforce development, adult education, postsecondary
education, and critical work supports, like childcare. Invest
in strategies for job creation and youth free connection,
summer youth employment, for examples through the Opening Doors
for Youth Act. Make improvements in the Workforce Innovations
and Opportunity Act in tandem with the Higher Education Act,
and directly address the consequences of incarceration. This
could include ensuring background checks are accurate, such as
the Chairman's Fairness and Accuracy in Criminal Background
Checks Act, restoring Pell grants to individuals who are
incarcerated, and investments in correctional education.
In conclusion, I urge Congress to build on what we already
know from research, state and local experience, and young
people impact the communities themselves, directly address the
structural barriers that I have mentioned here today, invest in
equity and spreading innovation, for example, through
infrastructure.
I urge Congress to create a plan for universal access to
education and employment for all young people and individuals
impacted by the criminal justice system.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify, and I look
forward to your questions.
[The statement of Ms. Bird follows:]
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Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. I want to thank all of our
witnesses for their testimony.
We will begin now with questions from the Members and I
will go last. So I first recognize the gentleman from Arizona,
Mr. Grijalva.
Mr. GRIJALVA. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank
you to the witnesses.
Ms. McCann, in your experience as a litigator, explain how
the change to the standard of proof in the Gross decision has
adversely impacted age discrimination in employment claims. Is
there evidence that AEDA claims are being rejected by the
courts more often, since that Gross decision occurred, and the
impact of that?
Ms. MCCANN. Sure. Thank you.
As I explained in my testimony, the Gross decision
basically heightened the level of proof for an age
discrimination victim as compared to other victims of
discrimination. So it is no longer enough for an age
discrimination victim to prove that age was a motivating factor
in their employer's decision, but they also have to prove the
hypothetical negative that had the employer not taken age into
account, they would have done the same action or taken the same
decision. So they are almost being required to prove a
hypothetical negative.
That is very difficult to prove and by proving that age was
already a motivating factor, the age discrimination victim has
already established a claim.
It is hard to quantify the impact Gross has had on age
discrimination claims. How do you quantify or take into account
the cases that were never brought because an age discrimination
victim, knowing how difficult it was already to prove
discrimination, now knows that the burden has been raised. We
have heard anecdotally from other plaintiff's attorneys that
they are not going to take an age discrimination case knowing
that they are going to be required to produce either more
evidence or more compelling evidence to prove age
discrimination than other forms of discrimination. It is one of
the reasons AARP has its litigation program, because we have
the resources to take on these cases.
So a lot of victims just choose not to bring them.
Mr. GRIJALVA. Thank you very much.
Ms. Bird, just a general question. I think we have heard
and will probably continually hear some more about the issues
that we are dealing with, whether it is youth, issues of age
discrimination, disabilities, discrimination in terms of
whether it be pay or accessibility, that all this can be
overcome by individual grit, you know. That the individual's
initiative, the individual's success, that it is up to that
individual regardless to make it out. And that for this reason
there should be no government involvement, let nature take its
course. Kind of an upside down Darwin theory in my mind, but,
anyway.
So your response to that, since you mentioned systemic
reasons, and why there is a role for government. If you could
expand on that one point that you made.
Ms. BIRD. Yes, thank you for that question.
As I mentioned, the barriers to employment faced by a range
of folks are structural. The research is pretty clear that
there are discriminatory hiring practices based on age, whether
you are a younger worker or an older worker, based on race. We
haven't improved discrimination--
Mr. GRIJALVA. If that barrier exists--if I may, Ms. Bird--
how can the individual, through individual grit, get over that
barrier?
Ms. BIRD. Yeah, so I believe that there is a Federal role
to play and part of that Federal role is ensuring that there
are fair hiring practices; Federal Government working in
partnership with employers to dismantle some of those barriers.
For example, for individuals who are incarcerated, ensuring
that there are Ban the Box efforts that don't unfairly
discriminate from those who have had backgrounds and impacted
by the criminal justice system.
So that is just one example of how the Federal Government
can play a role, because these issues are structural and we
can't overcome them with individual case by case efforts.
Mr. GRIJALVA. Thank you.
Mr. Roos, in the transition process that you talked about
and that ACHIEVA went through, and others, you state your
decision was not well received. Who objected and why?
Mr. ROOS. Primarily it was families of the people who had
been in the workshops for all of those years that were really
our biggest opponents. They didn't see an alternative for their
sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and I attribute that
to what they were used to. I talked about it in my testimony,
they had gone right from high school right into a workshop. It
was that standard Monday through Friday, 8:00-4:00 o'clock.
They knew their son or daughter, their loved one, was well
taken care of during that time. Employment really wasn't the
focus, it was time spent somewhere that they knew that they
were adequately supported, as opposed to looking to achieve
employment outcomes.
Mr. GRIJALVA. I yield back, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
Chairman SCOTT. The gentleman from Tennessee, Dr. Roe.
Mr. ROE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank all of you. I
agree with many things that all of you said. And, Mr. Gross, I
knew when I was getting older when I kept getting these
unsolicited emails for the walk-in tub. That is how I knew I
was aging.
In our State of Tennessee--and I want to go over some
things that we are doing there and just get your comments on
it, and also on the issue of incarceration. I had a local
roundtable with my law enforcement people, and 80 percent of
the jails are people there with drug crimes. And we can't
arrest our way out of this problem. And these are people then
that are tainted. We need them in the workforce.
And I think the President did the First Step Act. It was a
bipartisan bill that I totally agreed with. And as a physician
that has watched this occur over the years, this drug epidemic,
we have to do something about it because it is affecting the
life expectancy in this country, it is also affecting our
workforce. So that is one thing said.
In Tennessee we recognized--we had a skills gap and we
recognized that in our State. And we started a Drive to 55,
where 55 percent of our people in our state had a definable
skill or certificate after high school. And the way we did this
was we made community college free. Anybody in our state who
graduates from high school now can go to community college or
technical school. And these are some numbers I want you all to
remember. I went to my local TCAT and talked to the president
the other day, and 77 percent of students graduate on time in a
career path--77 percent, much higher than college--98 percent
are placed in a job immediately after school, 100 percent
graduate with 0 debt, where the average debt of a college
student, who may not be able to get a job, is around $30,000 in
our State. If it is a private school obviously it is much
higher. So we have recognized this skills gap.
And I went out hiking this weekend with a friend of mine
who can hire five mechanics today. I could go on and on about
the unfilled and the soft skills. That is why, Ms. Bird, it is
so important to have youth working to learn those soft skills.
Show up at 8:00 o'clock, work hard and be there until 5:00
o'clock. And I think our State is doing a decent job. We have
14,000 people in the Tennessee Reconnect. If you are a senior
and you lose your job, you also can go back to a school and be
educated at no cost. Because we believe that investment in
education in the State of Tennessee is going to pay huge
dividends for our State.
I guess, Mr. Pianko, a couple of questions that you have.
What are some of the biggest challenges that states face in
helping students earn degree, and what are some of the biggest
opportunities we ought to be focusing on?
Mr. PIANKO. Well, first of all, I want to commend the
government of the State of Tennessee. What you did in
Tennessee--and I didn't actually know all the statistics you
just mentioned, but when Governor Haslam started with the free
college program I think he made a big splash. And, honestly, I
think he really galvanized a lot of people around the concept
of making college tuition free up to some level.
At the state level--again, I think Tennessee is a really
wonderful example of sort of creating the ecosystem around
connecting education to employment. You mentioned sort of the
employment councils that you guys created and then made sure
that the community colleges and the regular colleges and
universities all integrated with that. And the results speak
for themselves. So I think Tennessee is an excellent example.
Mr. ROE. Let me give you another example we are doing. We
have a bus company from Belgium that is moving in, and they are
starting to shovel dirt I think this spring. They are paying
120 students $16 an hour to go to school to learn to be
welders, to have a guaranteed job at north of $22 an hour to
start out with, plus their benefits. So we are already seeing
huge benefits from that.
What are the--and anyone can answer this question--what are
some of the best innovations that you all have encountered when
it comes to using industry expertise to guide the development
of career preparatory programs? I will throw that open to
anybody.
Ms. BIRD. Yeah, that is a really good question. And I will
jump in.
I think one of the things that we are seeing is really the
notion of career pathways, which is baked into the Workforce
Innovation and Opportunity Act. It requires a number of
different systems working together, so with business and
industry, with the workforce development board, which has those
employer partnerships, which has the labor market information,
and with higher education institutions, like community college,
like technical schools. So there is not one entity that can do
it alone, but at the state and local level support it, again by
the Federal role and that framework. It allows for business and
industry to be an effective partner in creating career pathways
and creating the opportunities post education and training for
employment.
Mr. ROE. Thank you.
And Mr. Roos, I want to thank you for advocating for your
employees and for the group that you represent. I respect and
admire you for that.
And I yield back.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you.
The gentleman from the Northern Mariana Islands, Mr.
Sablan.
Mr. SABLAN. Yeah, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for
holding this hearing, and welcome to all the witnesses. Thank
you for being here with us.
Ms. Bird, I know you are here appearing in your position as
Director of the Youth Policy, but I am also taken back in your
oral presentation with the passion you have in supporting your
testimony. So I want to--I have a few questions for you.
I want to know about funding levels. When we talk about
money here, sometimes it gets into higher level of discussions.
But your testimony notes that current funding levels are
insufficient to provide the employment and training services
that individuals with barriers to employment need to move out
of poverty and into good jobs. Current Federal youth employment
and training programs serve approximately 339,000 opportunity
youth, reaching just about 25 percent of the young people in
need of employment, education, and service pathways.
So let me ask, if Congress were to say double the funding
for youth employment and training programs, what do you see the
potential in the participation rate?
Ms. BIRD. Thank you for that question. It is really
critical.
So first thing is that we have seen funding levels
dramatically decline for employment and training programs for
young people over the last 40 years, and in particular since
2000. And so we are not at the funding levels where we used to
be. So we know that at some point in our history this country
did think these were critical investments, early work
experience and those skills.
So as it relates to opportunity youth in particular, we do
need to increase the funding. We have 4.5 million young people
who are out of school and out of work, and yet we are only
serving a fraction of those young people through programs like
Job Corps, Youthbuild, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity
Act programs. And so we know that we should scale up those
programs and serve them. Now, we would increase participation,
but it is not just a formula that if you double the funding you
double the amount of young people engaged, because we know we
need to think about the supportive services, work supports, as
well as the different types of programs that young people are
engaged in.
Mr. SABLAN. But you could in a sense double it and maybe--
even more than double right, if it is done right?
Ms. BIRD. Yeah. Well, what we have been calling for through
the Reconnecting Youth campaign is that we need annually to
engage at least 1 million more young people in these
opportunities. And so that includes a range of things like
summer youth employment, like work based learning, and all
those other opportunities.
Mr. SABLAN. Which leads me to my next question. Really, I
would like to know your opinion about which Federal programs
are most effective in assisting opportunity youth, for example.
In your testimony you described this group as the--like you
just said, 4.5 million young people ages 16-24 who are not
participating in school or work. So can you give me your
assessment on which Federal programs--some we may have in my
district, the Northern Marianas, and some way may not--have
been most effective in addressing this cohort? And in
particular, can you speak to the effectiveness of Job Corps
centers, which we do not have in my district, regrettably.
Ms. BIRD. Yes. So I will try to get to as much of that as
possible.
Mr. SABLAN. Thank you.
Ms. BIRD. So the issues that young people, especially
opportunity youth face, are not one size fits all issues. And
so there is no one answer, like this is the most effective
program.
What we know from research and state and local experience
and implementation, is that there are effective strategies,
like work base learning, that allows young people to earn and
learn, like integrated education training which allows young
people to gain foundational skills, build adult education, and
create pathways to postsecondary opportunities and to
employment.
So there are the strategies that are baked in. And what
WIOA does is actually include those provisions to incentive
state and local workforce boards to have community based
partners, to engage young people in those opportunities.
Mr. SABLAN. Yeah, thank you. My time is up.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you.
The gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Walberg.
Mr. WALBERG. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to the
panel for being here. It is an important topic, an exciting
topic that we are engaging in today.
When I meet employers in my district, they often talk about
the disconnect between the skills being taught in colleges and
universities and the skills that employers are seeking to meet
their workforce needs. Sometimes they don't even come close to
what actually is needed in the workplace, as you have indicated
in your testimony.
I have a number of excellent colleges in and around my
district that are attempting to develop courses and programs to
satisfy this workforce demand. Mr. Chairman, you might be
interested, that in one college, Adrian College, in my district
has developed a relationship with Google. And I remember when
we visited Google last term together and heard of the massive
need that they had in people trained in the computer skills,
IT, coding, all of the rest, but also needed those soft skills,
critical thinking skills, et cetera. They weren't finding them.
They were finding people that had courses, but those courses
weren't meeting the needs of the real world. And so it has been
interesting to watch Adrian College develop this consortium
now, starting with Google, and now ratcheting up and out with
other colleges as well that have niche fields that they can
share in unique and creative educational arrangements so that
individual students can have opportunity to have those needs
met, the soft skills as well as the technical skills that the
businesses, whether it is in marketing or sales or logistics or
insurance, et cetera--when they get into the field themselves
they are prepared and ready. And they don't have to have the
remedial training that Google would have to give most of what
they are receiving from universities today. And so partnerships
like this seem to be something we ought to be working toward.
Mr. Pianko, in your experience, have you seen other
colleges start to amend their curricula to better align with
the workforce demands? And, if so, is there a common thread or
model that you think could be broadly emulated?
Mr. PIANKO. Yes. So this is--I get asked this question a
lot, which is like how do we do it better for a college or
university, how do we get better connected to employment. And I
think we have to realize what people do well and what people
may or may not need help with. And colleges and universities
were really not set up to do workforce development and job
training.
