Thinking big on jobs

Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency in large part on a promise to help American workers displaced by trade and technology. That’s a worthy goal — but if he wants to deliver, he’ll have to rethink his approach.

To date, Trump has focused narrowly on industries such as mining and manufacturing. These efforts are woefully misdirected, and not just because technological progress and global competition should be embraced and not blocked. It’s also a matter of scale. Today, goods-producing industries have far fewer jobs at risk than the vastly larger services sector.

As a new Bloomberg analysis demonstrates, businesses such as department stores and landline telecommunications have become the biggest job losers among 350 subsectors of the economy.

To be sure, overall employment in services has gone up since Trump won the election last November, but the effect of job displacement on many individual industries and their workers has been severe.

The coming decades may be even more disruptive. Artificial intelligence is threatening new swathes of the labor force. Researchers at the University of Oxford estimate that nearly half of all U.S. jobs — about 69 million — are vulnerable, particularly such low-wage occupations as office clerks, food servers and cashiers.

… The U.S. is ill-prepared for this challenge. The main government retraining program, Trade Adjustment Assistance, focuses on manufacturing jobs. That’s far too narrow.

The U.S. needs to furnish opportunities for retraining to all who lose a job through no fault of their own. Every level of government should cooperate with employers to create more ambitious and effective apprenticeship programs.

Benefits should be more portable and other barriers to mobility — geographic and occupational — should be urgently identified and removed.

The future of jobs needs to be a much higher priority — and the president and Congress need to think a lot bigger.