Labor chief: Economy should work like Match.com

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez wants the Obama administration to be the economic version of a dating website.

Perez said Wednesday at a speech in Washington the goal should be to be like “Match.com: Our goal is to match jobseekers who want to punch their way to the middle class with businesses.”

Perez said U.S. officials need to “step up our game” and reevaluate the old models that ushered young people into the economy.

{mosads}”We’ve got to get rid of the old models of train-and-pray where you train people for jobs and pray people will find them for those jobs,” Perez said at the forum, hosted by the center-left think tank Third Way. “If people aren’t hiring widget makers — we shouldn’t train people to be widget workers.”

Perez said that America was at an “Eisenhower moment.”

“[President Eisenhower] helped build our physical infrastructure,” he said. “We’re constructing the modern super skills highway. We need to have on-ramps and off-ramps.”

He reiterated the administration’s push for more apprenticeships, arguing that those public-private programs are often more beneficial — and less costly — for students looking to enter the workforce.

“Parents say, ‘No, my kid is going to college,'” Perez said. “What we must say is that apprenticeship is the other other college — except without the debt.”

Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) used the forum to relaunch their Manufacturing Jobs for America campaign, a bipartisan effort to pass a series of manufacturing bills — eight of which were signed into law last Congress.

Both Coons and Baldwin called for strengthening community colleges and apprenticeship programs.

Coons said that policymakers should aim to be “strengthening the linkages between the curriculum and community colleges.”

Baldwin noted that apprenticeship programs help young people test out careers in manufacturing careers while allowing them to consider going to college later on.

“I truly believe that you cannot have an economy built to last if you don’t make things,” Baldwin said. “It’s not your grandfather’s factory anymore… I do think that there is a branding problem [with the manufacturing industry].”