Fight poverty with job training

The statistics had not adequately reflected the economic reality for years, but most Hawaii residents could not have been surprised by the update. The U.S. Census Bureau has made a new calculation that incorporates Hawaii’s high cost of living and determined that the proportion of the state’s population living in poverty was among the highest in the nation, at 17.4 percent.

This is called the "supplemental poverty measure," expected to become the official yardstick used to gauge financial conditions. What’s still considered the official figure, which doesn’t factor in cost of living, puts the poverty rate at 12.5 percent or 18th lowest in the nation.

We should take off the rose-colored glasses. People here know about the "paradise tax," and those least capable of paying it should have the prospect of working their way toward a better life.

The emphasis is on the word "working," as in the working poor. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 15,000 of Hawaii’s employees, or 4.7 percent of the workforce, were paid at or below the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour (these would include salaried employees whose pay and working hours would average out below the minimum). That’s a startling increase in numbers occupying the low end of the pay scale. From 2001 to 2008, that sector represented only 2 percent of the workforce.

Clearly many of the better-paying jobs were shed in the economic downturn, compelling more people to accept work at diminished wages. The state administration is considering legislation to raise the minimum wage, the first increase since 2007.

That would serve as an economic stimulus — those earning the least generally spend any increase in pay that they get. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia now have a higher minimum wage than Hawaii.

While increasing it would be a good idea for a variety of reasons, it’s only a small and short-term part of the solution.

More needs to be done to train Hawaii’s workforce, giving more prospective employees the skills required of better paying jobs. The federal government needs to recalculate the assistance that Hawaii needs to achieve its workforce goals, based on the new poverty figures.

State labor officials said they haven’t yet heard of any plans to increase Hawaii’s share of federal funding for workforce development, but they are hopeful. That’s because the formula used for calculating state allotments under the Workforce Investment Act includes economic disadvantage of the population as a factor, they said.

In the meantime there are other efforts being made to improve industrial training. Last year, the University of Hawaii’s community colleges received $24.6 million in a grant from the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training federal initiative, part of $500 million in similar grants issued around the country by the federal labor and education departments.

This funding has enabled the schools to partner with local businesses to design training programs specifically in the agriculture, energy and health care industries. The state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations is planning to seek legislation to boost its worker education programs, and that issue deserves lawmakers’ full attention.

There’s a glaring spotlight being placed on the country’s current fiscal problems, and there are indeed spending problems that need to be addressed. But Hawaii, like the rest of the country, has a mismatch between the workers emerging from schools and the type of well-paying, hard-to-fill jobs that are available. Among these are skilled trades and newer manufacturing jobs that require specific, technical knowledge. So investing money in smart programs to close the jobs gap should be budgeted in as part of the larger, long-term effort to fix the economy.

There is, after all, no better solution to worsening rates of poverty than seeing that the underemployed have the skills to land a job paying a living wage.