Retraining

Job retraining programs traditionally have focused on helping hourly, blue-collar workers switch to careers outside the factory. Now laid-off managers and high-wage workers are getting some attention as well. Unemployed Californians can apply for job-retraining funds to pay for upper-level certificate programs in sectors such as entertainment and healthcare at UCLA Extension, one of the region's largest providers of continuing education. Cathy Sandeen, dean of UCLA Extension, announced the new program Thursday, saying it would address the changing needs of today's workforce.

HUNTINGTON LAKE, Calif. - Comanche has one pale blue eye, one deep brown and a prancing gait that has cowboy Morgan Austin suspecting this mystery horse once paraded around an arena. Until two weeks ago, Comanche wouldn't let anyone in the saddle. It took Morgan, 17, two months of talking to him "real quiet-like," slipping on a saddle blanket, then the saddle, before he could hoist his own lanky frame onto the brown-and-white quarter horse. Now, on a day when the sky is pale with heat and ragged breaths of wind kick up thick, sticky dust, Comanche and Morgan lead the way down a boulder-strewn Sierra trail.

When Sherry Meyer injured her wrist two years ago, her doctors told her there was no way she could return to the production line at Herman Miller Inc.'s furniture manufacturing plant where she had been cutting and packing wood veneer. "I was the sole support for my three children and all of a sudden I faced the question of how I was supposed to support them." "I was really frightened," she adds, because she feared that with only a high school education. she would not find another job.

As usual on Wednesday, dozens of people who are homeless or living in poverty crammed into the lobby at the offices of Chrysalis, a downtown L.A. nonprofit organization. Some hoped to land a spot in hours-long computer and job training courses. Others awaited a course on job-searching for convicted felons. Meanwhile, down the hallway, a coalition of major L.A. firms announced that they had agreed to put up $200,000 over the next two years to enhance the nonprofit's programs. The funds will go toward expanding basic one-day courses into more intensive classes that span several days, in hopes of reducing rampant homelessness and unemployment in the downtown core.

Olga Robelo has worked at Lanz, a women's clothing manufacturer and retailer, for 25 years. She has graded patterns--draft ing a range of pattern sizes from one basic pattern piece--with ruler and pencil and later with a manual grading machine. But now, Olga Robelo is moving into the computer age along with Lanz and many other companies in the garment industry.

For many unemployed Northwest timber workers, government-funded retraining involves at least two wrenching changes--leaving the woods to learn a trade, then leaving town to find work. For a small but growing number of Oregon timber workers, however, programs that teach new ways to profit from the forest are helping them stay in the woods and in the rural communities they love. Such programs rely on a major change of their own, asking trainees to look beyond the big old trees to see what the entire forest ecosystem can offer.

The current Administration is claiming that free trade agreements will bring prosperity, and "jobs, jobs, jobs!" But what about the hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs that have already gone--encouraged to leave the United States because of "free trade" policies? There is talk that some type of "retraining" programs might be considered, but what kind of good-paying jobs will be available when companies have already moved away and how will our collective standard of living be maintained without these jobs?

If The Times is interested in protecting public lands in the Sierra Nevada, as was suggested by your May 15 editorial, you should support the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act, HR 1396. NFPRA would end the logging on our national forests and other public lands. Because we spend over a billion dollars a year subsidizing national forest logging, this bill would obviously save us a great deal of money. At the same time, part of the savings would be redirected into ecological restoration and worker retraining.

I read, with great interest, Jeremy Rifkin's article, "What's a Worker Worth in a Workless World?" (Commentary, Oct. 11). As a business strategy consultant who has spent the last 15 years advising corporate clients on adaptations to technology, I very much agree with Rifkin. Largely because of technology, we are quickly becoming a nation of haves and have-nots. The haves possess the information, knowledge and education to deal with technology. They're advancing. The have-nots lack the information, knowledge and education to deal with technology.

If Linda Blandford's reporting ("Golden Boys, Princes of Darkness," May 14) is correct, some immediate retraining and instruction in duties is due Deputy Patrick Duff--and perhaps the entire Sheriff's Department. What he could have done, and should, was round up the hooligans and call for enough backup to cart them off to the nearest jail, where they could wait for their parents to pay the damages. Indeed, ordinary common decency would demand that they themselves be made to repair all damage and apologize publicly to all concerned.

