Problemas como migración, el fentanilo, la seguridad fronteriza, la relación con China, son parte del debate y las preocupaciones en la intensa política bilateral

SIS Conference on Trade Issues with a focus on the Americas and the Pacific regions; I chaired a panel discussion with the Ambassador of Costa Rica, the Charge of Argentina and Former Mexican ambassador Geribumo Gutierrez

SIS organized a conference with Universities in Canada and Chile to discuss elections across the hemisphere. I was one of the three speakers.

Mexico is home to some of the hemisphere’s largest, most sophisticated and violent organized criminal groups. These organizations have drawn from Mexico’s history of smuggling and close proximity to the United States, the world’s largest economy, to grow into a regional threat.

Sergio Aguayo is the head of a research project done by El Colegio de México and the Mexican Senate to compare the approaches to combating organized crime of seven Mexican presidents and presents key lessons for improving results from Mexican policies and actions going forward. Kate Doyle and Ambassador Earl Anthony Wayne offer comments.

Super discussion April 4, at the Mexico Institute with analysts from Mexico: Integralia Managing Director Luis Carlos Ugalde and economic analyst Carlos Ramírez. We explored the challenges and risks for US-Mexico ties built into 2024 national elections in Mexico and the US.

Four Exemplars of the Importance of Public Diplomacy to American Foreign Policy

Innovative work to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives across a variety of critical transnational issues – climate change, disinformation, migration – characterizes the four recipients of PDCA’s 2024 awards for achievement in public diplomacy.

In compiling their outstanding records of accomplishment, all four demonstrated excellence in team leadership, advanced organizational skills, creative use of social media, and sustained energy and drive.

The four recipients so honored by PDCA this year are:
Wren Elhai, Spokesperson, Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES)
Patricia Muñoz, Strategic Content Specialist, U.S. Consulate General Ciudad Juarez
Public Affairs Section, U.S. Embassy Bratislava, consisting of four American officers and 10 locally-employed staffers led by PAO Tamara Sternberg-Greller
Josh Lustig, Public Diplomacy Officer for Emerging Voices, U.S. Embassy Seoul
“These award winners represent both domestic and foreign employees of the State Department who work creatively and energetically to further U.S. objectives and help foreign audiences understand our country,” noted Ambassador Earl Anthony Wayne, co-chair of the PDCA Awards Committee. “They also reflect the fact that public diplomacy overseas includes both Americans and Locally Employed Staff members who work hard to defend American values and represent the United States.”

Very happy to join 50-75 students from American University's School of International Service on Tuesday evening March 26 and talking about a career in the diplomatic service.

Discussion with USAID, World Bank, USIP, Afghan-American Business Council and others on economic, financial, development and humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan, needs on the ground, and Taliban policies.

Group argues in letter to senators that failure to endorse the Convention on the Law of the Sea undermines U.S. interests. I am happy to have been one of the supporters who signed on to this letter.

Joining with other senior US former officials in calling for the US Senate to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty.

Successful Workforce Development Is Vital for a Competitive and Prosperous North America
Distinguished Speaker Series: Globalization 2.0
Organized by Texas A&M University’s Cross Border Threat Screening Program
February 20, 2024
Earl Anthony Wayne
Talking Points Used

The North American workforce suffers from alarming skills gaps and mismatches.

If left unaddressed, these labor market deficits could undermine North American economic competitiveness and sow the seeds for greater social dislocation.

Long before the pandemic and the “great resignation,” employers in North America often struggled to identify employees who possess the skills needed. Conversely, employees often found it difficult to acquire the education and training they needed to access job opportunities.

With the surge in hiring evident over the past two year, these mismatches continue to impede companies and sectors in Canada, Mexico, and the United States from realizing the potential inherent in the powerful production and commerce networks that their countries have been building since the early 1990s.

Skills gaps and shortages, in digital skills and emerging technologies such as electric vehicles, remain as a central challenge for the region.

