National Skills Summit

National Skills Summit
Skills Summit Highlights

Statement from

Ray Marshall, Former Secretary of Labor

Former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall has devoted his professional life to helping people gain the equality of opportunity our nation promises. The following are excerpts from Secretary Marshall’s book Back to Shared Prosperity that reflect the message he conveyed to participants at the Summit.

The High Road To Productivity

"It is clear that with the internationalization of markets, countries, companies, and people can thrive only if they yield to the imperatives of global competition. The most basic of these imperatives is that we can compete in only two ways: reduce wages and income or increase value added (or productivity and quality), sometimes referred to as the ‘high road….’ The high-value-added option, by contrast, could create very steep learning and earning curves and therefore holds great promise for personal, organizational, and national advancement. A production system based on ideas, skills, and knowledge clearly is less restrictive than one based on manual work and physical resources. However, since under present institutional arrangements in the United Sates market forces tent to lower wages for most workers, the high-road outcome will require positive interventions."

Making Technology Work For All Americans

"The essence of technological and economic progress is the use of more ideas, skills, and knowledge in the production process and less manual labor and physical resources, thus improving productivity, the ultimate source of real incomes…. Technology can increase productivity, [which is] simultaneously displacing labor and providing the means to improve the incomes of those who remain employed. By improving productivity, technology lowers costs in the affected industry and throughout the economy…. Technology can expand markets and produce a higher rate of growth in output and employment, which could have the net effect of increasing both income and employment…."

"Some analysts believe that prosperity caused by a more knowledge-intensive economy could be even better and more equitably shared than it was between 1945 and 1973, when it was fueled by the civilian applications of technology developed for military purposes, supportive macroeconomic policies, massive improvements in higher education because of the GI Bill, and strong domestic and global demand…. "

[An important factor of technology] is the increased knowledge base of the whole economy brought about by the new technology…. Similarly, the organization of work within and between companies and countries requires new kinds of skills, especially quantitative, abstract learning, interpersonal, communicating, and problem-solving abilities that put a premium on the knowledge and skills needed to most effectively adapt and use advanced technology."

All Years of Schooling Are Not Equal

"Almost every economic and social policy analyst recommends improved education, especially for low-income groups, as one of the surest ways to achieve shared prosperity. There is a question, however, of whether new jobs require higher skills or whether the availability of better-educated workers enables employers to hire them for jobs requiring less education. Confusion over the relationship between education and economic outcomes results in part from using years of schooling as a measure of educational achievement (i.e., skills and knowledge). Obviously, all years of schooling are not equal. There often are very different outcomes when educational achievement is measured by objective achievement assessments and compared with economic performance or social pathologies. It also clearly makes a difference what kinds of knowledge and skills people have, not how many years they spend in school."