4 Moreover, government-funded training is of varying quality. Government spending on training falls woefully short, not only failing to compensate for the withdrawal of employer funding but actually declining in recent years. In the current economy, workers are increasingly on their own, without sufficient tools and the structures they need to succeed. Exacerbating this is the fact that a smaller share of workers are members of unions today than several decades ago. 3 Workers also have little ability to ensure that the training they receive will lead to a good job, as they have minimal input into most training programs and limited power to improve the quality of the jobs for which they train. Today’s typical male worker earns roughly the same inflation-adjusted hourly wage as did his counterpart four decades ago, so taking on further debt is a risky proposition. Workers have little room in their budgets to pay for more training. 2 Moreover, the way businesses have increasingly chosen to structure work-away from the traditional employment relationship and increasingly toward contracted work-suggests that, in the future, they are likely to reduce their spending on and involvement in training even further. 1 And when businesses do train their workers, they tend to invest in the ones who are more highly educated or highly paid. Businesses are training far fewer workers than they did in years past, despite being the largest source of funding for workforce training.
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