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I appreciate all kinds of training, but my favorite is spring training; my passion for improving our education and workforce systems is exceeded only by my love of baseball. I grew up going to Toronto Blue Jays games when they played in Exhibition Stadium, a stadium built for Canadian football. We’d sit in bleachers that started a normal distance from left field, then – rather than curving with the outfield fence – sledded straight so you’d find yourself sitting hundreds of meters away from the action. This explains how a Blue Jays centerfielder could subsequently credibly claim he regularly urinated in the outfield during games.
Baseball was also the subject of my first published work. In college, my roommate Dave and I penned odes to MLB stadiums. “Stadium Poetry” was published by the campus humor magazine and included sporting stanzas like this one to the old home of the Chicago White Sox:
Ol' Comiskey
O city of the broad pork shoulder
Hog butcher to the major leagues
Intrigued,
I plod to the concession stand.
And this one to the maligned concrete home of the Atlanta Braves:
Fulton County
The place that Sherman missed.
Too bad.
I prevailed upon Dave to include Canada’s two teams, the Blue Jays and the Expos. Here’s the composition to Exhibition Stadium’s much-needed replacement with the world’s first working retractable roof.
SkyDome
The first thing
That I think of
When I think of
SkyDome
is
Opaque
Opaque
Opaque
Opaqueopaqueopaque
And the Montreal Expos, who played in Olympic Stadium under a retractable roof that never worked:
Olympus
The rain falls
In the dome.
No one notices.
It's raining in French.
For as long as I can remember, baseball has crossed borders (although less so since the Expos became the Washington Nationals), along with much else. Although baseball has produced some productive trades, the most productive trade occurs in other goods and services, to the tune of trillions of dollars each year. The same semester we wrote Stadium Poetry, Dave and I took an economics course in international trade and learned that countries with comparative advantages in producing different products were always better off from trade. The example constantly cited by our professor was food and clothes, although because he never seemed to change out of the same pair of green pants – a habit he shook when he became an econ celebrity and bon vivant for predicting the Great Recession – we always referred to it as trading food for green pants. Food producers in green-pants-country and green pants producers in food-country could be compensated for any losses from trade; there would always be more than enough surplus to go around.
So on the eve of President Trump’s proposed 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, Dave – who went on to write his senior thesis in economics on the deadweight loss associated with toll collection and spent several cold winter mornings senior year counting cars on the Mass Turnpike – sent me this missive: “As a huge fan of deadweight loss, this is like Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa all at the same time.”
It’s not just Dave. Pretty much every economist agrees that erecting barriers to trade makes everyone worse off. So how did we get to a place where the U.S. is on the verge of what the Wall Street Journal calls “the dumbest trade war in history.” Although President Trump has connected tariffs on Canada and Mexico with fentanyl (perhaps only to strongarm our neighbors to do more to stop it – prompting Paul Krugman, Nobel-winning economist and author of the international trade textbook we read that semester, to suggest that using fentanyl to justify a trade war was reminiscent of the Bush administration’s “weapons of mass destruction” pretext for invading Iraq), the real reason was provided by Robert Lighthizer, U.S. Trade Representative in the first Trump administration. Lighthizer argued in the New York Times that trade between nations should always be balanced. And while there’s no basis for this in economic theory or formulae, Lighthizer zeroed in on the damaging effects of imbalanced trade, specifically “the distributional effects in our country.” In contrast, a Trumpian system of balanced trade would lead to “fairer distribution of the true benefits of trade” (while also eliminating Trump’s trade-deficit-pretext for annexing Canada).
We are where we are – including newly reinstated 25% tariffs on all imports of steel and aluminum, primarily impacting Canada, and 42% of Americans feeling good about tariffs – because we’ve utterly failed to fairly distribute the benefits of trade. Lighthizer correctly points out that American workers “have seen millions of their good-paying jobs disappear… and many of their communities… decimated.” While this may not be obvious in coastal blue states, it is in rural and red state America where the only non-fast-food outlets still operating on main streets are Dollar Tree and Family Dollar, where products are cheaper because of trade ( albeit no longer $1), but who cares if you no longer have a good job.
For decades, America has been reaping gains from trade but failing to tap the surplus to help trade-displaced workers land on their feet. And so the connection between Trump’s trade re-trade and our education and workforce systems deserves a lot more attention.
***
The surplus (or additional annual income) from international trade is estimated to be $1 trillion, or $10,000 per household. Even if we conservatively focus on incremental gains from liberalization since the 1980s (when President Trump developed his singular ideas on trade), gains are easily over $100 billion per year or $1,000 per household. So what have we invested to fairly distribute the benefits of trade? In 1962, the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program was established to do exactly this. At its peak in 2010, TAA funding was under $1 billion – less than 1% of annual gains from freer trade, and perhaps as little as 0.1% of total benefits.
Why haven’t we invested more? Because TAA hasn’t done what it was designed to do, namely move trade-dislocated workers into good or better jobs. Instead, TAA was handed to the Department of Labor (DOL) which eluded the tricky jobs question by funding states to provide two benefits to trade-dislocated workers: (1) training for up to two years; and (2) up to two years of income support. To encourage training, workers had to enroll in a program within 16 weeks of being laid off in order to qualify for income support. Moreover, employers and workers had to jump through hoops to be qualified as “trade-affected.”
