Mike Salsbury/The Olympian
Eric Stubb (left), a fifth-grade teacher from McCleary, speaks with Gov. Gary Locke and Sen. Maria Cantwell after Monday's meeting.

Cantwell touts worker training efforts

PATRICK CONDON THE OLYMPIAN

OLYMPIA -- In 1993, Eric Stubb was one of 600 people laid off from a mill in Grays Harbor County.

"You are horrified, worried," Stubb said Monday. "There are a whole lot of emotions."

Then Stubb got what he calls a second chance at life -- he enrolled in a worker retraining program. He attended Grays Harbor Community College and later Saint Martin's College in Lacey -- where he graduated as valedictorian, even though he lived in a van during much of his school career.

Now a fifth-grade teacher at McCleary Elementary School, Stubb would like to see more displaced workers get the same opportunity.

"This is one of the best bets you can make with your money," Stubb said Monday in Olympia at a news conference with U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell and Gov. Gary Locke.

"These people are highly motivated; they realize this is a chance of a lifetime."

Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, called the news conference to pitch her efforts to get more money for work force training into the federal budget.

The Senate recently agreed on a proposal to restore several million dollars in cuts to work force training.

President Bush proposed the cuts.

Cantwell announced her own effort to add an additional $73 million in worker-training funds.

"In the next several years, companies are going to locate where the skilled work forces are," Cantwell said. "I want Washington state to be that place.

"That's how you win economically."

Such efforts will be important in Washington, Cantwell said, as its work force recovers from layoffs at The Boeing Co. and at technology firms.

South Sound needs

In South Sound, training would be of great benefit to the health care industry, said Scott Bond, the chief executive officer at Providence St. Peter Hospital.

Right now, St. Peter employs about 3,200 people in Thurston and Lewis counties. That means the hospital should be hiring about 300 to 400 people a year to keep pace with turnover and expansion, Bond said. That's about two people every week.

But that's not happening, because there aren't enough qualified applicants, Bond said.

The shortage is especially stark among registered nurses, for which the hospital has 27 full-time and part-time openings.

The hospital has more critical-care beds than it has nurses to staff them, Bond said.

"We're hearing from the community colleges that they have qualified applicants," said Bond, who also attended the news conference. "What they don't have is the training slots."

These numbers play themselves out in industries statewide, according to a report prepared by Cantwell's office.

Not enough room

Out of 115,000 dislocated workers in Washington state, the study found about 38,000 are "likely to seek training" if given the opportunity.

However, the state's community and technical colleges have slots for training only 12,500 dislocated workers.

Holly Moore, president of Shoreline Community College, said her school is serving twice the number of students its funding was intended to serve. That load is even heavier in southwest Washington, Moore said.

Despite the state's faltering economy, the Cantwell report found that 59 percent of the state's businesses have jobs that could be filled by workers with the right qualifications.

"There's too high a number of unemployment in the state when, at the same time, employers are saying they have vacancies," Locke said.

In addition to trying to boost federal worker-training funds by $73 million, Cantwell will introduce a legislative package with several other components intended to boost access to worker training:

- Changing the Pell Grant application process so recently laid-off workers' eligibility for financial aid is determined by their income after their layoff -- not from the year before.

- Targeting worker-training funds to specific job opportunities by working with local economic development councils and educational providers.

- Providing money for innovative programs that use distance learning to help the disabled, workers with children at home or those who live far from individual programs.

"A lot of people who get displaced, they've worked there a long time and their confidence level is low," Stubb said. "When they get back into retraining, they realize they can do it."

The Olympian Copyright 2002

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