County Executive Scott Walker can be excused if he smells a conspiracy.
Last week MayorTom Barrett announced that he would like to have the city take over the Private Industry Council from the county and oversee the council’s job training efforts. His fellow Democrat, Gov. Jim Doyle, immediately announced he favored the idea, and a Journal Sentinel editorial declared that the mayor had made a compelling case.
All this harmony is lovely to see, but I have one question: Where’s the beef?
At no point did Barrett, Doyle or the Journal Sentinel explain why this arrangement will result in better job training. For starters, the Private Industry Council is a tiny player when it comes to job training. It only has a $15 million budget, compared to about $1 billion for Milwaukee Public Schools and more than $300 million for Milwaukee Area Technical College. MATC is particularly critical to matching the training of potential workers to the needs of local companies. But the mayor offered not one word about MPS or MATC.
The PIC largely operates with federal money and provides job placement for a difficult-to-serve population. I suspect its placement numbers aren’t great, but that’s probably true of all PICs nationally, because they serve under-educated, difficult-to-employ clients. Anyway, that’s irrelevant, because Barrett didn’t offer any statistics to make his case.
In Milwaukee, the county has overseen the PIC for decades. About 70 percent of the clients it serves are from the city and 30 percent from suburbs in the county. It has always been oriented toward the city and its board has always had some appointments made by the mayor. If there are problems with this structure, doesn’t it behoove the mayor to prove this, and to show why a city takeover will improve things?
Barrett’s predecessor, John Norquist, wasn’t exactly shy about grabbing power. Yet he never proposed the city take over the PIC. Instead he worked with the group, appointing his jobs expert, David Riemer, to serve on the PIC board. Reimer had a big influence on its policies, as it dealt with W-2 and welfare reform. The Riemer/Norquist philosophy on these issues was well-known; Riemer pushed for the New Hope program that was an early prototype for W-2.
But does anyone know what Barrett’s philosophy on job training is? Barrett’s point person will be Donald Sykes, who ran the Social Development Commission back in the day. Don’t we need to know what Sykes’ approach on job training is, or what he has accomplished since being hired by Barrett?
One way to evaluate a proposal is to ask who had the neat idea. The announcement by Barrett was supported by Greater Milwaukee Committee head Julia Taylor and had already secured $500,000 in funding from the Helen Bader Foundation. This suggests the idea might be promoted by Taylor and foundation head Daniel Bader. They worked together to create the Initiative for a Competitive Milwaukee, which was supposed to connect inner-city workers to jobs. It was a very well-intentioned effort, but as a November story in Milwaukee Magazine documented, the effort spent some $800,000 in funds and accomplished nothing. Shouldn’t that track record be considered before Milwaukee goes on another job training junket with Bader and Taylor?
I don’t mean to suggest the Private Industry Council is beyond reproach. Its president and CEO, Gerard Randall, has seen his salary rise from $95,000 in 1998 to $159,000 in 2004, the last year for which the group’s federal tax form was available online. That’s a nifty 67 percent increase in just six years. We should all be so lucky.
But Barrett never raised the issue of Randall’s performance. Perhaps that’s because Randall is a very vocal Republican, and worse for the Democrats, an African-American Republican who appears regularly on TV pundit shows. For several years, Randall successfully resisted Doyle’s effort to remove him from the University of Wisconsin’s Board of Regents, irritating the governor greatly.
Walker told the JS he was afraid Barrett’s move would undermine regional economic cooperation. He suggested Milwaukee’s PIC should be merged with its suburban counterparts to create a seven-county jobs council. Good luck selling that one to the three-county PIC serving Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties and the three-county PIC serving Racine, Kenosha and Walworth counties. And why change these regional entities into one giant agency unless they are doing a poor job of job placement?
In short, there are a lot of questions to be asked about all these neat ideas that are supposed to improve Milwaukee. Perhaps it’s time for some answers.
Harley’s Fat Cats
Even as Harley-Davidson was pushing the union representing its workers to make concessions, its executives were cashing in millions of dollars in stock. A Wall Street Journal story reported that seven Harley executives sold 1.5 million shares of company stock valued at $101.3 million, taking advantage of rising stock prices. The seven insiders made a profit of $45.9 million.
Meanwhile, the union was being asked to make pension concessions, make payments toward health insurance coverage and accept a new two-tier structure with lower wages for new employees. All the sacrifices, it seems, would be made below the executive suite.
Harley CEO James Ziemer told the WSJ that about half the stock was sold by the retired CEO, board chairman Jeffrey Bleustein. But that still left many millions for Ziemer and five other executives.
The JS has reported on the union negotiations, but hasn’t seen fit to report on this insider sale. The paper even did one story with the headline, “Some say strike could help Harley.” In short, the company can risk a slowdown in production while it plays hardball with the union.
Once upon a time, newspapers aggressively reported on union-management disputes. But today, they mostly pass on these stories. Indeed, a JS article last week reporting on Miller’s female workers (who put a clever song on YouTube to dramatize their dispute with management) conceded as much. The story quoted Gordon Lafer, a professor of labor studies at the University of Oregon, who said unions today generally feel shut out from the traditional media.
Ironically, the story on Harley’s insider trading came from a newspaper with one of the country’s most conservative editorial boards. Yet the WSJ aggressively reports the news in a rather non-partisan fashion.
Beyond the newsworthy timing of the stock sale, it also suggests a move to cash in while the company is still riding high on the hogs. The WSJ story notes that the average Harley customer is 47, that the company is selling an increasing percentage of motorcycles with loans it makes to customers and that the average number of days these loans are outstanding is going up. Translation: The company could be in decline from a one-time peak of popularity.
All of which makes the story very relevant for Milwaukee readers.
And check out critic Ann Christenson’s Dish on Dining.
