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A new joint effort focuses on meeting high-wage employers' needs by helping low-income workers develop their skills.

By ROB BROWN and AUTA MAIN August 3, 2008

 

The days when a high school diploma assured a good job for life are long gone. Like most growing industries, even Maine's manufacturing sector now frequently require education well beyond high school just to get in the door, let alone advance up the career -- and income -- ladder.

To make better jobs available to more Maine people, we must better align educational programs that should be ladders from poverty to self-sufficiency.

To that end, Maine's Department of Labor and Opportunity Maine are working together to promote a more comprehensive vision of work force and economic development that will improve business growth, create good jobs and raise incomes in Maine.

Maine has the lowest incomes and the lowest rate of degree attainment of all the New England states. We have a surplus of low-skilled workers and a shortage of middle- to high-skilled workers, leaving many businesses struggling to grow.

For the sake of our economy, common sense dictates that we invest in developing the ability of those low-income workers to gain the skills needed to meet this shortage.

Recent business surveys bear this out. For the National Association of Manufacturers, 90 percent of respondents indicated a moderate to severe shortage of skilled employees.

For the Maine Development Foundation, 42 percent of respondents ranked "educated work force" as their No. 1 need, ahead of other concerns such as taxes, transportation or utility costs.

Furthermore, Phillip Trostel, a research economist at the University of Maine's Margaret Chase Smith Center and School of Economics, has demonstrated that the states with the highest percentage of degree-earners also have jobs that pay the highest salaries. High-wage employers in need of high-skilled workers are not going to locate in a state with a work force like ours.

To improve the composition of our economy, we need to change the composition of our work force. We must invest in educational opportunity. Any economic strategy for Maine that does not have coordinated investments in the skills and capacities of our work force at its core is not sustainable and would not be likely to succeed.

Recognizing this fact, Maine recently passed two innovative laws aimed at increasing access to higher education and developing the state's work force:

• The Competitive Skills Scholarship Program is directly tied to the work force needs of high-wage employers in every region of the state. It simultaneously cuts worker compensation taxes for Maine businesses and invests in helping low-income workers finish a degree, certification, apprenticeship or on-the-job training program.

These are folks for whom tuition is but one barrier. The scholarship program provides needed support with child care, books and transportation, as well as with remedial math, reading, writing and computer skill instruction.

• Opportunity Maine invests in those same workers' ability to enter Maine's work force in a good job without immediately sinking under the burden of education debt.

It will allow those who earn an associate or a bachelor's degree at a Maine school to be reimbursed for education loan payments through a state income tax credit during any year in which they continue to live, work and pay taxes here after graduation.

Alternatively, businesses that pay employees' education loans as an employee benefit will be able to claim the tax credit, providing a strategic tax cut and a strong incentive to expand or locate businesses in Maine.

These two programs combined represent the most innovative, ambitious investment in affordable education and economic development in the nation. They are two sides of the same coin: helping Maine workers prepare for careers in high-wage, high-demand occupations, and rewarding hard work and a commitment to Maine with educational and economic opportunity.

The Competitive Skills Scholarship...