I prefer the term "governmental policy".
1. stop incentivizing and rewarding outsourcing
http://www.aflcio.org/About/Exec-Counci ... rcing-Jobs2. if corporations want to do recruiting outside of typical hiring populations, they should consider minority communities inside the U.S., like Indian reservations. There could and should be government programs to incentivize that.
3. because job displacement from automation (and globalization) does have some degree of inevitability, focus on worker retraining. Also, offer new domestic employment through infrastructure and "green" jobs.
4. you omitted some more areas where government can assist labor -- most notably, support labor unions with pro-union policies (instead of the opposite)
make sure overtime violations and other practices stop contributing to wage theft
make sure workplace safety is vigorously enforced
etc.
Good ideas there.
(Though you can’t be right about incentivizing outsourcing. Someone in another thread assured me thats a fiction!)
One item I find a little troublesome, (if I can drift off tangentially): is #2 retraining workers.
Education is not embraced like it should be.
Nobody seems to have figured out how to do that well: retrain workers, from what I’ve seen.
Its often a 3 week audit crash course for workers & there is no “failure” ever.
American workers tend to have ingrained resistence to change & react cynically to new things.
Social pressures dictate the training landscape - trying to force a regression to the (assumed) mean.
The trainers are being paid to do a job that often they really don’t believe in, or conversely believe like a child believes a fairy tale.
Then, employers of “retrained” workers don’t believe their employees are more than one trick ponies.
So that the job has to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.