Vice President Joe Biden argued Friday that the federal government needs to help train people to transition to jobs with a future like information technology, and away from the more physically demanding jobs of the past.
“It’s cognitive capability now, rather than physical capability,” he said at a discussion on tech hiring and training on Friday. “There’s not a lot of folks shoveling coal into the steam furnace, it’s a different requirement.”
Biden also called on lawmakers and the unemployed workers they’re trying to help to “to figure out where the jobs are going to be.”
Biden’s remarks echoed some of the same sentiments about the coal industry that created headaches for Hillary Clinton earlier this year. At a March event on CNN, Clinton promised to put coal miners out of work.
She was responding to a question about why poor white people should vote for her, and said she would promote policies that would bring jobs to underserved poor communities. As an example, she said she is the only candidate with a policy for bringing “clean renewable energy as the key into coal country.”
“Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?” she said.
Clinton also said her administration would try to help those who were in the mining industry, but her remarks still created a firestorm in the coal-industry-dominated battleground state of West Virginia. Clinton apologized and said she had misstated her position, and said she was trying to provide more jobs to the region and an industry that faces inevitable job losses in the future.
“What I said is that is going to happen unless we take action to help and prevent it,” she explained.
Biden on Friday only touched on the topic briefly, but mostly touted tech training programs for people in areas with high unemployment, such as Detroit.
“What do we do for all those talented people out there who have real skills and cognitive capability to do things required today but don’t know how?” he asked.
The information technology field is fertile ground for unemployed workers willing to receive 14-16 weeks of training, he said. Recent studies show there’s a need for 1.2 million information technology workers in the U.S., and that 500,000 of those jobs are already available, he said.
He highlighted a $2 billion Obama administration program aimed at providing training for technology jobs at community colleges across the country and connecting the trained people to companies in need of employees with those skills.
Biden said one of the ways the federal government helped pay for the programs, along with private-sector contributions, was to increase the fees U.S. companies must pay to bring highly skilled foreign workers into the country on H1B visas.