The jobs that you are talking about at Google, the
technologies that they are describing probably change over once
every 3-6-9-12 months.
Mr. WALBERG. Right.
Mr. PIANKO. And colleges tend to take--I sat on the
curriculum committee of my undergraduate institution and it
took us two years to update a curriculum, and usually that was
adding a new book or something. When programming languages,
especially in the technology field, are changing as rapidly as
they are, it becomes very difficult for colleges to do what you
are describing.
And so I think--
Mr. WALBERG. Under the old model?
Mr. PIANKO. Under the old model.
Mr. WALBERG. And I guess what we are saying is, that model
needs to change?
Mr. PIANKO. Right. So the question is what do you do if you
are a college, right.
Mr. WALBERG. You change.
Mr. PIANKO. You change.
Mr. WALBERG. Or you go away.
Mr. PIANKO. Or you focus on what you are really good at.
And then I think there are going to be a new brand of
companies, nonprofits, community-based organizations that
spring up that actually provide the connective tissue between
educational institutions and employers.
And it is really hard for the one college in your district
that probably graduates a few hundred students every year to
have that relationship with Google. That is unique. But if they
could tie into some sort of broader national framework of
either a company or a nonprofit that actually provides a lot of
that training that Google needs, that last mile training that
Google needs--and Google will pay for it.
Mr. WALBERG. And Google is paying for it.
Mr. PIANKO. Google is paying for it.
Mr. WALBERG. And 21 other businesses are now starting to
work in this consortium to do the same thing.
Mr. PIANKO. Exactly. And what you are describing is exactly
what the future is. These intermediaries are going to spring
up. And Congress should really help develop these
intermediaries that can connect, you know, this chasm between
education and employment.
So what you are describing is exactly the innovation we
would be excited to see grow.
Mr. WALBERG. And with push like you are talking about, in
the sense forcing through--saying it is not going to work the
old way.
Mr. PIANKO. Right.
Mr. WALBERG. Colleges, if they are going to survive. And
small colleges like Adrian are going out of business every day.
Mr. PIANKO. Those are the ones that are struggling the
hardest. I mean if you are a small college, how do you keep up
to date? And so, you know, I think as you think about well how
do you encourage innovation, you should actually think about
putting workforce dollars on the table that could facilitate
that interaction with--Google is a big example, they got a ton
of money. But there plenty of other companies in your district,
Congressman Scott's district, that would probably love some
money to help them build an apprenticeship program for the
middle skill areas that you described.
Mr. WALBERG. Thank you. Exciting opportunity.
I yield back.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you.
The gentlelady from Florida, Ms. Wilson.
Ms. WILSON. Thank you, Chairman Scott, for holding this
hearing on this critical issue of eliminating barriers to
employment. I also thank the witnesses for sharing their
testimony with us this morning.
The importance of today's hearing cannot be overstated.
Even though the economy has statistically reached full
employment, there are still tens of thousands of people who
have been left out of the job market. There are numerous ways
to increase employment and break down the barriers that too
many Americans face when trying to enter or re-enter the
workforce.
Two prime examples of Federal programs that contribute to
breaking down these barriers are the Workforce Innovation and
Opportunity Act and career and technical education programs.
Increasing funding for both of these important programs would
be a positive step forward.
We also need to remove the barriers to employment for those
with arrest records and other criminal backgrounds. One in
three Americans has a criminal record, and they not only face
educational, social, and other barriers to employment, but
oftentimes outright discrimination. Low rates of high school
retention among black male students directly relate to high
rates of joblessness and incarceration. More than 2/3 of black
male dropouts end up serving time in State or Federal prison,
making their path into the workforce much more difficult.
One of my life's missions has been to put up a permanent
roadblock on the destructive and demoralizing path that has
entrapped too many boys and young men of color and other at
risk youth. In my experience as a teacher and a principal has
taught me that very real benefits of reaching children as early
as possible and how, with the necessary encouragement and
support and resources, their lives can be transformed so that
they will make positive choices for themselves and their
futures.
I have a few questions for Ms. Bird.
Ms. Bird, how important is it to bring together community
institutions, such as schools, workforce development providers,
the juvenile justice and child welfare agencies, to reach
opportunity youth?
Ms. BIRD. It is really important. What we know is that
because opportunity youth have faced a number of different
barriers, whether it be as a result of living in high poverty
communities where there is lack of investment, systemic
failures in their k-12 system that have pushed them out of
school. You've mentioned boys and men of color. We know they
are more likely to be referred to law enforcement and have
higher suspension and expulsion rates. So, again, these issues
are structural and systemic.
So in order to really capture opportunity youth and to meet
them where they are, we need recruitment efforts, and that
involves cross systems collaboration. We know that young people
in the child welfare system, for example, are more likely to
have employment and postsecondary challenges.
So the workforce investment system really is a convening
entity that can braid and blend and support cross systems
partnership to create the best interventions and the best
opportunities for opportunity youth where they are.
Ms. WILSON. Your testimony addressed the untapped potential
of opportunity youth. At a time when job openings exceed the
number of applicants we are seeing more and more employers
recognizing the potential of these young people and making
concerted efforts to engage these workers. We also know the
barriers to employment do not go away once a young person is
hired.
How does our current workforce development system help
ready young workers for employment opportunities and help
employers connect with these young workers? And what services
are in place for support?
Ms. BIRD. So I will answer in a number of different ways
because, again, what we find is that what workforce development
boards in partnership with their community partners are really
thinking critically about the needs of employers, as well as
the needs of young people in their communities.
So, one, they are thinking about coaching and advocates
that help young people to navigate not only the types of career
pathways that they need, but also the social supports and the
supportive services, again, that are baked into WIOA, to help
them, for example, if they are a young parent. What do they
need in terms of support there, in terms of childcare.
The other thing that we think is really important, and
we've seen this in some of the research with summer youth
employment, with employers is really how do you also train the
workplace to be prepared and to be able to supervise and to
coach young people themselves. So all the training and support
doesn't just happen for young people, but the employer and
private sector community.
I would be happy to follow up with you, because we have a
number of examples from around the country and we do think that
the Federal investment can support that in places where it is
not happening.
Ms. WILSON. Thank you very much.
Chairman SCOTT. The gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Allen.
Mr. ALLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for
being here today.
We have quite a dilemma in the country, and it was
basically created by this tremendous economic opportunity we
have experienced under the Trump Administration and Republican-
led Congress. Our economy is doing better than ever, best in
the world; 7 million jobs open right now.
I meet college graduates with college debt every day that
cannot find a job. I talk to people in my district, and
everybody needs workers to grow their business. They can grow
their business if they had a skilled workforce. We know that
the number one thing that a business looks at when they want to
locate in a community, is skilled workforce. This government is
spending a lot of money to try to look at various ways to deal
with this.
I will tell you the biggest problem in my district as far
as workers is passing a drug test. I mean it is alarming. In
fact, law enforcement tells me the biggest problem they have--
80 percent of their problem surrounds either the sale,
distribution, or use of drugs. And so we know that there are
reasons--I have employers that want to encourage their folks to
work overtime, but they won't work overtime because if they
make a certain amount of money they lose their government
benefits. In fact, they do not want to move up in the workforce
because they will lose their government benefits. There are
people who won't go to work because they will lose their
government benefits--maybe 20 million work capable people out
there.
I think the problem is with the Federal government.
As far as your research, and you have talked a lot about
innovation and education programs, what are you doing to solve
some of these issues, these real issues that folks are having
out there?
Mr. PIANKO. Yeah, look, I think the biggest problem is what
you alluded to, which is you graduated from college and you
don't actually know--you do not have the right skills to get a
job. And what then ends up happening is you are under employed
and you become the barista at Starbucks, or whatever the image
that connotes. And you are lost. And if you are a millennial
right now, you are on average 40 percent less wealthy than the
generation before you was at the same time in their career. And
it has led to a huge amount of disaffection and, frankly, a
significant decrease in the labor participation rate. And you
mentioned that we have this amazing economy going right now,
and we actually have employers who are willing to pay to bring
people back into the economy.
And so what I strongly recommend is we figure out a way to
leverage existing dollars because there are--we spend a lot of
dollars right now between WIOA, Pell, all the Title IV spending
that we make--that we can create more incentives for colleges
to--for businesses, to bring back people who are underemployed,
who have gone down the path that you described, because the
world isn't working for them. They went to college, they took
out all this debt, and they are not getting the jobs that they
want. Or they went to college and they weren't successful at
college. We didn't mention this, but 50 percent of people--more
than 50 percent of people who try college, it doesn't work for
them. And so our only response to them is go back to college to
get a job. And we need other alternatives, we need other
alternative pathways to employment. And that is what I would
strongly recommend this body--
Mr. ALLEN. We have a financial aid system in the country,
and you touched on this a little bit, but what are some steps
you suggest that we take to address the real problem?
Mr. PIANKO. So right now the entire incentive structure in
the financial aid system is--and I regret to use this term here
in this forum, but it is butts in seats. And our entire
economic model is, if someone shows up to class on a certain
day, then there is enough Pell or Title IV money for that
person to get paid to sit there or for the school to get paid
to sit there. We need to create better models that encourage
schools to actually have output measure, whether that is
actually linking the Title IV monies that they are receiving to
eventual outcomes or creating other, you know, financial
measures that incent schools to create better outcomes for
their students.
Mr. ALLEN. Great. Thank you, sir.
And I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you.
The gentlelady from Oregon, Ms. Bonamici.
Ms. BONAMICI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Ranking Member.
Thank you to our witnesses and also to Mr. Gross for being here
today.
You know, despite our Nation's low unemployment rate, the
economy is not working for everyone. There are systemic forces
in our labor market that are creating barriers. Those include
wage discrimination, lack of paid family leave, unpredictable
schedules, inaccessible childcare, and, of course
discrimination.
My home State of Oregon has taken some tangible steps to
address some of these barriers. The state legislature raised
the minimum wage, we have long prohibited employers from paying
tipped workers a sub-minimum wage, and in 2015 the legislature
passed a Ban the Box bill to prohibit employers from inquiring
about criminal convictions before the interview stage of
hiring.
Also I want to talk about workforce development programs
that are helping more people, but I want to note that--you
know, I mention my State. An equitable workforce requires
Congressional action. So workforce development programs--Ms.
Bird, I really appreciated your testimony. I want to talk a
little bit more about the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity
Act, or WIOA, which we passed with bipartisan support in 2014.
We know that it is really outlining the vision for a workforce
system that is responding to the needs of employers, but also
getting people into jobs.
So how do the programs provide the support services to help
individuals facing barriers, but also what role have local
workforce development boards played in supporting the state and
local strategies? How should this Committee address these
successes and challenges as we look at reauthorizing WIOA?
Ms. BIRD. Yeah, so I will start with the role of local
workforce boards. As we know through WIOA, the Federal role is
really to kind of set the stage of what does research show
about interventions that work to lift up the innovation that
has been happening in local communities. And now what we have
found is that local workforce boards again are the convening
entity and really connecting. Because of the unified plan that
was baked into the law as an option, we have seen then that
more and more local workforce boards are partnering with their
health and human services agencies, thinking about behavioral
health. That is a really huge challenge for individuals who
have been formerly incarcerated or young people, and others.
Ms. BONAMICI. Absolutely.
Ms. BIRD. We have also seen that local workforce boards are
using their research strategies to go deeper with individuals
to barriers to employment. And that is at the local level and
the state level.
And so I have couple of examples in my written testimony
about how California has advanced that, because of the
definition of individuals with barriers to employment, as well
as Washington State. And I am not sure they would have done it
otherwise.
Ms. BONAMICI. And I don't want to cut you off, but--
Ms. BIRD. Oh, I am sorry.
Ms. BONAMICI.--I want to get another question.
Ms. BIRD. I am sorry.
Ms. BONAMICI. Thank you very much.
Ms. McCann, Oregon's population is one of the most rapidly
aging in the country. I have heard from workers who tell me
they have been dismissed or denied employment because of their
age. And for at least the last decade there is a sort of common
understanding that it is really hard to prove an age
discrimination case. Age discrimination is wrong and employers
should not be allowed to violate the rights of older workers
who are striving to provide for themselves.
So I joined Chairman Scott in introducing the Protecting
Older Workers Against Discrimination Act. I am glad we are
focusing on that today.
So you talked in your testimony about the importance of
providing the same sort of Title VII protection to older
workers that other populations have under the Civil Rights Act.
So I wanted to follow up on Mr. Grijalva's question, how has
the Gross decision and the subsequent cases applying it,
affected the EEOC's ability to respond to age discrimination?
And also--I am going to try to get these all in at once so you
can use the time to respond--how have these decisions affected
the anti-retaliation claims under Title VII, and how would the
Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act help
workers bringing these claims?
Ms. MCCANN. Thank you for all your questions.
To start with your comment about the EEOC. I think that the
Gross decision affects the EEOC in much the same way in which
it affects private plaintiffs, that the EEOC also faces that--
when bringing an age discrimination case, faces that same
heightened burden of proof.
Ms. BONAMICI. It was already hard, now it is--
Ms. MCCANN. It is already very, very hard. And so the EEOC
is hampered as well.
As far as your question about the anti-retaliation
provisions of Title VII, unfortunately Gross has been applied
to Title VII's retaliation provision. And the problem is
historically when statutes have the same purpose and identical
language, courts have interpreted those statutes consistently.
But Gross changed all that and said that unless Congress, you
know, thought far into the future and thought of every possible
other statute that might be affected and amended them as well,
that the amendment they are making to the particular statute--
Ms. BONAMICI. I am running out of time. How could the
legislation help workers?
Ms. MCCANN. Because it sends a clear message that
discrimination is discrimination, that age discrimination is
not a second class civil right and you do not face a higher
burden of proof than other discrimination victims.
