Labor Economics Commons^™

Workplace Education At The Bottom Rungs, Andrés Torres

New England Journal of Public Policy

In the late 1980s, observers of the Massachusetts hospital industry were predicting a severe shortfall in skilled technical workers. The Worker Education Program (WEP) emerged as one of several responses to this projected labor shortage. It was premised on the idea of an internal solution to the need for workforce development, shifting the focus from external recruitment to upgrading of incumbents — nutrition, maintenance, clerical, and secretarial staff— and from traditional classroom training to workplace education. Other features of the WEP model made it an extremely interesting experiment: it was operated by labor-management partnership, it was located statewide in nine …