Republican Richard Thornburgh

 

INC.: Such as?

THORNBURGH: The new Johnstown Corp. is a good example. In that case, an idle steel plant was purchased by an entrepreneur who negotiated a new union contract with the steelworkers' local that had previously represented the plant. The contract halved their wages and benefits, but gave them a one-third equity interest in the business and set an incentive pattern for compensation. Today there are 450 people working at that mill, which is less than the 700 or so that once worked there, but still better than zero. I spoke with the owner some weeks ago, and he said things were going well in a number of areas, but he is most impressed with the renewed sense of commitment among the work force. He was in the plant one weekend and there was a guy there, on his own time, shining up his lathe -- just polishing it up. That's what's really going to turn things around in this country.

INC.: Johnstown is one of those rare success stories, where steelworkers get to be steelworkers again. But the more common model is worker retraining, which in many instances is said to shift highly skilled, highly paid workers into dead-end jobs with low skills and low pay.

THORNBURGH: I'm sure you can find plenty of specific cases where unemployed steel workers have been unable to find jobs that pay what they were paid before, or offer the kind of job security and self-esteem they might have had. I'm sympathetic to that. But on the other side, The Washington Post ran an article about a steelworker in his thirties who was a nurse, making good money in a growing field of health care, getting his act together. The woods are full of anecdotes on both sides, but it is not anecdotal assessment that's in order. I think what you have to do first is break through that psychological barrier that says the old industrial era is coming back, that the status quo ante will be restored. And once that barrier has been broken, then you have to make available as full a range of job-retraining services as you can. Retraining is not a panacea, not a cure-all. But it can work; it has worked. Whether it works depends, more than anything else, on whether there is another job out there to be retrained for. That's where our efforts should be focused.

INC.: But it's the quality, not just the quantity, of the jobs that is of concern.

THORNBURGH: You know, just before I left the governor's office, we held an annual award presentation for new products. And one of the businesses we honored was an outfit that had made a precision robot that could, essentially, thread a needle. And after I got through mugging for the cameras at this thing, I turned around and saw two guys with white coats who were running this robotic thing, and I went over and shook their hands. And one of them said, "You know, we've met you before. You came down to [the steel mill at] Midland and passed out a job-training check." They worked in that mill and now they're technicians in a robotics operation. And that story exposes one of the myths about the transition to a high-tech economy -- a myth that every Mr. Goodwrench is going to have to become Dr. Advanced Thinker with a Ph.D. in order to participate. It's simply not so. Any of the studies that I've seen of emerging new technological industries shows that the vast majority of jobs are really blue-collar jobs available to people with a high-school degree and a fair amount of on-the-job training.

INC.: In Pennsylvania, it used to be that when someone talked about economic transition and economic development, what they were talking about mostly was big industrial companies -- big business. One of the hallmarks of your efforts was to redirect the focus on small business, young businesses, and technologcal innovation.

THORNBURGH: And it was not without a price.

INC.: How so?

THORNBURGH: It was clear that some of the big businesses that were in decline would have preferred to have had more propping up than the future-oriented nature of our strategy called for. It never got down to pitched battles or anything. But there was clearly a difference between my administration and the Business Round Table. Their tone tended to be critical of our direction.

INC.: How important was big business in terms of your own economic programs?

THORNBURGH: Well, perhaps I can sum it up this way: if we relied on the Fortune 500 companies for economic growth, Pennsylvania would be looking at a net reduction in jobs during the past decade, from something like 1.2 million to 600,000. In fact, we had a net increase in jobs, which means considerably more than 600,000 were created because of the growth of small businesses.

INC.: And are the managers of those large firms to be held accountable for that, or was it something inevitable?

THORNBURGH: No it wasn't inevitable. I think there is probably a good deal of validity to the conventional wisdom that our major corporate managers are less attuned to the long pull than they should be, that they respond too much to the pressures of their price of the stock and their own compensation regimen. And an unfortunate by-product of that is this takeover mania.

INC.: But with the exception of one former Treasury Department official, Richard Darman, your fellow Republicans seem reluctant to say those kinds of things, at least in public. Isn't it time for the Republican Party to finally make its break with big business, with Wall Street?

THORNBURGH: Well, let's not be too hard on my brethren -- it's early yet. But you're right. That would be a good message, a relevant message. And it's a Republican message.

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