Introduction

As the pace of international market integration and technological innovation quickens, Lbxrican workers are more often confronted with displacement and the need to find new workplaces, even new occupations. Do we, in the United States, have satisfactory mechanisms for ensuing a just transition? In this study, we examine the experience of American defense industry workers in the wake of the Cold War as a way of reviewing and evaluating national policies toward li.orker adjustment and re-employment as they have evolved in the 1990s. Defense sector workers are the single largest group displaced from U.S. private industry over the past decade – some 1.4 million workers in the sector lost their jobs between 1987 and 1996. Their experiences offer a powerI% lens through which to evaluate the ability of American institutions and policies to move skilled labor quickly from one set of activities to other productive ones in the economy.

American defense worker policies in the1990s should be a high water mark, at both national and state/local levels, for two reasons. First, structural decline in the 1980s in auto, steel and other heavy industries sparked new interest in the special problems of displaced workers. At the state lev,el, some officials crafted industry-specific policies to address layoffs and strove to integrate these policies with worker retraining and upskilling. At the national level, the Department of Labor (DOI_,) acknowledged that employment policies targeted at entry-level workers did not work for this new group of structurally unemployed and pledged to pioneer new types of programs. When the Clinton administration came into office in 1993, incoming DOL leaders pledged to revamp and beef up funding for displaced worker programs and place them center stage.