If the region is to cope with accelerating technological changes, adapt to shifting demographics, and create buffers against unexpected shocks, North American leaders should formulate and invest in a serious North America workforce development agenda.

The three countries have begun to address workforce development issues more consistently since 2020 when the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) came into effect and as workforce development was identified as action area by USMCA’s Competitiveness committee.

The leaders of the three countries also made workforce development an important action item for the competitiveness work agendas approved by North American Leaders Summits (NALS) in 2021 and 2023.

As part of the NALS follow up work, ministers and private sector representatives launched a specific workforce development program focuses on promoting the North American semiconductor industry in a June 2023 Washington conference.

Also, the US and Mexico made workforce development a bilateral work topic since they revived the bilateral High Level Economic Dialogue (HLED) in 2021 and have organized specific workforce development events and projects.

This is welcome progress.

However, the United States, Canada and Mexico have not yet invested in a comprehensive North American Agenda to address systematically the skills gaps and mismatches that continue to hinder prosperity and the competitiveness of North America’s workforces and thus its productive potential.

All three countries, and much of the world, have been forced to reconsider the “future of work.” Over the longer term, technological transformations are likely to contribute to the creation of more and better jobs.

However, during difficult transitions across many industries, companies, individuals, and governments need to prepare for the shocks that accompany “creative destruction.”

By joining forces, North Americans can make more and better jobs a reality and ameliorate the disruptive effects of change.

Although technological change already posed significant challenges for the workforce, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated, exacerbated, and reshaped the ways in which both production and business are conducted.

Technological shifts and pandemic-related changes catalyzed a “double disruption” for workers globally, in the words of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The pandemic forced businesses to reevaluate the role of technology in their workplaces, manage workers remotely, and rapidly expand internet commerce. The pandemic opened serious discussions about the resilience, robustness, and reliability of supply chains across North America and worldwide.

The emergence of ever more powerful tools using Artificial Intelligence (AI) has added additional concerns about further significant changes in jobs, skills, and the workplace across North America and internationally, as part of the ongoing debate and discussion about how governments might best manage this powerful new technology and its effect on workers and businesses.

To better address these gaps, the United States, Canada, and Mexico need to increase and better target investment in the development, adjustment, and training of their workforces and to build cross-continental collaboration.

If North America is to augment its regional competitiveness, it needs a strategy to develop and deploy a 21st century workforce.

A North American workforce development agenda, therefore, should focus on four areas:
(1) work-based learning;
(2) innovative use of transparent credentials;
(3) labor market data collection and transparency; and
(4) creating collaborative mechanisms to help prepare for changes ahead.

The implementation of this agenda depends on multistakeholder involvement, driven by collaboration among national and subnational governments, businesses, academia and education providers, unions, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

The three governments should lead the way, identifying successful partnerships and programs under way across the continent, and looking to expand them.

This collaboration might start by responding to the needs of sectors of regional importance, such as the automotive sectors, emerging “green” energy production as well as on semi-conductors, where work has already begun.

Workforce Development in North America

North America boasts one of the world’s strongest trading and production networks.

The United States, Canada, and Mexico combine for a population of nearly 500 million people and a gross domestic product (GDP) of over US$31 trillion.

This includes the world’s largest, tenth largest, and fifteenth-largest economies, respectively.

The United States is the largest trading partner of Mexico and Canada, and those two countries are the United States’ largest export markets.

More than 50% of the trade within North America is in intermediate goods, reflecting the fact that the three countries build so much together.

Since the early 1990s, trade within North America has grown by a factor of four.

Mutual investment is massive and growing.

Since the 2020 launch of USMCA, North American trade has grown some 30%, averaging over $3 million a minute and foreign direct investment has increased.

Mind the (Skills) Gap

North American employers report a lack of applicants, the lack of adequate or sufficient technical (“hard”) skills, insufficient human/social (“soft”) skills, and inadequate experience as the main reasons for their difficulty filling positions.

These skills gaps and mismatches keep workers from attaining better jobs and harm companies’ competitiveness and industrial performance. Together, this is a serious drag on the regional economy.