Ms. BONAMICI. Thank you. And now I am out of time. I yield
back.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you.
The gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Grothman.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Yeah. I would like to thank you for this
hearing. I wish I had five minutes for each one of the four of
them, but I have got to pick. And I, as the Chairman knows,
have a special interest in Dr. Roos' area of expertise. I am a
little concerned about some of the things he said, but you say
it one time that over 500 people with special needs working for
you and things have shifted. You still have 65 working for you
and 100 in other places and other people are still looking.
I have a lot of people who are very happy working in the
sheltered workshops in my area and they are very concerned. So
I would like to know if we follow through on what the bill you
support says, what becomes of these folks? I am very concerned
that in your testimony you say that all too many current
certificate holders will not take that approach under their own
volition. So, in other words, you believe that people with
special needs have to be forced somewhere where they wouldn't
actually want to go, which I find kind of discriminatory and
offensive.
But I would like to know of the 500 people you used to have
working for you, when you decided to kind of shut down your
work floor, where are they all? I guess you have got 65 working
for you and 100 in other places. The 100 in other places, how
many have a work coach?
Mr. ROOS. Out of the 100 that became employed
competitively, probably the majority if not all receive some
level of job coaching. Support and employment through the
Office of Vocational Rehabilitation or through the home and
community-based waivers is a great service for people looking
to get into community--between community-based assessments, job
development, job coaching, placement, follow along, that has
really been the key to the success for those over 100 people
and almost all have accessed that service.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Okay. Okay. Now we have got 165, which means
there are still 335 to go who at one time worked on your floor
and now are not. What became of the 335? Could you break that
down for us?
Well, first of all, I have got another question for you.
You mentioned you have 100 working outside of your facility. Of
those 100 how many are working say at least 30 hours a week?
Mr. ROOS. Very few. We probably average about 18-20 hours a
week across those 100 people.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Okay. So they really--as far as the value of
work or the self-satisfaction of work, you have got--of the 65
who are still working at ACHIEVA, how many are working what I
would call full-time or what you would call full-time?
Mr. ROOS. For that 65, we are probably in the same range,
although a little bit higher, about 20-25 hours a week for that
65.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Okay. So you really have very few people who
are now working let us say at least 30 hours a week?
Mr. ROOS. That is correct.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Okay. So if I have somebody who is right now
happy in a work center and is working 30 or 35 hours and is
proud to be like so many other people in society, so many
people like siblings in their society, when we pass this bill a
very tiny percent are still going to have the satisfaction of
working say 30-35 hours a week and kind of like being like
everybody else.
Is that true? Apparently?
Mr. ROOS. When you say working in a facility like that,
that number of hours a week, I would argue that in essence they
are not working. They might be attending, they might be
physically present 30-35-40 hours a week, but they are not
working.
I discussed in my testimony there is a lot of down time
that occurs in those workshops. Work is not always available. I
still see people prior to our closure doing work sampling,
where one person will put together a widget and the guy across
the table from him would take it apart.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Okay.
Mr. ROOS. So attendance versus working are two different--
Mr. GROTHMAN. Okay. Now I will give you another question. I
have 10 work centers in my district. I have a very high opinion
of all of them. Right now there are people who work part-time
in a work center and part-time out in the community. Some of
these people are very proud to work out in the community and
wish they could work more hours out in the community. Other
people prefer to work in the work center, for a variety of
reasons, and they are very adamant in that, that they prefer to
work in the work center.
Why would we vote on a bill or for a bill in which people
who are happy working in the work center no longer have that
right or, as you say here--in essence pushing them out of their
work center because ``all too many current certificate holders
will not take that approach under their own volition''. In
other words, they don't want to, but the government has to
force them out of a job they currently like.
Mr. ROOS. Elimination of a 14(c) doesn't force people out
of a workshop necessarily. I would challenge those workshops
that if they support their business model and they have a happy
workforce, to find a way to pay minimum wage, just as we have
done in our business operations, successfully.
Mr. GROTHMAN. I don't know what your average employee is
like, but at least the work centers that I deal with, there are
a lot of people who fairly obviously cannot produce at a
minimum wage, right. The minimum wage I think is $7.50. there
is a bill we have heard here that it is going up to 15 bucks. I
would think it is somewhat obvious that it is hard to put
together a work plan in which you can take somebody like that
and make money while paying them, you know, $4-500 a week. And
you could wind up with some very unhappy people.
Do you agree?
Mr. ROOS. I agree that you need to look at your workforce
in terms of their ability to contribute and produce, but I
would argue that if you have people in a work center that
clearly aren't showing those abilities or showing any
advancement towards competitive employment, then I would
question as to why they are in a work center when there are
other home and community-based services available to them that
would provide to them a fulfilling community life.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Do you mind if I respond, Mr. Chairman?
I mean I will give you an example and you can tell me what
I should tell them. I ran into a guy in my district recently, I
think he is 34 or 35 years old. He is severely physically
handicapped. He gets paid well under minimum wage, as he is
incredibly physically handicapped. Very sharp though, very
bright. He was laid off, for whatever reason, because the
government said this is not okay. His dad tells me he is
crushed. That they put him in day services, which his dad and
him describe as babysitting.
So he has gone from maybe making $.80-$1.00 an hour, but so
proud of that paycheck he earns, to going in day services,
babysitting. And this 33 or 34-year-old sharp guy, he is
crushed. What should I tell his dad?
Mr. ROOS. Yeah, I don't promote segregated day services
either, and I don't think that is the right solution for that
gentleman that you have just described.
The Center for Medicaid Services is looking at something
called community participation supports as a way of getting out
in the community, short of having to rely on a facility, any
type of facility.
Mr. GROTHMAN. He is crushed because he doesn't have a job,
he is not earning a paycheck, not because he wants better day
services.
Chairman SCOTT. The gentleman from California, Mr. Takano.
Mr. TAKANO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am very pleased today that the Committee is considering
the passage of POWADA, which stands for Protecting Older
Workers Against Discrimination Act. I don't want to use the
word POWADA because I want the people to understand what we are
talking about.
Ms. McCann, just briefly tell me what this law would do,
this Act would do.
Ms. MCCANN. Sure. The Protecting Older Workers Against
Discrimination Act would restore the ADEA and other civil
rights statutes that have been negatively impacted by the Gross
decision back to the standard of proof that applied to it prior
to 2009. So it does not expand the law, it restores the
standard of proof that was disturbed by Gross.
Mr. TAKANO. Because of a Supreme Court decision. I have
become familiar with some of the facts around Mr. Gross' case.
And as I understand it, he was working with a great record,
rising rapidly in the company, the company was merged with
another company, and then he was demoted and dismissed. Do I
have the facts correct?
Ms. MCCANN. You have them exactly right. He, you know,
worked for his company for 30 years, steadily rising among the
ranks, always getting good reviews. But then after the merger
and a reorganization, some employees were offered a buyout, Mr.
Gross was not. Instead he was demoted and his new position, he
tells me, he basically was given no responsibilities, and as a
result, he got a poor review
Mr. TAKANO. So we have seen the same old--this is a big
statistic we always cite, this trajectory of increased
productivity in our country, but yet workers not sharing in
that productivity and technology is blamed. But I contend, as
many others are starting to contend, that it is the rules of
our economy and the ways in which the protections for our
workers, for basic fairness in the workplace, have atrophied
and then weakened. And the way I look at this, the Supreme
Court decision made it far more difficult for people like Mr.
Gross to prove that he was discriminated against based on his
age. He was a great worker, producing--part of the productivity
of the company, but these new managers that came in had this
obvious economic motive to reduce the salary obligations they
had to workers like Mr. Gross. Right, Ms. McCann?
Ms. MCCANN. Correct. And I also want to add that he
actually--Mr. Gross actually was able to prove that age did
play a factor in his demotion. He proved that in the District
Court and the employer was not able to prove that it would have
made the same decision if it hadn't considered his age, and he
won. And it was only until the Supreme Court said that actually
he also had the burden to prove that negative hypothetical that
despite the fact that he had proved his age was a factor, that
the employer would not have taken the same decision, would not
have demoted him--
Mr. TAKANO. He had to prove that the employer did not have
any other reason to do what they did?
Ms. MCCANN. Exactly, exactly.
Mr. TAKANO. Right? Even after he had proved that
discrimination was--
Ms. MCCANN. Even after he had already proved--
Mr. TAKANO.--that discrimination was definitely--age
discrimination was definitely a part of it.
Well, I can definitely see a lot of Americans who are
reaching, I mean, this age. And I mean I think this last
recession--I mean we are at full employment now, but I think
there are a lot of Americans, older Americans, who are going
back to work because they have to, who cannot reach the same
salary levels that they had before this last recession. This
protection is so important to Americans.
Look, here is a question I want to ask you. Even if we fix
this, that will be an important thing if we fix this with the
protecting older Americans, but don't we also face the burden
of a growing number of employers who are forcing their
employees to sign employment contracts which force them into
arbitration, which I mean even if they have this private right
of action and can prove discrimination, that is also a barrier?
Ms. MCCANN. That is also a barrier to employment. As I said
in my testimony, all the barriers that older workers face
cannot be addressed in one hearing. And POWADA certainly does
not address that situation, but it is also a significant issue.
Mr. TAKANO. I am pleased that this legislation is
bipartisan. I am please we see a number of Republicans,
conservative Republicans actually joining us and--I mean they
understand it. The older Americans is a huge voting population.
But it is important also--and I don't want to--I want to
move toward the light instead of crossing the entire darkness,
but I also just want to make the point that it is incomplete
today, that we need to pass POWADA, but we also need to deal
with forced arbitration. That if we enhance your protections
but we don't really give you a full remedy to make sure that
you have a right to enforce these rights, then that is only--
that is a halfway measure.
I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you.
The gentleman from Idaho, Mr. Fulcher.
Mr. FULCHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I have got a question for Mr. Pianko. I wanted to make
maybe just a point first and shift gears a little bit to an
area that we really haven't talked about yet.
But you made a statement in your testimony that some 40
percent of college graduates are under employed with their
first job and 10 years later probably half of them still are.
Honestly, that makes sense to me because that is kind of what
we see in my home State of Idaho. And we have an incredibly
good statistic when it comes to unemployment. It is like less
than 3 percent. And this is overall, all employees. But yet
more than 20 percent are on some kind of public assistance. And
so we see that.
In our State--and this is kind of the point I wanted to
make and then I am going to follow up with a question--but in
our State part of the reason is a little bit different. We used
to be more dependent on resource-based jobs, manufacturing
based jobs. And due to a number of reasons, a lot of regulatory
and legal and that type of thing, those jobs have transitioned
to service-based jobs. Nothing wrong with service jobs, they
just don't have the same economic impact.
So that is the point I wanted to make.
And you also said the nature of work has changed, and that
is in our State, and I think other states in the west in
particular, that is part of it.
It has put more focus on the need to be the entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurs are different skills type of people. How would
you recommend to incentivize that entrepreneur? You are
shifting the paradigm. How do you encourage that new generation
of entrepreneurs?
Mr. PIANKO. That is a hard one. Look, I actually went to
Stanford for business school, which is sort of the heart of
Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship. It is an ecosystem that
takes a lot of time to develop. And actually, you know, we in
this sometimes beat up on colleges and universities for not
providing people a pathway to employment.
One thing universities do extremely well is serve as hubs
for entrepreneurial ecosystems. And universities attract a lot
of research funding from the Federal government and from
private industry. And so one of the things that you can do is
to encourage the development of--you know, you have got some
really wonderful universities in Idaho--encouraging the
development of those universities into research hubs and sort
of entrepreneurial hubs.
The second thing, and this is--I think it is hard to
underestimate the debilitative impact of student loans on
entrepreneurship. If you have a $100,000 or $30,000, or any
number of student loans, and if you don't make your student
loan payment you are in default and your life kind of falls
away. It is incredibly different to take that risk to start a
company.
And so the other piece beyond sort of how you on the
positive side create that ecosystem is it is incredibly
imperative--and I think the gentleman from Tennessee left--but
some of the states are really working hard to minimize the
student loan impact, especially for students who go to state
university systems. And I think this body, you know, has a real
obligation at this point to help fix that problem. There are a
number of very good solutions to it.
The downside of federalizing the financial aid system about
10 years ago is--I think the other side of it, you know, we
really tried to encourage access, but then suddenly now that we
have so much access that there is $1.5 trillion of debt. That
would be fine if we were all paying it off, but we are not.
And so I think those two pieces as a policy maker is what I
would encourage you to look at.
Mr. FULCHER. Okay. Those are definitely worth looking at.
I have got just another minute, so I am going to do a quick
follow up. An example, possibly, of one of the areas that
started to bear some fruit. I just wanted to know if you heard
anything like it before. In our--again, in our State and in the
west there is a lot of open land. Drone usage, for example. It
can be used for a whole host of things, infrastructure, aerials
for forest management. The list goes on and on, power lines,
utility lines, all that.
We have an inventive community college that started a drone
operator software. Have you heard of anything like that? And
for things like that, any idea for incentives or ways to try to
incent that type of education?
Mr. PIANKO. The most important thing you said is you have
picked an area of expertise. Too many colleges and--too many
states say oh, we are just going to create entrepreneurship,
right. That aspect of having to create a center of excellence
around drone research, I have actually read a little bit about
this. I mean take advantage of your natural resources. I
haven't heard--there are a lot of programs developing around
drone usage, there is a lot of funding head toward drone usage.
I think it is going to be big. But that is not my area of
expertise.
What is my area of expertise is you have to take the most
important first step. You have identified an area where you
have some form of advantage because of open land, low
population density, and you have created a locus for what can
become a thriving economic ecosystem that drives lots of high
paying good jobs. And that is what I would encourage you to
think about.
