You may have missed the commercial on television, or the advertisement in your newspaper.
The one aimed at you folks who were making between, say, $10 and $20 an hour.
The one that urges you to return to a technical or trade school to acquire skills for a new occupation in a global economy.
The one that says that after you have completed your advanced education, you will be able to earn between $5 and $10 an hour.
Five to $10 when you were making $10 to $20?
You bet.
There's no such commercial, of course. If there were, no one would sign up for the retraining courses.
Nevertheless, that's what the people in Washington are encouraging jobless workers to do. In fact, they are spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to retrain and reeducate American workers so they can make less money.
Except they aren't telling workers that once their education is completed they will receive smaller paychecks. And their benefits - most notably health care and pensions - won't be as good as they had at their last job.
But before the litany of statistics that show how things are, it may be useful to understand what the people in Washington believe is an appropriate income for those who've been put out of work.
In conducting studies of workers who have lost their jobs because their companies were unable to compete against cheap imported goods, the government considered one of its retraining programs a success if workers moved into a new job ``that paid or had the potential to pay suitable wages.''
And what was the U.S. government's definition of ``suitable wages''?
It's 80 percent or more of the displaced worker's former wages.
Thus, if you earned $35,000 at a company that shut down and moved to Mexico, and you completed a retraining course and found a new job that paid - or might one day pay - $28,000, the people in Washington chalked you up as one of their success stories.
Now the findings from an audit report prepared by the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Labor. Its investigators tracked a group of displaced workers who qualified for retraining under the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which was enacted in 1974 to aid workers who lost their jobs as a result of imports.
* Just five of every 10 displaced workers who were eligible to attend retraining courses did so.
* Of those five workers who completed retraining, only two found work in their new field.