There’s no better illustration of TAA’s failure than the 2017 book Janesville, which documents what happened after GM closed its Janesville, WI plant in 2008. In the book, Amy Goldstein portrays trade-dislocated workers funneled by the local workforce board to Janesville’s community college to sit in classrooms. According to Goldstein, “of the laid-off workers who arrived at the college in the fall of 2008… nearly half left without finishing what they’d begun.” The completion rate was lower – approximately one-third – for those who enrolled in associate degree programs.
TAA put classroom training on a pedestal without regard to the fact that trade-dislocated workers tend to be older and less likely to want to go back to school. More damning, it did so without regard to the fact that “train and pray” programs don’t reliably lead to placement in good jobs. Even if training providers like community colleges could read employers’ minds, determine exactly what employers are looking for, and then execute on that curriculum, the gap from classroom training to hiring has always been wide. In between lies a gulf of unscientific hiring processes, employer biases, digital hiring – with exponentially more applicants – and a rapidly widening experience gap – far too much noise to establish a strong correlation between a training program – particularly a new one with no track record of producing in-demand talent – and landing a good job. So it wasn’t surprising in 2008 that American University researchers found TAA to be “of dubious value in terms of helping displaced workers find new, well-paying employment opportunities.”
Undeterred, in the wake of the Great Recession, America doubled down on classroom training for displaced workers when President Obama signed legislation authorizing the $1.9 billion Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training program (TAACCCT – an acronym only a bureaucrat could love). According to New America, the best that could be said of TAACCCT was that “participation was associated with statistically significant and positive increase in the odds of employment outcomes” although the “positive effect appears greater for… program completion and credential completion compared to the employment outcomes.” Tellingly, TAACCCT’s employer engagement fact sheet omitted any hiring data. And despite enrolling over 500,000 students, none of the hundreds of studies on TAACCCT demonstrated the program contributed to putting thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands, of displaced American workers back in good jobs. Still, a decade ago, for four golden years TAACCCT supported the launch of new community college programs, the hiring of new faculty, program directors, and deans, and generally padded community college budgets.
TAA and TAACCCT funded classroom train-and-pray because DOL put them on the same shelf as its other workforce development programs and because classroom training is workforce development’s safe place. The fact that “TAA is often considered the ‘Cadillac’ of workforce development programs” says a lot about other workforce development programs. Ironically, TAA ceased funding newly dislocated workers in the summer of 2022, just in time for the start of President Trump’s successful presidential campaign.
***
The saga of Trade Adjustment Assistance is a metonym for what’s plagued American workforce development: conflating training with jobs. Instead of insisting on balancing all bilateral trade relationships and destroying relationships with close allies along the way, there’s a simpler solution to fairly distribute the benefits of trade. As Brookings notes, TAA had “a limited record of offering work-based learning opportunities such as apprenticeships or on-the-job training that adult learners and displaced workers are likely to find more appealing.”
Work-based learning means putting trade-dislocated workers in jobs first, then turning to training. If we had put the job placement horse before the classroom training cart – if we had funded “work-based learning opportunities such as apprenticeships or on-the-job training” instead of classroom training – it would have been obvious that Trade Adjustment Assistance warranted investing more than 1% of trade gains. This is why Peter Coy of the New York Times was right to focus on the failure of TAA in explaining President Trump’s 2024 election win.
Here’s a thought experiment: in the 1980s and 90s, as free trade became orthodoxy for both political parties – particularly Democratic protectors of the working class – what if we had taken a different tack? Instead of shunting dislocated workers off to community college classrooms, what if we had immediately moved them to alternative full-time career-track positions with built-in training?
This may seem like fantasy and more easily said than done in today’s trade-decimated communities. But they didn’t go from healthy to decimated overnight, and the decline might have been staunched at the outset by directing funding to jobs rather than classroom training. In retrospect, if America was going to get massive benefits from free trade, instead of the same-old same-old of giving money to community colleges and hoping for the best, we should have gotten a head start on tapping the surplus to subsidize industries, communities, jobs, and earn-and-learn pathways in those jobs.
***
Beyond tariffs directed at our northern neighbor, it’s clear things are changing in Washington, DC. At the Apprenticeships for America Summit in DC earlier this month, it was a tale of two cities. Legacy workforce players funded by DOL grants, including community colleges, were all doom-and-gloom. Meanwhile, new earn-and-learn intermediaries – those in the business of setting up apprenticeship programs and hiring apprentices – were excited at the prospect of change.
Although we’ve missed the boat on training and trade for over 40 years, it’s not too late to change course. It’s not too late to build the earn-and-learn infrastructure we’ve been missing. While we’ve been playing awful defense, other countries are going on offense with new earn-and-learn models. Like Dubai’s new Business Associates Program, a 9-month hire-train-deploy program that aims to recruit global talent with job placement and training as well as travel, accommodation, and work visas. Dubai is reportedly investing $100K per hire. It sounds rich, but even at this price, most Democrats would give their eyeteeth to go back in time and redirect TAA spend to swing state hire-train-deploy programs like this.
Given the parlous state of our politics, it’s a fair bet that progressing (or at least not regressing) on other important social and environmental goals requires solving this first; it’s a fair bet that workforce has become America’s gateway problem. But the most recent and surprising consequence of our flawed approach to trade dislocation is the shocking rupture between my home and native land and my country of choice, between the True North Strong and Free and the Land of the Free, between the home of the Blue Jays and the rest of Major League Baseball. America’s new trade-driven policies have accomplished the impossible: enraging mild-mannered Canadians.
It couldn’t be less opaque: we need to try new things to help American workers and communities. As Hamlet said in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, “there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” In our contemporary tragedy, it’s raining in French and English. So as spring training starts, let’s hope for training’s fall.