Mr. FULCHER. Thank you to the panel.
Mr. Chairman, thank you.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you.
The gentlelady from North Carolina, Ms. Adams.
Ms. ADAMS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the
Ranking Member as well. And to the witnesses, thank you for
being here today.
I want to start off by mentioning that I am a proud co-
sponsor of H.R. 1230, the Protecting Older Workers Against
Discrimination Act. I support it because there is no reason why
elderly Americans should be held to higher evidentiary
standards than workers who are discriminated against because of
sex or race or religion or national origin.
And we have heard a lot from this Administration about our
record low unemployment rate, but we know that number doesn't
entirely reflect the status of our economy. We also know that
older workers are consistently given the short end of the
stick. Age discrimination claims represent 20 percent of all
EEOC claims. And in times of economic slowdown, older workers
are more likely to be laid off, which can have terrible impacts
on a future life expectancy.
So, Ms. McCann, with all of that being said, in this
current economy with low unemployment rates, is age
discrimination still an issue?
Ms. MCCANN. Unfortunately, very much so. The number of age
discrimination charges certainly does surge during times of
economic downturn, but they never go away. The share of older
people who still want a job but have not been able to find one
has not recovered from pre-recession levels. And the reasons
are, one, hiring discrimination. Hiring discrimination is
rampant, but it is very hard to prove. And so employers have no
incentive to self examine their hiring policies to reduce them.
And the other reason that age discrimination is still a
problem is that a lot of the jobs in this economic recovery are
low skill and low quality and low income. So you have a lot of
older workers who are under employed who are still looking to
find better jobs.
Ms. ADAMS. So do the unemployment numbers accurately
reflect a number of long-term unemployed older workers?
Ms. MCCANN. They certainly reflect the number, but I don't
think they are totally accurate. It doesn't capture all of the
discouraged workers, and again, those who are still looking for
a job but have not been able to find one.
Ms. ADAMS. Okay. Thank you very much.
Let me move to Ms. Bird. I want to touch on the issue of
barriers to employment for people who get caught up in the
criminal justice system. A lot is being said about ex-offenders
and the importance of a full reintegration into society by
providing quality employment, and rightfully so. But I also
want to address those who are arrested for low level crimes,
such as minor drug possession. And there have been a lot of
studies conducted that show racial disparities and how
prosecutors make charging decisions for low level crimes. We
know that arrests that remain on an applicant's record can
impact employment opportunities regardless of whether the case
is dropped in the future.
So, Ms. Bird, in your opinion, could addressing the
decision making of prosecutors have a meaningful impact on
tearing down a barrier to employment?
Ms. BIRD. I think that is a part of lowering barriers for
individuals who have been--had an attachment to the criminal
justice system. So it is a part of it. But what we really need
to think about is beyond arrest, for those who have been
incarcerated, how do we start not at reentry as a way, but as
while folks are incarcerated, including adult education and
training while folks are inside, and that is correctional
education. And we have a number of different models from around
the country. That is important.
The decisions that prosecutors make, it is very important.
And we have examples also of partnerships with workforce
development boards around the country that create diversion for
in particular young adults that have access to more work
opportunities, more work experience, youth development
programs, and mentors.
So it is not a one size fits all solution. But as I
mentioned earlier and in my testimony, we really do need cross
system solutions and the investments in things that we know
that work.
Ms. ADAMS. Okay, great. Thank you very much.
Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you.
The gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. Walker.
Mr. WALKER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I would like to
thank the panel for being here today.
I have got a couple of questions I would like to get into
for Mr. Pianko, but I would like to actually start with Ms.
Bird.
And, first of all, just to comment, I was looking at it, it
looks like you work with economic justice, criminal justice
reform, and mental health policy, specifically for youth and
young adults. I think that is very important. And I remember
taking student mission trips as a pastor for 16 years in the
places, the inner cities of Cleveland, New York, and Baltimore,
and saw it first hand as far as what can be done. So I commend
your heart and passion. It is very obvious today that you
believe in what you are saying here. And I would venture to
guess there is probably a little bit of a faith perspective
coming from--but no response there, it is just my hunch.
Republicans have tried to lead the way in many of these
areas. Opportunity zones, as far as when we talk about
investments into some of the different areas, also First Step
and Second Chance Act, some of the investments that continue to
grow in the HBCU areas and other places.
So I think there is a conscientious level that the Federal
government does have a role in some of this. But also I do
believe that there--one of the gentleman earlier on one of the
colleagues on the Democrat side said this is not about grit. I
agree with that, but I do believe that part of this is a level
of personal responsibility coupled with these other areas to
show that the self-worth can be reached to a place to
accomplish some of these things. And I think that is where
sometimes the Federal government can overshoot the runway,
almost creating an enabling mindset as opposed to one that
continues to persevere. Because adversity is in every one of
our lives, and adversity is what builds that integrity or
character to be able to overcome some of this.
And I just want to make sure--not that you are not saying
this--there is a balance approach as far as what the Federal
Government's role is, but also what needs to be done in some of
the workforce training. So a little bit of a commentary, and if
I have time I will come back to you for a response on it.
But I just wanted to say I appreciate specifically--because
if you can capture the youth, if you can show a better pathway
for the youth, I think you have a chance of really making a
positive impact.
Mr. Pianko, given the consistent lack of skilled workers in
today's workforce, what kind of long-term effects does this
kind of skills gap impose on our economy and our ability to
compete, not just here, domestically, but on a global scale?
Mr. PIANKO. So this is--we are in a global market right
now, where we are in competition for jobs and jobs are driven
by skills. There is a London Center of Economics study that the
skills gap costs about $160 billion to the U.S. economy. And,
frankly, we have a massive deadweight loss to the economy by
all the money we spend on recruiting and training and then not
having that person actually end up--the educational system not
getting them the jobs that they need to be competitive. So we
have invested all this money and then we don't get the outcome
we want. And so, it is critically important and I think you are
on to an important topic.
Mr. WALKER. Well, you mentioned in your testimony that
under the current Federal work-study structure it is easier for
a student to get a job, to use your word, mopping floors on
campus than getting hands-on workforce education at a private
business off-campus. Can you break that down or give the
weights of that for just a minute on how additional flexibility
to spend Federal work study funding off-campus jobs would
enable students to gain the hands-on experience needed to enter
the workforce?
Mr. PIANKO. So right now less than I think .1 percent of
all Federal work study dollars are spent with private
businesses.
Mr. WALKER. You said .1 percent?
Mr. PIANKO. I believe it is .1 percent. I can--counsel is
nodding his head, so I think I am right on that.
Mr. WALKER. Wow.
Mr. PIANKO. Which is a shockingly small number. We all talk
about, and this is where I will get on a soapbox for a second,
apprenticeships, okay? We have a billion dollars sitting here
that could be effectively funding the start of a major
apprenticeship movement in our country and instead, you know,
something like 75 or 80 percent of those dollars are spent
doing on-campus jobs that don't have a direct connection to
employment. And so I believe that Secretary DeVos recently--
this morning announced that they were going to expand a pilot
program to start experimenting here, but I would strongly
recommend that the Congress as part of HEA--
Mr. WALKER. In my final 20-some seconds, sorry to interrupt
you there, and you were going there a little bit, can you speak
to the role apprenticeship programs play in reducing the skills
gap for students who do not have the resources to attend a
four-year college or university?
Mr. PIANKO. If there is one thing that matters it is
reducing the friction between educators and employment. And,
you know, I hate to quote a European model, but I think it
actually works in the apprenticeship system, which is you
actually combine work and education into one and you bring the
skills training into the education. And if you look at the
funding models that exist in places like Switzerland and
Germany that have created this apprenticeship model that works,
it is based on that premise.
Mr. WALKER. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman SCOTT. The gentleman yields back. The gentlelady
from Pennsylvania, Ms. Wild.
Ms. WILD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Roos, I would like
to start with the question about the issue of disabled workers
earning competitive rates of pay. The times have changed so
very much and I do truly believe that the disabled deserve to
live independently and that subminimum wages certainly won't
encourage or enable that to happen. And I very much want to
sign onto H.R. 873, the Transformation to Competitive Wages
Act. But I will tell you, and I am asking this question really
in an endeavor to be able to respond to advocacy groups who
have contacted my office and have claimed that H.R. 873 would
have a chilling effect on the hiring of workers with
disabilities and particularly those with the most severe
disabilities. Can you address that? Help me out with this
issue.
Mr. ROOS. Sure, I would be glad to. I have heard all those
concerns, as well, and we heard those from families back in
2015 when we made the announcements that we were going to
transform our vocational supports. And honestly, I just haven't
seen it in reality. For those who truly want to work, I stand
by the fact that the supports are in place to empower that to
happen, to supported employment technology. Partnerships with
local employers has really been key to our success in finding
competitive opportunities for people with disabilities, even
the most severe disabilities.
There is also that group of people, as I was alluding to
earlier, that I truly don't think work is what is important to
them necessarily, yet they are in a workshop. And it is really
finding what is meaningful to them if that workshop were no
longer a possibility. And, you know, I think they are commonly
referred to as wraparound services. There are many services
available, and through those home- and community-based waivers,
that can help someone live a fulfilling life and meet those
health and safety concerns that arise quite often when we think
about workshops not being there.
But again, I always go back to the point that if someone
wants to be employed, I truly feel that they can be at a
competitive level earning a rate at or above minimum wage,
commensurate with other people doing the same job in the same
industries. It is just piecing together those services and
supports that they are going to need to be successful.
Ms. WILD. So you don't believe that there would be
additional costs to the employer other than the higher wages?
Mr. ROOS. I don't. Reasonable accommodations are usually
quite cheap, quite frankly. Employers get scared about that a
little bit in terms of having to make those reasonable
accommodations, but most of the time it is really not much of
an investment on their part.
For current 14(c) holders, if they want to maintain their
current work they are doing and maintain the contracts they are
doing, they are going to have to do it through a reduced
workforce. You know, our business operations used to operate
with--it was discussed earlier--
Ms. WILD. Excuse me, I am going to stop you there.
Mr. ROOS. Sure.
Ms. WILD. Just because I have questions, other questions I
want to ask.
Mr. ROOS. Sure.
Ms. WILD. And, of course, we always have limited time, but
thank you very much for your input.
Ms. Bird, I want to address the issue of criminal
background checks in the application process. I represent a
district in Pennsylvania. And in Pennsylvania, an employer can
consider an applicant's felony or misdemeanor conviction in the
hiring process only if they relate to the applicant's
suitability for the job. If the employer decides not to hire
someone based on his or her criminal record, the employer must
inform the applicant in writing.
And while I think that law is imperfect, because an
employer is granted great deference in determining the
applicant's suitability for the job, I do like the requirement
that the employer inform the applicant in writing that the
criminal background was a factor in the hiring process.
Do you see any utility or application of that kind of
provision at the Federal level as a deterrence to
discriminatory hiring practices?
Ms. BIRD. Yes, and I think there are a number of other
approaches, as well. We know we have incorrect records, and so
there is a remedy for that. We know that we have seen
expungement be really important and really critical because we
have young people and older adults who may have had an
infraction when they were in their late teens, and it still
follows them 10, 20 years later. And so the research does bear
that out.
So I think to have approaches that address a number of
things, incorrect records, and you might have been arrested,
but there is no actual detention or incarceration.
Ms. WILD. And if you weren't notified by the employer of
why you weren't hired--
Ms. BIRD. Exactly, exactly.
Ms. WILD.--you wouldn't know to address that.
Ms. BIRD. Much like we do in our credit background checks.
There are incorrect things and it allows us to have increased
credit scores. So it is really important to apply a number of
approaches.
Ms. WILD. Thank you very much. I yield back.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. The gentleman from Pennsylvania,
Mr. Meuser.
Mr. MEUSER. Thank you, Chairman Scott. And thank you, Dr.
Foxx. And thank you to our witnesses.
As we know, unemployment has hit its lowest point in 50
years. The economy has added 4.6 million jobs over the past two
years. Mr. Pianko mentioned in his testimony America is facing
an unprecedented mismatch in the supply and demand of talent,
and I quote. I do not believe we need new laws, more
regulations, and heavy-handed government to close the skills
gap. I was in business for 25 years. Historically, it is not
the Federal government, but the innovation initiatives of
businesses that have successfully closed skills gaps over the
course of time. Perhaps we are in a new area with new
challenges, but that certainly has been the history.
I also believe that any education and support for education
provided to career and technical schools deserves equal the
support provided any higher education school.
I also believe with Mr. Roos related to people with
disabilities, those with disabilities, and the work that they
can do, those who happen to have disabilities, and their
importance to a productive business team.
So all that being said, Mr. Pianko, I want to start with
you, please. The funding for higher education, Federal and
State, over the past 20 years, do you know how much that has
gone up over the past 20 years in general, rough terms?
Mr. PIANKO. I think that is a very difficult question to
answer.
Mr. MEUSER. Right.
Mr. PIANKO. I am sorry. It would take a thesis to get you a
good answer on that.
Mr. MEUSER. Roughly it is about double. So, as you probably
guessed, since 1999 to 2019 we have doubled the Federal and
state expenditures for higher education, not to mention the,
well, the level of student loans that you could also add on top
of that. So the funding has been there.
Perhaps we should be smarter in planning ahead from this
day forward, as you have been mentioning.
So a couple of my questions are, have businesses
statistically, according to your statistics--I do my ``me''
search throughout my district, but your research, have
businesses embraced career and technical colleges for
recruitment?
Mr. PIANKO. So I think it is very spotty. I think in
general the talk is more than the reality and everyone in their
district probably has one example where a company and a
technical college kind of coordinated on something. And I think
there are some exceptions, like Tennessee. I think the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has really struggled in this area,
as an example, so I think it is very spotty.