Local employment centers will have to start spending more of the $500 million in annual federal funding on vocational training — and less on helping the jobless write resumes, practice interviewing and search for work. Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill Thursday that requires local workplace investment boards to divert at least a quarter of the money for their job centers to programs that teach the jobless new skills for the changing economy. That minimum would rise to 30% in five years.

When the Electrolux refrigerator factory shut down in 2006, idling almost 3,000 workers, this self-proclaimed Refrigerator Capital of the World put the last two locally produced units in a museum. And the town itself might follow -- a once-thriving community overwhelmed by economic forces beyond its control and seemingly bound for history's dustbin. Waves of layoffs hit other factories. New start-ups cut back. Hard times hit local stores, service firms and government agencies.

UCLA Health System has agreed to pay $865,500 as part of a settlement with federal regulators announced Thursday after two celebrity patients alleged that hospital employees broke the law and reviewed their medical records without authorization. Federal and hospital officials declined to identify the celebrities involved. The complaints cover 2005 to 2009, a time during which hospital employees were repeatedly caught and fired for peeping at the medical records of dozens of celebrities, including Britney Spears, Farrah Fawcett and then-California First Lady Maria Shriver.

California's budget crisis has eased a bit, thanks to a South Carolina man grateful to the state for helping him 46 years ago. Dennis R. Ferguson wrote a check for $10,000 to the state treasury Nov. 23 as "repayment for what California did for me" when he was laid off from his aerospace engineering job in 1964. Ferguson, a 74-year-old retired computer programmer who lives in the Atlantic coastal community of Fripp Island, S.C., said the four months' worth of unemployment benefits he collected after losing his job with Douglas Aircraft allowed him to re-train for a new career in computers.

At a news conference Thursday, attorney Mark Rosenbaum recalled taking an 18-year-old to a celebratory meal after his graduation from the high school at Camp Challenger, a Lancaster juvenile facility. The teenager, known as Casey A. in court papers, wanted to go to Denny's because the restaurant had pictures on the menu. Despite about three years of schooling he'd received while at Challenger, Casey was illiterate and unable to read a single word on his own diploma, the attorney said.

Recent Palestinian attacks on West Bank settlers, which are likely to increase in response to relaunched peace talks, pose one of the biggest challenges yet to U.S.-trained Palestinian security forces and their uneasy alliance with the Israeli military. The militant group Hamas killed four Israeli settlers and wounded two others in shooting attacks this week as Palestinian and Israeli leaders were starting their first direct negotiations in nearly two years. With the talks already hanging by a thread, an uptick in violence is the last thing the Palestinian Authority wanted to see, particularly because it could strengthen Israel's hand in negotiations.

The invincibility of the B-2 Stealth bomber was unquestionably verified when one considers how Senate approval of President Bush's request for 20 of these $2.2-billion-per-aircraft bargains didn't cause even the slightest blip on the nation's political radar screen. The openness of this Stealth deal underlines the state of our national economic insanity. It stuns one to contemplate what would be done with the money, if just one less B-2 were bought: -- Retraining of laid-off defense workers; loans to help start new small businesses; development grants to advance technology--job and wealth creation!

After attending the women's Visions expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center (Jane Applegate's Small Business column, Aug. 2), the plain fact is that most women have progressed no further than the new, advanced mop that stole the show. Most of the booths were unrelated to any possible new vision for women. There was an obvious lack of business and educational companies' participating in demonstrating the tools of the present and future. Visions is put on in six states. L.A. is one city in desperate need of woman retraining.

With home sales sliding, employers reluctant to hire and world stock markets gyrating wildly, the U.S. economy is in danger of stalling. Now one of its only reliable sources of fuel is running out: federal stimulus spending. Funds flowing from the $787-billion legislation passed last year have helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs and propped up social programs such as unemployment benefits. But with much of that money spent and lawmakers reluctant to approve another big round of spending, concerns are rising about what will replace it in the short term to keep the economy moving.

Job retraining programs traditionally have focused on helping hourly, blue-collar workers switch to careers outside the factory. Now laid-off managers and high-wage workers are getting some attention as well. Unemployed Californians can apply for job-retraining funds to pay for upper-level certificate programs in sectors such as entertainment and healthcare at UCLA Extension, one of the region's largest providers of continuing education. Cathy Sandeen, dean of UCLA Extension, announced the new program Thursday, saying it would address the changing needs of today's workforce.