04/14/2002

Your March 23 editorial, headlined "Wrong way to boost wages," suggesting that Providence city money would be better spent on vocational training than a living-wage ordinance is grossly uninformed and misleading.

I've been a workforce educator in Providence for eight years. I'm now a graduate student at Harvard, focusing on adult-education policy. The major problem that adult students face today is the lack of time to attend programs that might boost their employability skills -- a lack of time brought on by the need to work regular overtime to feed their children.

A recent analysis conducted at Harvard suggests that the average working adult can attend school for no more than 150 hours a year -- about five weeks of full-time education. That is hardly enough to make any noticeable educational gains. Workers can't get the kind of vocational training you advocate unless they are paid well enough to make ends meet on a 40-hour workweek.

Moreover, to imply that worker skills deficiencies are to blame for the mass exodus of manufacturing business to countries where the labor works for well below our minimum is placing the blame for the city's economic problems on the backs of the people who are most effected by it. This is unfair. A democratic city must be able to stand up for the people who comprise it and say we affirm the right for all of us to live.

DAVID HAYES

Providence