RETURN TO CURRENT ISSUE

Excerpted from the Valley Advocate

By Jo Ann Di Lorenzo

Brad Sperry was just launching into a Power Point presentation explaining his board's new plan to help former welfare recipients and other displaced workers find jobs.

As if on cue, as Sperry, director of planning and policy research for the Regional Employment Board of Hampden County, was saying how the "customer-friendly" plan is built on the corporate darling of "continuous quality improvement," his voice was drowned out by the strains of "When the Saints Go Marching In."

Sperry's "customers" had come to speak for themselves.

The roughly 75 demonstrators represented the Anti-Displacement Project of Western Massachusetts. In political circles, ADP is known for its in-your-face approach and its knack for instantaneously amending even the most carefully crafted meeting agendas.

Fashionably late, as is its style, this mosaic of humanity--teenagers carrying "Reinvest in America" signs, elderly Russian women in babushkas, men in dreadlocks or ties and suits--had crashed the May 24 public hearing in downtown Springfield on the Workforce Investment Board's plan for implementing the federal Workforce Investment Act, which beginning July 1 will constitute the federal government's sole job training initiative.

In setting its sights on the board, ADP is going right to the source. The board controls $6.4 million in federal funding for employment services and job training for displaced and disadvantaged workers. The 48-member, business-heavy board determines exactly how much counseling, education, and vocational training is available for the estimated 8,200 people in the region who need help finding decent jobs… .

Of the $6.4 million in the 2001 budget, $3.6 million, or 56 percent, is earmarked for personnel, overhead, and the costs of running two "one-stop" training centers. One quarter of the budget would pay for individual training vouchers to enable low-income job seekers to attend specific, though as yet unnamed, training programs, while 13 percent is set aside for youth programming: tutoring, study skills instruction, drop-out prevention services and summer employment, for example.

"The plan is all about jobs first, just getting the person into any old job," one ADP leader said. "Training is where most of the money should be going, but it's just not a priority."