Mr. MEUSER. Do you have any examples, any models, anything
you can point to that--
Mr. PIANKO. Well, I think Tennessee has done an excellent
job. I think Colorado--I forgot to mention earlier, I don't
know if there are any representatives from Colorado. Colorado
has really made a real effort on this, some other states, as
well. I think there is some--I think if you want real Federal
action across the board, the only way to truly incent
businesses, and I think it impacts achievement, is to actually
put some real dollars behind the coordination of the education
infrastructure and the employment infrastructure. And I think
that is really where we would have to go.
Mr. MEUSER. So on-the-job skill development is where it is
happening.
Mr. PIANKO. And I agree with your point. We are spending
enough money on education. So the issue isn't how much money
are we spending. The issue is how are we spending it.
And, you know, take the Federal work study example, I mean,
that is a perfect example, or GRAD Plus. I mean, we have these
massive, massive programs that are well-intentioned, but they
are not actually achieving the goals that we want them to
achieve. So I would encourage you to think about redirecting
dollars and sort of encouraging this education employment
ecosystem connecting rather than new dollars and new
regulation.
Mr. MEUSER. I mean, some companies take great pride in
their workforce development, but what they offer to those with
disabilities and to all people, but not all companies, of
course, do that. So there is certainly a place for career and
technical development.
Mr. PIANKO. I think there is--companies aren't going to
change. You have got two organizations that just don't talk to
each other. Companies, they want someone who programs in
Python, who can, you know, on June 30th in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania.
Sorry, go ahead, congressman.
Mr. MEUSER. Clearly, your number, 74 percent of academia
thinks that they are doing great in this regard and 15 percent
of the workforce.
So my time is up. I yield back.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. The gentlelady from Connecticut,
Ms. Hayes.
Ms. HAYES. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you to all the
witnesses for being here today.
Last Friday, we marked the 65th anniversary of the Brown v.
Board of Education decision, a landmark ruling declaring that
school segregation was unconstitutional. Unfortunately, we know
that systemic racial segregation continues to leave youth of
color behind. The overwhelming number of disconnected youth in
this country come from disconnected communities marked by high
adult unemployment, poverty, racial segregation, and low levels
of adult education attainment.
High poverty, racially segregated communities often lack
the opportunities for upward mobility, contributing to higher
youth disconnection rates for communities of color. From 2016
to 2017, Black youth were the only racial group who saw an
increase in rates of being disconnected. I mean, groups 16 to
24 coming from high poverty areas who were not in school.
In Connecticut, there are over 44,000 disconnected youth
ages 16 to 24. In my district alone there are 8,100
disconnected youth.
So my questions today are for Ms. Bird. How does racial and
income segregation make it difficult for youth of color to
access the social capital and networks that afford them access
to traditional business and industry sectors?
Ms. BIRD. So as I mentioned in my oral testimony as well as
my written testimony that these issues are structural and they
are about segregation and proximity to networks that allows you
to gain access to work experience. In our research with young
men of color we found that references and work experience,
those two issues, are critical in creating access. So the
question is how can we create more opportunities in particular
for African American and Native American youth who have these
high disconnection rates due through workforce investment
system.
Ms. HAYES. Thank you, and I couldn't agree more. I have
seen that same thing right here on the Hill when I am trying to
recruit interns or hire staff. There are people who have just
never had access to the types of opportunities that are
provided here, so they have never had the experience to now
quality for the jobs.
So what does the evidence tell us about the effectiveness
of summer job programs in improving academic outcomes for
school youth?
Ms. BIRD. I am glad you asked that question because I was
just thinking about my first summer job experience. I am born
and raised in Philadelphia, and many of the skills that I
learned on that first summer job which I didn't know was a
workplace learning opportunity at the time, but it was a
partnership with the school district and the University of
Pennsylvania, was gaining positive self-concept, communication
skills, social skills. And so the research bears it out, but
what we don't have is that same level of Federal investment
that we had when I was able to have that opportunity.
Employers say they need and want it. When they have young
people, they want to keep them over time. And we have research
that shows that it keeps kids safe in the summer as well as
increase our attendance and student engagement.
Ms. HAYES. I am so glad you said that. Let us talk about
it.
Ms. BIRD. Okay.
Ms. HAYES. Because my first job was at New Opportunities as
a summer youth counselor, and that was actually my next
question. How does it impact attendance rates and test scores?
Ms. BIRD. Yeah. So there is a couple of new research that
is in Detroit, for example, and studies, so we think that there
needs to be more research invested in what are the impacts of
summer jobs, but we already know there is a great body of
research already there. So it improves test scores. It
increases attendance, but also these transferable skills that
folks call soft skills, which really we call essential skills
in our field, are transferable over a lifetime.
Ms. HAYES. And how does that impact transitioning into the
workforce?
Ms. BIRD. So the research bears it out. The more you work
one year, the more you work another year, and so work
experience is literally critical. And in the Workforce
Innovation Opportunity Act there is a carve-out--I wouldn't
call it a carve-out, but 20 percent to support work experience,
which includes a number of different things we were talking
about, but it really isn't enough.
Ms. HAYES. I love just hearing you speak because you are
literally adding credibility to everything that I know already
to be true. And so my last question, does current Federal
funding, including WIOA Title I youth funding formulas, ensure
that groups of young people are prioritized?
Ms. BIRD. Yes. Well, it provided the--what I will say, the
infrastructure and framework as I mentioned, but it could do
more. And what I mean by more is when we are talking about
individuals of various employment or opportunity youth, we know
it is not a traditional kind of route to pathways. And so the
more means supportive services, the more means additional
partnerships, the more means more investments and work
experience and references, as I mentioned.
Ms. HAYES. Thank you so much.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. The gentleman from Pennsylvania,
Mr. Smucker.
Mr. SMUCKER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Roos, I would
like to just clarify your position. This is following up to
some of the questions from Mr. Grothman. Are you opposed to the
14(c) wages or do you think that all organizations should close
their work centers?
Mr. ROOS. First and foremost is the payment of subminimum
wage.
Mr. SMUCKER. Sure. What about the work centers?
Mr. ROOS. I think that, for example, to answer your
question, one of our work centers was transitioned into an
affirmative industry model. In that model we were able to do
the same. It is pallet manufacturing and packaging. We were
still able to do the same type of work we did before, it is
just an integrated workforce.
Mr. SMUCKER. And I am going to stop you, I am sorry--
Mr. ROOS. Sure.
Mr. SMUCKER.--because I can't take my entire five minutes
on this. But I concur with some of the comments that Mr.
Grothman had made. I have a number of very effective work
centers in my areas who are serving individuals with
disabilities and in some cases very severe disabilities. They
are groups of parents in some cases who have come together to
try to provide the best opportunity they possibly can for their
sons and their daughters. And I have spoken to those parents
and talked with them about how they feel and how their sons and
daughters feel about working in a facility like this. These are
individuals who require supervision that generally cannot be
provided.
So, first of all, I want to say the goal is always to get
someone into an integrated workplace if they can. And, in fact,
today I think they are making more of an effort to do that than
maybe in the past, and that is a good thing. But, you know, I
think your numbers of how many people have transitioned to a
workforce tell the story of what can potentially happen if you
are going to close all the workforce centers.
These groups have contracts with businesses. They are
providing a valuable service in a setting that can provide the
self-worth of a job. So I would ask you to rethink requiring,
you know, the goal of every work center to be closed.
Mr. Pianko, I do want to get--I thank you for your
testimony and some of your policy suggestions you used. The
last-mile training, I think staffing agencies can be a
potential solution there; I have seen that. And as your
testimony highlighted, the nature of work has changed, so we
need additional training.
I happen to believe that our community colleges and
technical schools can play a very, very important role in
addressing employment and what you call the hiring friction. I
very much agree with your suggestion that Congress should make
more of these programs eligible for receipt of dollars from the
Pell program.
I do want to go to your testimony and perhaps take issue
with the way you have characterized businesses. You literally
say investing, too often businesses look at things through the
lens of a free rider problem. Investing in education is more
likely a gift to a company's competitors and hence for suckers.
Do you really think businesses view their workforce in that
way?
Mr. PIANKO. I think it was specifically tied towards
dollars spent. And there is a big different between spending on
something that will benefit you as a company, so teaching them
the specific software--
Mr. SMUCKER. There is a quote from Henry Ford, ``The only
thing worse than training your employees and having them leave
is not training your employees and having them stay.''
Mr. PIANKO. So--
Mr. SMUCKER. In my experience, I think businesses,
employers need to be the first ones to make the effort to
address the skills gap.
Mr. PIANKO. I think--
Mr. SMUCKER. And the businesses in my area that I talk to
understand that investing in their employers--I was a business
owner myself, several hundred employees, investing in my
employees was the most important investment that I can make. If
you are losing employees to a competitor, then you are not
doing what is needed to provide the kind of workforce that your
employees want to choose to work in. So I would encourage you
to think differently about how businesses should be thinking
about training.
Mr. PIANKO. Now I understand your question. I totally agree
with you. I think it is incredibly shortsighted. I think
businesses are actively--are actually acting in a shortsighted
manner by not creating educational options. And so I think that
we actually have a rare case where businesses are willing to
invest in talent. And, frankly, one of the biggest things--
right now what happens is businesses--
Mr. SMUCKER. I think--
Mr. PIANKO. Yeah, I agree with you, yeah.
Mr. SMUCKER.--that is what businesses need to do and then
the investments and the partnerships with community college,
the apprenticeship programs, can really improve the workforce.
But it would be a disaster for businesses not to understand
that they have to take the lead in investing in their
workforce.
Mr. PIANKO. And, unfortunately, too few businesses are and
that was the point of that comment.
Mr. SMUCKER. Thank you.
Mr. PIANKO. Especially around entry level hiring. Entry
level hiring is where this is a big issue.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. The gentlelady from California,
Ms. Davis.
Ms. DAVIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for
being here. I am going to support my colleague and my Ranking
Member on the higher ed subcommittee because I think that there
actually is a lot of excitement here about how we best develop
programs, apprenticeship programs, that really are going to
scale in this country, different from what we have today. And
so I wanted to move that conversation a little bit during my
time.
We have talked about a number of systemic barriers and that
is very important. I think, you know, we always have to ask
ourselves who benefits when we break those barriers down and if
there are people who lose. I am not we--I think we all benefit.
Maybe we can check your feelings about that in a second.
But for Mr. Pianko, as I understand it, and please correct
me if I am wrong, that within your realm you do have a number
of registered apprenticeship programs.
Mr. PIANKO. Sorry, one, TekTonic has the first Department
of Labor approved registered apprenticeship program in software
development, yes.
Ms. DAVIS. Uh-huh. Could you share with us then how you
think that is a proven model or can be a proven model? And what
evidence-based--I think evidence do we have basically that
creates a more portable system for anybody who is engaged in
that process?
Mr. PIANKO. Yeah. So TekTonic is a wonderful program--
company. What they do is they actually recruit from workforce
investment boards really top-quality candidates who are
overlooked in the traditional world. They use the WIOA dollars
to train. As soon as they are accepted into the program they
are paid, I believe, $15 an hour.
And then what TekTonic does is it is actually a web
development company. So we have dozens of clients who pay us to
develop websites. We immediately put those people right after
there through a short training program off of WIOA into actual
work where they are getting paid far above minimum wage. These
are highly functioning people.
And then it solves two problems because at the end of the
program they are actually then--we encourage after someone has
done 1,000 hours to be hired by the ultimate company. So that
is how it functions as an apprenticeship program.
Ms. DAVIS. And so when we talk about a registered program,
and I think the Ranking, Chair, and I certainly have a great
deal of interest in this, but sometimes there are some
differences in terms of how Federal dollars are invested, where
they are invested, and whether or not we need to ensure that
the programs are portable.
Mr. PIANKO. Yeah, and I want to point out one issue around
diversity which I think is very important, that eliminating
friction from students matters. So TekTonic has an extremely
diverse population, 82 percent of the population is diverse. If
you look at a picture it will look like America. Thirty-three
percent are female. This is in a coding environment. Thirty-
seven percent are people of color and 30 percent, perhaps most
importantly, are veterans.
And so I think what you are seeing is if you allow employer
pay models to take over, you enable a much more diverse
workforce in our technology community and the high wage jobs
that go along with it. And I think that is critically
important. We are seeing that.
Make schools another example. I won't go on, but.
Ms. DAVIS. Yeah. Would you say, also, though, that the
standards that they have set as being a registered program also
has benefit and may be what drives in many cases the
opportunity for them to receive that investment from the
Federal Government?
Mr. PIANKO. Yeah, I think the registration program overall
is useful. I am not sure it is a sine quo non. I am not sure it
is like the only thing that matters. I think actually employer
acceptance is a lot more important. And I think the
registration process tries to get at that. I think the
registration process was designed for a different age.
Ms. DAVIS. Yeah.
Mr. PIANKO. So as we look into software and other areas, I
would encourage us to think about how we can modernize that.
Ms. DAVIS. Yeah. I think the other thing that is critical
there is we have a number of states that actually don't have
any oversight for apprenticeship programs. So that is one of
the things in terms of the infrastructure that we need to
build.
But I also wanted to just mention that, you know, we are
talking about investment now and you mentioned a billion
dollars and, in fact, that Secretary DeVos talked about this
today. I think if we were to look at the European models, which
we have touted and we see the infrastructure that has been
developed there, not just with the businesses, but also with
the school system, that is really critical in terms of
counselors and advice that students get, data, et cetera, they
are spending a whole lot more. I mean, ratios to what they are
doing, they obviously have been at it a whole lot longer than
we have and they have that history.
