Labor Secretary Chao visits Bangor Meeting focuses on job training

BANGOR – Laid off four years ago from her job at Dexter Shoe Co., a job she had held for nine years, Cindy Thompson faced an uncertain future.

She knew that she didn’t want to go back to the factory, but her previous training in the travel industry was of little help in the post Sept. 11 world when interest in travel plummeted. With help from a career center and course work at Eastern Maine Community College, Thompson found a more rewarding job as a unit coordinator of the critical care unit at St. Joseph Hospital.

Thompson is the kind of success story that U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao is looking for as she makes stops across the country promoting the Bush administration’s High Growth Job Training Initiative. It’s a program Bush announced last year, aimed at encouraging job training and education in fields that are expected to yield demand in the future, if not already.

Chao’s latest stop was in Bangor on Wednesday, where at Husson College she spoke and listened to comments from a roundtable consisting of business leaders, educators and workers who successfully made transitions in the work force.

Left out in the cold were representatives of labor unions, who apparently had heard about the meeting secondhand, and showed up but were relegated to waiting in their car on the other side of the parking lot outside the Richard Dyke Business Center, where the discussion was being held.

Jack McKay, president of the Greater Bangor Area Central Labor Council, a union organization, expressed concern that labor officials weren’t involved in a discussion billed as a “Jobs and Growth Roundtable.” For McKay the perceived snub came at a time when he said it’s important to involve unions who represent workers and that have a vested interest in making sure they are prepared for any changes in the work force.

McKay suggested that the omission of unions may have been politically motivated.

“It calls into question whether it was a real exercise in creating and pursing policy or whether this was a step on the 2004 campaign trail,” McKay said.

Congressman Mike Michaud, a Democrat, attended part of Wednesday’s discussion and spoke briefly with Chao, who wouldn’t answer questions from the media, referring a reporter to a deputy secretary who was present. Michaud also provided Chao with a letter outlining some of his concerns, including his outrage at proposed changes to labor standards that would limit overtime pay.

Federal officials said that the roundtable discussion was intended to focus on the connection between educators and employers and that workers like Thompson were included prominently in the discussion.

During the roundtable discussion, Chao spoke of current signs of a strong American economy – with the third quarter last year being the most robust in 20 years – and hard choices ahead. She acknowledged this country faces a shortage of trained workers. The biotechnology field has tripled since 1992 and it’s projected that 3 million jobs in that field will be needed across the country in the next decade.

And by 2010 there will be a need for one million nurses nationwide, a demand that hospital executives and educators present were all too aware of.

At Eastern Maine Community College, 260 people applied for 24 slots at the health program, said the college’s president Joyce Hedlund.

Norman Ledwin, CEO of Eastern Maine Medical Center and Sister Mary Norberta, CEO of St. Joseph Hospital, both in Bangor, pointed out inequalities Maine faces when it comes to training, hiring and keeping workers.

St. Joseph has had two pharmacy positions vacant for two years, unable to compete with large pharmacy and department store facilities that can offer better pay and no evening work, compared to the hospital pharmacy which has to be open around the clock. Ledwin said it’s difficult to compete with the salaries paid out of state.

And Ledwin pressed for challenge grants that, when combined with funding from companies themselves would help promote businesses involved in biomedical research that might not otherwise be able to operate.