1980-1986 High Technology Business Cycle: Its Impact on Federal Occupational Education Policies (Michigan).

Abstract

A six-year longitudinal case study was done to determine whether the occupational education policies of the Trade Readjustment Act of 1974 (TRA), purportedly designed to return unskilled and undereducated economically displaced workers to full employment, was able to provide the necessary occupational education for traditional automobile assembly line workers so they could participate, as workers, in the economic development of their community. This community under study is Oakl and County, Michigan, an automobile manufacturing center undergoing revolutionary high technology socio-economic change during its 1980-1986 business cycle. A group of 177 TRA sponsored automobile workers at Oakl and Community College's industrial vocational education campus in Auburn Hills, Michigan, in the fall of 1981, was selected for study; and Oakl and County, Michigan's 1983 high technology educational and economic development plan was selected to support the study. The High Technology Cognitive Systems Evaluation Model was developed to determine if TRA policies were compatible with both the educational development needs of the TRA workers and the educational development requirements of the County's high tech economic development plan. The central concern was the adaptability of the TRA policies to the social-psychological characteristics of Oakl and County's traditional automobile work force so that these workers' educational development under TRA will support this community's high tech economic development. The results of the evaluation show that the TRA policies are influenced by the social psychological processes of the traditional automobile assembly line manufacturing social psychological environment in the County. The TRA program as implemented in the fall of 1981 reinforced the low tech cognitive systems of the traditional automobile assembly line work force rather than the high tech cognitive systems required in the County's 1983 economic development plan for the support of the County's economic development. The reintroduction, in 1986-87, of the TRA program with a massive investment, similar to its 1981 implementation, as workers experience massive economic displacement again, must be stopped and its funds diverted to community based and controlled educational projects in support of local economic development.