So I think we just want to acknowledge that I am glad that
we are moving in that direction, but we are really not
investing in the way that we should if, in fact, we believe
that this is one of the ways in which we really can address
some of these systemic problems, but also generally just the
workforce development that we need in this country.
Mr. PIANKO. I think you are on exactly our point. We don't
invest in the apprenticeship piece, but we invest a lot in the
education piece. And so I think reallocating some of those
dollars to better reflect what we are trying to accomplish with
education and workforce is really critical. So I welcome that
suggestion.
Ms. DAVIS. Thank you very much.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. The gentleman from Maryland, Mr.
Trone.
Mr. TRONE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Roughly 600,000
individuals are released from incarceration every year. On July
19th, the BOP will update their records this year based on
additional sentence reduction, based on the first--good
behavior and the First Step Act. So more than ever are going to
be released shortly coming up.
Can we just run through the four folks, just two quick
bullets, what you think are the top first and second points
that we should be digging into to have a strategy backed by
research, research, what works and what doesn't to have
successful reintegration? Start over with Ms. Bird.
Ms. BIRD. Yeah, two quick points. One is that reintegration
actually does not start at the point of reentry. Reintegration
actually starts before. And so a couple of things. To WIOA, we
could think about the floor that is set to support correctional
education and increase that for adult education. Just 6 percent
of folks who are incarcerated have a postsecondary education
and 30 percent lack a high school diploma. So that is one quick
thing with some research backed up.
Mr. PIANKO. This is not my area of expertise, so if I could
yield my time to Ms. Bird or another panelist.
Ms. BIRD. Well, I will go on one more--
Mr. TRONE. Do another one.
Ms. BIRD.--one more thing that we can definitely do. As we
talk about reentry, we talk about a couple of different things.
Reentry is really important not only for the individuals
themselves, but their families and all the collateral
consequences. So another thing we can do, as we already
discussed, is think about employers and hiring practices, so
that whether that is the Ban the Box effort coupled with
workforce development board partnerships that can create
pathways to work will be important.
Mr. TRONE. Mr. Roos?
Mr. ROOS. Again, not my level of expertise either, but what
I will say is we have referenced them a couple of times today
is the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation. A lot of support is
in place for people who have been incarcerated getting off to a
good start, getting those supports in place, and the services
needed from the get-go to be successful in transitioning back
into the workforce.
Ms. MCCANN. Again, totally outside of my wheelhouse, so I
would just advocate that any efforts not ignore the needs of
older workers who are reentering the workforce.
Mr. TRONE. Let us go back to the Ban the Box. Thirty-four
states and more than 150 cities have adopted a Ban the Box
policy providing applicants a fair chance at employment,
removing the conviction history from job apps, delaying
background checks. At this point, three-quarters of the U.S.
population lives in a jurisdiction that has some kind of Ban
the Box.
My company has personal experience in this area. I have
over 7,000 employees. We banned the box a number of years ago.
We have hired hundreds-plus of folks in Ban the Box. And what
we are getting is better retention rates, a win, a second
chance for folks that works out better for everyone.
So is it time for Congress, Ms. Bird, to expand Ban the
Box, fair chance hiring to the private sector across the
country?
Ms. BIRD. Well, yes, simply put. The evidence does bear out
that there does need to be, again, some Federal role to help
support and incentivize the private sector to do this. And also
that folks who are returning from incarceration need to be
judged on their own merits, not anything in their past, based
on what they can do and their employability skills.
Mr. TRONE. What do you think is the key to convince
employers? Because it needs to be a partnership between
employers and the government and the BOP. How do we convince
employers that these folks who have a lower level of skillset
and we got to--it is key is starting before release, I
completely agree. What do we do to convince these companies
that they need to be aggressively looking and getting the word
out that they are looking for great workers who want a second
chance?
Ms. BIRD. Yeah. Well, a number of employers are already
doing it in partnership. So we have a number of hospitals, for
example, in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, who are really
considering the--
Mr. TRONE. But 55 percent of the folks, 1 year out, never
get a job.
Ms. BIRD. Yeah.
Mr. TRONE. So the number is not working for us.
Ms. BIRD. Yes.
Mr. TRONE. Fifty-five percent no job.
Ms. BIRD. Yes. And so one of the things I think that we
definitely need to do is to look at where it is happening
around the country and to assess how are they changing their
human resources policies. Because once the workers are in,
whether they are a young worker or an old worker who has been
impacted by the criminal justice system, they do have higher
retention rates. So that is do a little bit of learning of what
is happening around the country and lift it up at the Federal
level.
Mr. TRONE. Okay, thank you.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. The gentlelady from Michigan,
Ms. Stevens.
Ms. STEVENS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this important
and timely hearing. I represent a suburban community in
Michigan and this topic is critically important to my district,
a district that has a robust automotive supply chain, a
manufacturing economy that is frequently changing, and
questions come up around age discrimination, questions come up
around when people lose their job at age 50 and they have got
to reapply for a new job and where they are going to go. So my
questions today are going to center on that.
And they are also going to focus on the fact that when
somebody loses their job in their fifties and is unemployed for
a long period of time, they cannot access Medicare until age
65, so we have this gap. And we know that only 3 percent of
employees experiencing age discrimination in the workplace when
they are actually in the workplace have filed complaints with
their employers or the government according to the EEOC report.
And yet research shows that up to 60 percent of individuals
have experienced or witnessed age discrimination in the
workplace.
So if you don't all mind, and maybe, Ms. McCann, you could
take this one, but is age discrimination being normalized?
Ms. MCCANN. Unfortunately, I think yes. I think we actually
are learning to discriminate against ourselves. It is just an
acceptable ism in this society. And I think the 3 percent
figure is an illustration of that. And I think so many people
view it as futile to bring an age discrimination claim.
And you mentioned the cost of health insurance. A lot of
workers, when they know that they are going to fight face this
heightened burden of proof in an age discrimination case, say I
would rather take the resources, both my time, my emotional
energy, and my monetary resources, and use that to pay for
health insurance or pay for my kid's college education or pay
my mortgage rather than try to win an age discrimination case.
Ms. STEVENS. Well, I am a proud cosponsor of the Protecting
Older Workers Against Discrimination Act. There is obviously
needed legislation and there is also this cultural conversation
that we need to have around our workforce. And this is what the
Ed and Labor Committee, by the way, is prioritizing as part of
our cultural values, the value of work, that you matter.
So let us talk about the legislation for a minute. If this
important piece of bipartisan legislation was enacted how does
this affect the EEOC's effectiveness in countering unlawful age
discrimination cases?
Ms. MCCANN. I think it would help the EEOC immensely
because, again, we would restore the burden of proof to age
discrimination claims. They would not--as private plaintiffs as
well, they would not have to produce more quantitative, you
know, more evidence and more compelling evidence to prove age
discrimination. It is really critical and important.
Civil rights statutes don't just compensate victims. It
deters future discrimination. So if the EEOC was able to bring
and be more successful in age discrimination cases, it would
deter future discrimination, as well.
Ms. STEVENS. Well, we are grateful to our AARP for your
work in this because it is not just retirees. It is older
working Americans that you represent, as well.
And I want to cite this study, Ms. McCann, if you have
anything else you would want to chime in on this. In a recent
AARP study researchers sent over 40,000 resumes to apply for
more than 13,000 job openings posted online in 12 cities to
test for age discrimination. They responded to each posting
with three resumes representing different age groups: young,
middle-aged, and older. Even though all had similar skills,
older candidates received far fewer callbacks than young or
middle-aged workers. What does this data tell us, Ms. McCann?
Ms. MCCANN. I think it confirms what every long-term
unemployed older worker knows in their gut: that age
discrimination is going on. When they send out those resumes,
when they press the Apply button online, and never hear back,
they have this gut feeling that I think it is my age. And
research such as that confirms that, yes, when you do have
similar resumes, similar candidates, and the older worker is
not getting the interviews, the callbacks, that age is at play
in the hiring.
Ms. STEVENS. Thank you. And I yield back the remainder of
my time.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. The gentleman from New York, Mr.
Morelle.
Mr. MORELLE. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to thank you for
holding yet another important hearing in this Committee, which
has really been great over the last several weeks and all the
different topics we are taking. And today to discuss the
barriers to employment and effective methods to help
disconnected individual reengage in our communities and pursue
meaningful opportunities, particularly in light of the
challenges we face in terms of a labor shortage expected to
last in the United States for many years.
We know that our communities are best served when people
are actively participating in the workforce. When individuals
are disconnected they become isolated and miss out on critical
growth opportunities.
I did want to take a moment to focus on young people, often
referred to as opportunity youth, who fall behind in school and
miss out on basic foundational skills. As a result, prospects
for a stable and productive life become increasingly
unattainable. In my home State of New York, there are other
250,000 opportunity youth. These young people have been left
behind and we are missing out on their potential strength in
communities to fill the gaps in our workforce and create a
better life for their families and themselves. Identifying at-
risk youth and taking preventive measures to keep them engaged
in school and our workforce is critical to decreasing the
number of disconnected youth in our Nation.
In my district of Rochester, New York, our community has
recognized this need for preventive measures and taken
innovative steps to provide the tools, training, and support to
keep students from falling through the cracks and missing out
on the chance to lead a full and productive life. And I wanted
to just highlight two quickly, if I might.
One such effort, the Multicraft Apprentice Preparation
Program, or MAPP, is a unique partnership between the building
trades and historically disadvantaged youth. MAPP is dedicated
to helping those facing a risk or facing the devastating
impacts of poverty by training and engaging youth in building
and construction trade apprenticeships, and they have been a
very, very effective organization in the construction trades.
Enacting preventive measures within schools is another key
piece of the puzzle. In my district a partnership between East
High School and the University of Rochester has completely
transformed the outlook of the once failing high school. East
High integrates a myriad of systems that provide comprehensive
and high-quality services to support a diverse student body.
The school uses a restorative justice approach with
systematic support of counselors, social workers, and
comprehensive health services for those students. They are also
committed to promoting the social and emotional health of
teachers, students, and their families.
And I am proud to say that in just the first 3 years the
graduation rate has gone from 33 percent to 61 percent of
students. Suspensions are down and test scores have increased.
These programs demonstrate that through meaningful
partnerships, holistic approaches to education, and commitment
from the local, state, and Federal level we can keep students
engaged and build our workforce and strengthen our communities
and economy.
And I would like to ask, Ms. Bird, in your testimony you
touched on the barriers to employment that come from the lack
of investment in education, child care, and other critical
supports. Could you just share your thoughts on the importance
of a holistic approach to education and the importance of
integrating support systems? Something I am very interested in
as it relates to social, educational, and healthcare services
to help reduce the number of opportunity youth in the country.
Ms. BIRD. Sure. All of what you said is critical and I
really commend the work that is happening locally in your
district.
So as you already articulated, there was no one-size-fits-
all. We have to work on school discipline and school climate
issues, so that young people don't get pushed out of school and
leave prematurely. And so restorative justice strategies are an
important ingredient to that comprehensiveness that we need to
focus on.
But at the same time, for young people who aren't in a
traditional school system, we have to figure out ways to
reengage them, and that may be through a program that is
supported through the WIOA or through a community-based
organization. And so that includes partnerships like with the
building trades.
And apprenticeship is really important, but for
opportunities they need on ramp sometimes. And so we need to
really think about what is the role of pre-apprenticeship in
terms of workforce preparation, work readiness, and all the
other supportive services?
So absolutely, a supportive services model is one that we
should really be thinking about.
Mr. MORELLE. I appreciate that, particularly the comments
about the pre-apprentice, which I am a big supporter of.
I would just like to also follow up. One of the things that
I think is so important is that we remember individuals come
from families. And if you could give me maybe just a few
seconds your thoughts on how we might support families so that
they continue to support those young people who are struggling,
if you have any thoughts on that as it relates to barriers.
Ms. BIRD. Yeah. So at CLASP we have done some research on
low-income families and we have found that many young people
are living in families where they are working more than one job
and that does not allow them the fair wages that they need or
the support of schedules, as well as the benefits that they
need, like paid family medical leave. So we have to support
what happens in families as well as the young people, again, as
a result of segregation, isolation. We need to do all of those
things in order to put young people on a pathway.
Mr. MORELLE. Thank you to do all the witnesses. And I yield
back my time, Mr. Chair.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. The gentlelady from Nevada--
excuse me, the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Levin. I am sorry.
Mr. LEVIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And the gentlewoman
from Nevada's time is coming soon, I am sure.
I just want to start by thanking the Chairman for his
really tremendous leadership in this area. These barriers to
employment are so important to overcome and we have got bills
we are moving and I am very grateful for that.
And also to thank Mr. Gross. There is nothing requiring him
to be here. He is out here as a champion for justice for older
workers, and I want to thank you so much, sir, for your ongoing
efforts in this regard.
Ms. McCann, I want to ask you a broader question really
beyond POWADA what we should be doing. It is so important that
we pass it. Obviously I am an original cosponsor. But, you
know, I used to run the workforce system in the State of
Michigan and when we created our No Worker Left Behind program
and put 162,000 workers back to school to study for in-demand
jobs in community colleges and universities and so forth, so
many of them were older Americans who had been unjustly, you
know, terminated or separated from employment.
I think of the gentleman who had been in college and then
his dad had a heart attack. And mom said, you know, we all have
to pitch in here. And then here he was running a retail
establishment, I will just say, in Bay City, Michigan, and they
looked at him and they basically said, wait, we can get some
much younger person at a less price and they made some excuse.
And under our current legal regime, you know, he couldn't
obtain justice.
So this is affecting so many workers. What in addition to
POWADA should we be looking at legislatively or otherwise?
Ms. MCCANN. Thank you for that question. As you say, POWADA
is not going to fix everything. And some day AARP hopes for the
same sort of restoration act for the AEDA that the American
With Disabilities Act got in 2008. So there are a couple things
I will mention.
