Abstract

"The National Alliance of Business, Job Training, and the Limits of Social Entrepreneurship in the 1960s and 1970s"

Neil Johnson, University of California, Santa Barbara (neilr_johnson@hotmail.com)

Over the course of the 1960s, “job training” emerged as the raison d’être of liberal employment policy. Between 1963 and 1970, total federal spending on job training—encompassing, for example, the Manpower Development and Training Act, the Job Corps, the Concentrated Employment Program, and Public Service Careers—exceeded $5 billion. The proliferation of such initiatives created a significant opportunity for business executives to assume a leading role in the delivery of federally subsidized vocational and on-the-job instruction. This paper will examine the history of one such venture, the National Alliance of Businessmen (NAB). Founded in 1968, the NAB exemplified both the Johnson administration’s preference for leveraging public-private partnerships in the pursuit of maximum employment, and the widespread conviction that poverty could be alleviated through targeted investments in the “human capital” of marginalized groups. NAB leaders assumed the posture of “social entrepreneurs,” promising, as historian Amy Offner has written, to “apply existing strategies of capital accumulation to the widening array of problems that social movements had forced onto the national agenda.” By the early 1970s, however, the social-entrepreneurial ideal appeared to be in some doubt. A Department of Labor investigation identified several cases of fraud and mismanagement among NAB contractors; and in 1970-71 its flagship “Job Opportunities in the Business Sector” was scaled back in the face of an economic downturn. The limitations of the NAB’s voluntarist approach to job training and recruitment were most dramatically exposed in 1970, when the Chrysler Corporation cancelled its $14 million contract—the largest yet—with the Manpower Administration. By tracing the history of the NAB/JOBS program and its critics, this paper aims to illuminate how private contractors positioned themselves at the center of a burgeoning federal employment policy infrastructure, and in the process intervened in debates over the relationship between poverty and human capital.