| During the past decade, millions of American workers have lost stable, well-paying jobs due to structural economic changes caused by major advances in production technology and rapidly increasing international competition. These displaced workers often remained unemployed for long periods of time, and when they finally become reemployed, it was frequently in jobs that paid less than those that were lost. |
| Estimates of the magnitude of this problem during the early 1980s varied from roughly 200,000 to two million workers a year, or 1 to 20 percent of the unemployed (Bendick and Devine 1981; Sheingold 1982). More recent estimates place the number of displaced workers at about one million per year, or 10 percent of the unemployed (Flaim and Sehgal 1985). |
| The primary national response to this problem was passage of Title III of the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), which became law in October 1982 and took effect in October 1983. This federal program currently serves roughly 100,000 persons annually, or 10 percent of the nation's displaced workers (U.S. Department of Labor 1988). Roughly $200 million is spent each year (U.S. General Accounting Office 1990) for programs funded by the federal government, administered mainly by the states, and provided by a broad array of public, private, and not-for-profit organizations. |
| Title III programs combine approaches geared to immediate reemployment through job-search assistance with longer-range strategies to increase human capital through occupational skills training. In program year 1987, about 38 percent of all participants received job-search assistance, 28 percent received classroom training, 19 percent received on-the-job training, and 15 percent received other services (U.S. Department of Labor 1988). |
| In the early 1980s, when Title III was being implemented, little was known about the problems of displaced workers and how best to assist them. It had been two decades since the nation had focused on worker displacement (very briefly, in the initial years of the 1962 Manpower Development and Training Act), and there was little in the way of program experience or research findings to help direct this major federal initiative. Hence, funds were made available to the states, but there was very little guidance for the use of these funds. |
| To help fill this knowledge gap, a forward-thinking and innovative group at the Texas Department of Community Affairs embarked on a demonstration program to study the design, implementation, impacts and costs of a combination of job-search assistance and occupational skills training for displaced workers. This project, the Texas Worker Adjustment Demonstration, successfully implemented a large, rigorous, randomized experimental evaluation in three sites. |
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