I mean, just last year, Representative Grothman introduced
a bill that would expand the coverage of the AEDA. It would
require employers with 15 or more employees instead of 20 or
more employees to not discriminate based on age. A modest
change, but would have an important impact.
I think most critically we need to make sure job applicants
are protected given the rampant hiring discrimination and the
most recent, you know, media attention to the targeting based
on age on Facebook and other platforms. But yet the courts are
saying that job applicants cannot even have their day in court
to attempt to prove that these policies and practices
discriminate against them based on age.
Mr. LEVIN. Thank you. Well, let me pick up on that comment
and ask a question of Ms. Bird. I so appreciated your
testimony.
Another area that was super important to me personally and
I thought we made some progress, but not nearly enough, in
Michigan was prisoner reentry programs. And so we haven't
talked enough about that this morning. It is so hard to get a
job for a returning citizen because of all the kinds of
discrimination they face. Can you just speak to, you know, what
you think we need to do to help people get jobs? And there is
nothing more important to reducing recidivism rates than
getting people who have been incarcerated a good job and a way
to be productive on the outside.
Ms. BIRD. Yeah. So I hate to be repetitive, but I am going
to say it again, is that we really have to think about how
reentry starts before folks go home. And so what that means is
investing in the types of correctional education while people
are incarcerated and also lifting the ban on Pell for people
while they are incarcerated are two things. Because you don't
just have some kind of magic wand when you are released and
says, hey, you have all the skills that you need. And so we
need to focus on that.
We also, again, need to do all the kinds of things in
partnership with the private sector to ensure that we reduce
the hiring barriers that they face.
Mr. LEVIN. All right, thank you very much. Mr. Chairman, I
yield back.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. Now the gentlelady from Nevada,
Ms. Lee.
Ms. LEE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I want to thank all
of you for being here today. I want to thank the Chairman for
having this incredibly important hearing.
This is an issue that has such important resonance for me.
My father was laid off at the age of 56 and, sadly, never found
gainful employment after that, and really watched him suffer
with depression the rest of his life and so taking on this
issue and also looking at how we are evolving in this economy.
It is not just the skills that are changing, that are, you
know, that are going to help people retain employment. But it
is also looking at the effect of age and our aging supply on
our economy just not only from an employment point of view, but
also family.
And in my State of Nevada we have some specific challenges
overall. Nevada is one of five states whose 65-plus population
has increased by 50 percent or more between 2005 and 2015. And
we also have a sizeable population of older Americans in our
rural areas. And last week, in this Committee I was also proud
to participate in the Older American Act and work on
legislation that is critical to ensure that we are in tune with
this important segment of our population.
Ms. McCann, I just want to discuss with you the viability
of older workers staying around longer in the labor market. And
it seems that Congress has made it necessary for them to do
that by raising the retirement age in order to collect Social
Security. In fact, some people in this Congress are considering
raising the age even further.
And given that we know that Social Security plays such a
critical role in lifting millions of people out of poverty,
specifically about 15 million Americans over the age of 65,
what would be the impact on the economy of raising the
retirement age without addressing age discrimination in the
labor market?
Ms. MCCANN. Thank you for that question. I do think that
raising the Social Security age without considering the impact
of age discrimination is very shortsighted. It exacerbates an
already very significant problem. So the vast majority of older
workers are working because they need the money. And yet, I
talked about hiring discrimination, so if they are trying to
find a job and they can't get one and then they have to take
their Social Security and it is reduced because of the higher
level for receiving full benefits, they are facing lower Social
Security benefits for life and it is going to result in greater
levels of senior poverty.
Ms. LEE. Yeah, we are definitely seeing that. I can't tell
you how many times in my community when I am out whether it
is--you know, I am seeing older and older Americans out trying
to make ends meet. So incredibly important.
I also I wanted to follow up. You know, as you know,
today's workforce is more mobile than it has ever been. Workers
are able to stay at a job and move around onto the next,
hopefully most often for higher pay. Would you say that is true
for older Americans, as well?
Ms. MCCANN. Actually it is one of the greatest assumptions
and stereotypes that older workers are not going to stay in a
position very long because they are just waiting till they are
able to retire. And the research shows the opposite, that they
have significantly longer tenure than younger individuals. And
it is no, you know, black mark against the younger workers.
They are just following the money. They don't have the defined
benefit pension plans and other benefits that caused earlier
generations to stay for an employer for their entire career.
But, unfortunately, the assumption is still there, that it
is the older worker that is going to leave soon and not the
younger worker. And I see those type of cases all the time
where someone is denied a promotion or denied training
opportunities because of the assumption that they won't be
there very long.
Ms. LEE. Yeah. I want to follow up, also, along the lines
of automation in terms of not only how it affects
discrimination, but also what is the effect on older workers in
the workforce transitions that will be needed to transition
workers into occupational categories. Can you talk about how
that pertains, your perspectives on that, with older Americans?
Ms. MCCANN. Sure. I mean, I think our country underperforms
in our efforts to help displaced workers back into the labor
force when they have lost their jobs due to automation or
outsourcing to a contingent workforce. And so we definitely
need more funding for our workforce development systems. We
need to focus on some workforce development centers, the Senior
Community Service Employment Program, trade adjustment
assistance and others. It is very important for older workers.
Ms. LEE. Great. Thank you very much for your time. I yield
back. Thank you.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. The gentleman from Virginia, Mr.
Cline.
Mr. CLINE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the witnesses
for appearing today.
We have the lowest unemployment rate in 49 years, but yet
only 13 percent of the population believes that college
graduates are well-prepared for success in the workplace. Part
of this issue comes from more than 51 percent of students
wishing they could change their major, but other parts stem
from that college or degree simply not being a good fit.
Students are individuals and as such we should be encouraging
the best fit for each. There are many opportunities that work
for students beside just baccalaureate educations, and as
lawmakers it is our duty that opportunity and flexibility is
extended to a variety of professional paths, including career
and technical.
So I would ask Mr. Pianko, how can the private sector do a
better job of partnering with postsecondary institutions to
ensure the proper skills are being developed so that the
workforce gap closes even further?
Mr. PIANKO. Yeah, thank you. I think what we have talked
about today is that there needs to be a new class of
intermediaries that are private sector in nature primarily
between education and employment. And what we have seen happen
is that too many times when you go through college, you don't
get the result that you want and--whether you drop out or you
graduate and you don't get a job.
My colleagues Ryan Craig and Cassidy Leventhal just did a
whole--listed 250 alternative pathways to employment. And I
think you are going to see alternative pathways to employment
grow and around the edges of higher education. And I think you
are going to see higher education change because you are going
to see higher education need to adapt some of those models.
Otherwise, you are already seeing enrollments going down for
the reasons you cited. And I don't think that is going to end.
Mr. CLINE. Exactly. And with just 58 percent of students
completing their education within six years, financial issues
are often being cited as a common issue with completion. Do you
have some steps that you would suggest that we take to address
this specifically?
Mr. PIANKO. Yeah. The fundamental problem here, the reason
ROI has gone down, right, return on investment, and why it
suddenly doesn't make sense anymore for a lot of people to
think about college is because--not because the wage premium
hasn't gone done, right? You can still make more if you go to
college. It is because the cost of college has gone up.
And so, you know, there are a lot of reasons, people have
written doctoral theses on why the cost of college has gone up,
but the cost of college has exceeded the rate of inflation for
about 30 years by about 3 percent a year. So at this point it
takes someone working about 2,000 hours a year to pay for
college if they can, even in a state school, whereas if you
went to school in the 1960s it would have taken you about 200
hours.
And so you have this massive explosion of cost with
continued wage premium, but not enough to justify it. And so I
would encourage you to consider ways to limit the rising cost
of college. And I think a lot of it has to do with how our
Federal financial aid system is structured.
And so you smiled at that.
Mr. CLINE. Can you elaborate on that?
Mr. PIANKO. We can go back and forth on that one, but.
Mr. CLINE. No, I agree with you. Can you elaborate on that?
Mr. PIANKO. Yeah. If you provide a good and you provide
that level of subsidy for a good, costs will go up and that is
how it works.
Mr. CLINE. Do you feel that there ought to be some
increased accountability not only on the part of the
institution with respect to their costs, but also on the part
of the Federal Government, or reinjecting some private sector
role there and that will bring with it some interest in
limiting how much can be borrowed by a student?
Mr. PIANKO. Look, the Federal government right now sets the
limit for how much you can borrow at each stage of your
education. And especially at the graduate level, that is where
most people get into trouble. It is really hard with the way
the limits are set up for undergrads to get into too much
trouble with Federal student loans. The real explosion is on
the private side for people who choose very expensive schools
or graduate programs.
And so, you know, we should be looking at creating
mechanisms for skin in the game where the economic result of
college is defined by the return on investment that students
are getting for many people.
Mr. CLINE. As someone who is still paying off his law
loans, I agree with you.
Mr. PIANKO. I am, as well, incidentally.
Mr. CLINE. With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. The gentlelady from Washington,
Ms. Jayapal.
Ms. JAYAPAL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I just want to
say thank you so much for your leadership on these critical
issues and continuing to just be unflagging in breaking down
unfair barriers to unemployment. Thank you all for being here.
My home State, Washington State, just ended the subminimum
wage. And during the testimony in the legislature, Josh Major,
a worker with a disability, told the legislature, ``Just
because I dance to the rhythm of the rain doesn't mean I should
be underpaid. I am a great worker and bring many positive
attributes to my job and deserve an equal and livable wage.''
Mr. Major raised his voice alongside many other workers to
demand this change, and I just thought that was such a
beautiful statement.
Mr. Roos, you are in senior leadership at ACHIEVA, a
Pennsylvania organization that supports people with
disabilities to access employment. And your organization is
integrated. You employ people with and without disabilities and
your employment programs pay at or above the minimum wage.
Thank you for that.
Why is it so important to listen to the concerns of self
advocates, like Joshua Major, who demanded an equal and livable
wage?
Mr. ROOS. Great question. Thank you for asking. And my
response to that is that for years people languishing in
workshops, their voices just haven't been heard. We haven't
listened. For those over 100 people that are now competitively
employed, at least over 50 percent of their team members who
represent them always told us that they couldn't be employed.
They didn't have the skills to be employed. There weren't
alternatives for them from the workshop. And those 100-some
placements prove otherwise.
So to reiterate, their voices haven't been heard or others
have spoken for them over the years. That has been very
detrimental to their progression to competitive, integrated
employment.
Ms. JAYAPAL. Thank you. I just think it is an incredibly
important community, workers with disabilities, and I think we
should be doing everything we can in Congress to end the
subminimum wage and answer Mr. Major's concerns.
Ms. Bird, let me turn to you. Many Americans continue to
face an unnecessary barrier to employment as a result of faulty
or incomplete criminal records released by the FBI for use in
employment and licensing decisions. I know this is something
that the Chairman cares very much about, has a bill around
this. I care very much about it. We are going to be talking
about it tomorrow during our markup of the Dream and TPS bills
in the House Judiciary Committee.
Local law enforcement agencies routinely report arrest
records to the FBI. However, these same groups often fail to
report important information on the final outcome of an arrest
of disposition of a criminal case. Many of the gang databases
have no real legitimacy to why somebody is in there and it is
very difficult to get off.
There are an estimated 1.8 million workers subject to FBI
background checks that include faulty or incomplete
information. There are Federal mandates that require criminal
background reports to be complete and accurate. But a study
conducted by the Urban Institute examining 75 major counties
across the country found that roughly one-third of all arrests
for felony charges did not result in an actual criminal
conviction.
Furthermore, criminal background checks can include
convictions that occurred 7 years or more prior to an
employee's application date. This can potential violate Federal
statutes that limit record checks to 7 years. Arrest and
convictions that have been expunged, but have not been removed
from the criminal background records, can also unintentionally
exclude qualified candidates.
Can you tell me from your experience how significant is
this problem? And what do you recommend be done to eliminate
this barrier to employment?
Ms. BIRD. Yeah. So I think you have already talked about
how significant it is, and so one of the important steps is to
really consider the Chairman's bill and to think about how does
it work in tandem with the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity
Act? And how does it work in tandem again with employers to
reduce barriers to hiring?
Ms. JAYAPAL. And how do you see them working together now
or not working together now?
Ms. BIRD. Well, we need to pass the bill and we have an
opportunity as we think about reauthorization how do we bake in
provisions that include reducing all the barriers, which one
important piece is really making sure these records are
accurate and we know they disproportionately impact people of
color.
Ms. JAYAPAL. Thank you. Another question for you. A new
Federal Reserve Board study shows that while unemployed black
and white workers are almost equally likely to have left their
last job voluntarily, black workers were nearly twice as likely
as whites to have been laid off or fired from their last job.
And once black workers are out of a job, they experience
longer spells of unemployment than white workers. Ms. Bird, how
does race intersect with the barriers that we have talked about
today? I feel like you have sort of touched on this in almost
every answer, but I want to give you that opportunity.
Ms. BIRD. Yeah, yeah. And thank you for that opportunity. I
think we know what the research says and so what that means is
how does the public system help support a subsidized employment
system? Because the private sector is continuously
discriminating at these workers, especially if you have been
impacted by the criminal justice system. And so what the public
sector essentially does is allow for access and proximity to
work experience, to jobs. Transitional jobs, for example, is a
very good strategy that I hope that the Congress considers.
Ms. JAYAPAL. Thank you so much. I see my time has expired.
Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to introduce for the
record this report examining the role of job separations in
black-white labor market disparities?
Chairman SCOTT. Without objection.
Ms. JAYAPAL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Chairman SCOTT. The gentlelady from North Carolina.
Ms. FOXX. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I want to thank all
of our witnesses for being here today.
Mr. Pianko, the Georgetown Center on Education Workforce
estimated that over 95 percent of jobs created since the
recession have been filled by those with at least some college
education. Yet, you identified in your testimony that over 40
percent of college graduates are underemployed because they
took a job after graduating that does not require a degree.
It appears employers are over-reliant on using a college
diplomate as a candidate filter for their open jobs. To what
extent is this contributing to the skills gap? Are there
alternative metrics or indicators employers could use besides a
baccalaureate degree to seek a qualified worker?
Mr. PIANKO. Well, first of all, I would ask that you also
consider the Federal Government's role in this, as well,
because the Federal Government has similar requirements under a
bachelor's degree. And so whatever I say about the private
sector I would also ask that the public sector consider, as
well, which is that too often companies or the government will
put on a job application that you must have a college degree to
get that job. And if you think about that, one of the more
interesting stats that I have heard is that 50 percent of the
people replacing somebody, they are replacing somebody who did
not have a college degree. So you are effectively creating a
situation where you are constantly having to skill-up, spend
more money on education and training when other credentials
would work.
The entire mechanisms we use to hire, I know we have been
focusing on older Americans, disabled workers, et cetera, it
all comes back to what we call applicant tracking systems. One
of the fundamental shifts we have had is that people are hiring
through--you know, get 10,000 resumes, everybody hits submit on
an application, and then who is reading that application is
actually a computer right now. And so in the absence of the
ability to meet somebody in person, you are screening out lots
of people.
So to answer your question very directly, I think that we
should be move towards a more competency-based hiring system.
We need to create the marketplace for competencies so that
people from other backgrounds can take advantage of job
opportunities.
Ms. FOXX. Thank you for bringing forth the comment about
the Federal government. I am concerned about that and it is a
very appropriate thing to bring to our attention.
You also said in your written testimony that younger people
today are seeking summer entry level work at a much lower rate
than previous generations. And you point out that this lower
workforce participation likely has negative effects on soft
skill development.
How do college admission processes perpetuate this downward
trend? And what can be done to make sure we reduce barriers to
a young person's first job?
Mr. PIANKO. The most important thing you can do for your
kids is encourage them to go get a real job as early as
possible, I believe, no matter what your background is. And I
am a firm believer in that. College admissions counselors,
though, have been preferencing unpaid internships and travel
effectively, volunteer travel, over sort of the difficulties of
work. And if you are able to work at the level that is required
to pay 2,000 hours and still uphold a college--or, you know,
get through high school, you deserve a much bigger badge for
distance traveled than you do for being born to the right
parents.
Ms. FOXX. Thanks. I met with some people last week in the
masonry industry and they told me about a student in a pre-
apprenticeship program who made $6,000 last summer working. So
that is pretty impressive.
Colleges are enrolling students, but not making sure they
leave campus with the skills necessary to earn a good-paying
job, Mr. Pianko. This leaves the job of teaching productive
skills to business and industry, as you pointed out.
What is the benefit of employers--what is the benefit to
employers of investing directly in both formal and informal
workforce development program for their employees? And what are
some of the ways employers can reduce this hiring friction you
identify in your testimony?
Mr. PIANKO. First, I think someone who was a masonry pre-
apprentice and made $6,000 in the summer. And I think too
often, you mentioned B.A. degrees, too often we devalue trade
work and other skills that actually create real opportunity,
economic opportunity for large populations and, you know, may
impact Ms. Bird's testimony, as well.
In terms of sort of the--I am sorry, I forgot your--I
apologize. I was too busy answering your masonry. Just give me
the quick prompt and I will come back to you.
Ms. FOXX. Shouldn't have done that example.
Mr. PIANKO. Yeah. So I loved your example so much that I
went back to it.
Ms. FOXX. Well, you have talked a lot in your comments
about the employers directly investing in--
Mr. PIANKO. Right. Yeah, and I think, you know, we are at a
unique--and this is important for Congress to understand. We
are at a unique point in time where employers are willing to
pay to get people trained. If there is a time right now, I have
listened to this testimony. I am not an expert on the legal
issues that have been discussed here. What I can tell you is
you are at a unique point in time where you can bring back
these disenfranchised communities into the world of work.
Our portfolio companies are overwhelmingly serving and
getting people jobs without--usually with no government
funding, no payment on behalf of the future employer, into
high-paying, good jobs. Because an employer right now will pay
$30,000 for someone who can code for them. I can train someone
for 10 to 15.
A hospital group will train someone, will pay $80,000 to
recruit a nurse. I can train--Western Governors University,
which operates in many of your states, can train someone for
40. And if you are interested in getting a diverse workforce
and repositioning underrepresented minorities into high-demand
jobs, this employer pay model is one of the most critical
things to accomplishing that mission.
Ms. FOXX. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. But before I yield my
time, I would like to say to Mr. Pianko we have to have a
conversation after this hearing. You have violated a terrible--
Mr. PIANKO. I wrote down a big note and crossed that off.
Ms. FOXX. Okay. We will talk after. Thank you.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. I recognize myself for 5
minutes.
Let me follow through, Mr. Pianko, on that. As you know,
you get a tax credit if you invest in equipment or technology
that can make your operation more efficient, but you don't get
a similar tax credit for educating your workforce. Should there
be a similar tax credit?
Mr. PIANKO. I would go much further than that, Mr.
Chairman. I think you have a unique opportunity with HEA to
actually integrate a massive funding stream into getting people
jobs and I would strongly encourage you to consider that. I
mean, yes, there should be a tax credit, but you can't really
value--you can't eat tax credits. We need cash on the table.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. Ms. McCann, did I understand you
to say that you can actually prove age discrimination, but that
is not enough?
Ms. MCCANN. That is exactly what I said and that is what
Mr. Gross did. He proved that age was a factor in his
employer's decision to demote him, but since he was unable to
also prove that it was the but-for decision, in other words
that the employer would not have made the same decision without
considering his age, he was unable to prevail.
Chairman SCOTT. Who has the burden of proof to show that
there was no other motivating force?
Ms. MCCANN. Right now, under the Gross decision, the
employee, who is not in the position that the employer is to
make that showing.
Chairman SCOTT. Ms. Bird, you said we know what works on
incarcerated and you mentioned Ban the Box. Do you have
evidence to show that actually works?
Ms. BIRD. Yes, there has been evidence to show that it
actually works. But we also know it doesn't go far enough
because there still is discrimination against workers of color
as well as young people. So we have to think about Ban the Box
as well as other strategies.
Chairman SCOTT. Has the EEOC suggested that if you don't
have an individualized assessment of the criminal record that
it could constitute illegal discrimination? Is that being used
as a defense against improper use of criminal records?
Ms. BIRD. I am not able to answer that. I am not an expert
in what the EEOC does.
Chairman SCOTT. You mentioned the inaccurate criminal
background checks. Can you say a word about how bad a problem
that is?
Ms. BIRD. Yes, I believe the congresswoman already
articulated how bad it is and how inaccurate it is in terms of
arrests to conviction and so forth. And so it is really
critical that is cleaned up and your act will help to do that,
and, also, to increase employment for folks who are returning.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. I believe the gentleman from
Wisconsin had one question.
Mr. GROTHMAN. For Mr. Roos. Again, in your testimony you
said too many current certificate holders will not take that
approach under their own volition. In other words, we have to
force them out.
There is a young gal with disabilities in my district who
had a job, about 8 hours a week outside the work shelter and
the other 30 hours a week in the work shelter. One employee
asked her which job she preferred and she said I like my other
job, too, but all my friends are here. In other words, she
preferred the work center.
Now, your testimony says that we have to take away these
people's own volition. How do you justify to yourself just
because people were born with a different ability than you or I
that they no longer have the right to choose where they want to
work?
Mr. ROOS. I don't believe that we have the right to pay any
person, disability or not, less than the minimum wage. This is
not taking away the rights of anyone. This is creating
opportunities for people with disabilities that they have not
been able to experience.
Mr. GROTHMAN. No, she has both jobs, understand. You are
not answering the question. She has jobs in both places. She
knows what it is like to work in both places and she prefers to
work in the workshop. Why do we take that opportunity away from
her?
Mr. ROOS. Let us remember what workshops are designed to
do. Workshops are designed to develop the skills in order to
become competitively employed. So in your example, she has
shown that she has the skills to become competitively employed,
so why have to rely back on a workshop that is supposed to
develop those skills to achieve an outcome?
Chairman SCOTT. Reclaiming my time. Let me follow through,
Mr. Roos, on that. There is in the transition bill funding to
support transitional skills to get people out of the workshop
into competitive employment. There is also the possibility for
those that, frankly, cannot make the minimum wage--earn the
minimum wage--wage subsidies. Does that cover the problems that
the gentleman from Wisconsin articulated?
Mr. ROOS. I think that it may and I think all of the tenets
of the Act support current 14(c) holders in order to be able to
achieve these outcomes and takes into consideration those very
specific circumstances which you are describing and, again, can
create that whole community life for people currently in
workshops.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. That ends the Member questions.
The gentlelady from North Carolina, do you have a closing
statement?
Ms. FOXX. Yes, sir.
Chairman SCOTT. The gentlelady is recognized.
Ms. FOXX. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And once again, I want
to thank our witnesses for being here today.
As I said in my opening remarks, this hearing on
eliminating barriers to employment has focused on more, more,
more Federal Government intervention and not what most people
in this country understand, and that is that education and
skills are the key to employment. High schools don't encourage
students to work, but in many cases to volunteer, and that is a
problem. Blaming amorphous entities or concepts such as the
economy as structural barriers is a cop-out.
The economy has created 7.1 million jobs that are unfilled.
There is not one of us who doesn't hear from employers many
times every week, I have got all these jobs, I can't find
people with the skills. You cannot walk into any business or
industry in this country and not see signs up, Help Wanted.
It is easy to blame someone or something else for one's
failures. We all do it. Perpetuating that mindset does not help
anyone, but actually hurts a person by helping them avoid the
truth.
We have learned some lessons, I think, particularly from
Mr. Pianko's testimony today. Number one, the current system of
higher education is falling short and the cost to students,
employers, and the economy is enormous, $1.5 trillion in debt
for students. Forty percent of students are underemployed in
their first job. And as I said earlier, there are 7 million-
plus unfilled jobs.
The solution partly resides in the private sector with
intermediaries bridging the divide between schools and
employers. But the Federal approach to workforce development is
to blame for perpetuating a failing system. As this Congress
continues, this Committee must consider comprehensive and true
reform to the Higher Education Act. Federal work study and the
private sector partnerships, apprentice-style opportunities,
renewed focus on outcomes for all students, requiring skin in
the game for colleges and universities, all of those elements
that were in the PROSPER Act, which passed this Committee last
year.
Federal requirements are stifling the interaction between
businesses and college campuses and are setting up a generation
of Americans for failures. Colleges and universities need to
provide their students the opportunity to develop the skills
necessary to succeed in the workplace.
I remain committed to reforming the postsecondary system so
it works for students. There is no issue more critical to
securing a prosperous future for our Nation.
I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman SCOTT. Thank you. And again, I thank the witnesses
for joining us for this important discussion on barriers to
employment that keep too many Americans out of work. Obviously,
skills education can certainly help.
Today the Committee heard how older workers, workers with
disabilities, disconnected youth, and returning citizens face
discrimination and barriers to employment that undermine
opportunities to take part in the benefits of work. These
barriers have serious consequences for a wide range of
communities. Older workers, for example, face obstacles to
challenging workplace age discrimination. Workers with
disabilities face outdated laws allowing them to be paid a
subminimum wage. And millions of Americans disconnected from
school or the workforce face structural obstacles to
reentering.
Yet what remains consistent across these obstacles is that
when we work together to reduce these barriers, we strengthen
America's workers, the economy, and our communities.
Accordingly, Congress has a responsibility to ensure that all
Americans can have access to employment and earn the financial
stability and independence that come with work. By considering
the Opening Doors for Youth Act, the Protecting Older Workers
Against Discrimination Act, and the Transformation to
Competitive Employment Act, we took an important step towards
fulfilling that responsibility and empowering Americans shut
out of the workforce to access rewarding careers.
I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides
of the aisle to pass these bills and ensure that all Americans
can take an active role in our country's workforce and
contribute to our communities.
Finally, I would like to ask unanimous consent to introduce
into the record a letter of support for the Transformation to
Competitive Employment Act from 19 national and 134 state and
local disability organizations, the final report from the
Advisory Committee on Increasing Competitive Integrated
Employment for Individuals with Disabilities, convenened as
required by WIOA, which recommended to Congress to pass a bill
to phase out Section 14(c) while providing resources to expand
the capacity of competitive integrated employment.
In a recent report from the National Council on Disability,
the independent Federal agency charged with advising the
President, Congress, and other Federal agencies regarding
disability policies and programs recommending that Congress
pass a bill to phase out 14(c) while providing resources to
expand the capacity of competitive employment; and a letter
from Paralyzed Veterans of America in support of H.R. 1230, the
Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act.
Is there further business to come before the Committee?
If not, the Committee is now adjourned.
[Additions submissions by Mrs. Foxx follow:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
National Disability Employment Policy: https://ncd.gov/
sites/default/files/Documents/NCD--Deal--Report--508.pdf
Advisory Committee on Increasing Competitive Integrated
Employment for Individuals with Disabilities (ACICIEID):
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/odep/topics/pdf/
acicieid--final--report--9-8-16.pdf
The State of Age Discrimination And Older Workers In The
U.S. 50 Years After the Age Discrimination In Employment Act
(ADEA): https://www.eeoc.gov/reports/state-age-discrimination-
and-older-workers-us-50-years-after-age-discrimination-
employment
[Questions submitted for the record and their responses
follow:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
[Whereupon, at 1:23 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
[all]