Worse, mismatches are only likely to grow as change in employment accelerates. This is due in part to the increasing pace of automation, which is erasing old categories of work while creating new types of jobs.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that 14% of jobs across its member countries could disappear because of automation in the next 15 to 20 years, and another 32% are likely to change radically.

Core employment skills will change, increasing the demand for both “reskilling” (training for those displaced from jobs) and “upskilling” (training employees whose jobs are evolving).

Digital literacy and foundational digital skills will be increasingly important: by 2030 an estimated 77% of jobs in the United States will require the use of technology.

Notably, these challenges and talent shortages are prevalent for all three North American countries, and they affect businesses of all sizes to varying degrees (Figure 1).

The figures suggest that in all three countries—much like the global average—larger companies face more difficulty filling jobs. Of course, these companies are often the most regionally and globally integrated enterprises in North America.

Figure 1. Talent Shortage by Company Size

Source: Manpower Group, 2019 Talent Shortage Survey.

But it is worth noting that a mix of strategies will be needed, precisely because the challenges regarding employment and skills are so diverse.

For example, the OECD estimates that 10.2% of U.S. workers are in occupations with high risk of automation and are therefore in need of “moderate training.” An additional 2.3% are in need of “important training” to avoid the risk of losing their jobs because of automation. Likewise, about 8.5% of Canadian workers are in need of “moderate training” and 3.2% need “important training.” The OECD does not provide similar data for Mexico but finds that the country ranks at the bottom 20% on most indicators of skills development.

Automation will also hit sectors very differently:
How to adapt? As new technological advances are expected to modify classes of jobs for which workers are being trained today, it will be essential to develop this culture of learning and innovation throughout a worker’s life.

Both “hard,” or technical, skills and “soft” or human and social skills will be crucial to prepare workers for the future of work.

Although leading companies in the United States, Canada, and Mexico are adopting new technologies at comparable rates, public-private-academic collaborative efforts on training and workforce development still fall short.

Workforce resiliency should be a measure of its ability to adapt under varying and uncertain economic conditions.

The United States, Canada, and Mexico will need agile and resilient workforces with public and private educational and training systems that better support current workers and prepare students for careers of the future.

If no serious steps are taken in this direction, North America undoubtedly will face the social and political repercussions of displacement and unemployment.

Insufficient Workforce Development Budgets

Insufficient funding of workforce development is a region-wide concern. According to the OECD, North American countries trail other developed countries in such investment (Figure 2).

In the OECD’s 2021 tally of total public expenditures on Labor Market Programs as a percent of GDP, Mexico is last in 25th place, the US is second to last in 24th place, and Canada is better but still only ranked 16th among OECD members.

It is important to note that under the Biden Administration, the US significantly boosted its spending on economic investment in America including new funding for workforce development with three major pieces of legislation: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Chips and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

These pieces of legislation have funded a wide range of workforce development programs and opened doors for more. But many of are still being developed, implemented, and not yet funded.

The latest OECD data available (through 2021) continue to show Mexico trailing all other OECD countries in public spending on active labor market policies as a percent of GDP (figure 2). This bottom of the pack rating holds true even when focusing on training programs, which includes the current Mexican administration’s vaunted youth training program, “Youth Building the Future,”

While Canada ranks higher on per capita GDP basis that both of its neighbors, the US ranks low as a percent of GDP but significantly increased program outlays with the legislation mentioned above. Experts at the Brookings Institution argue that more funding is needed specifically focused on workforce development, however.

A Proposal for Workforce Development in North America

A regional approach makes sense because North America’s economies share workforce challenges – even if these challenges look a bit different in each country.

A collaborative approach is necessary especially due to the commercial and economic integration of the three economies.

Massive cross-border production chains and trade networks have positioned the region as one of the most competitive in the world, helping it build products together.

Conversely, skills gaps and mismatches in one part of the region harm economic and industrial performance elsewhere, curtailing the region’s competitiveness.
So far, the three countries have implemented different strategies for developing their workforces (see Boxes 1 to 3).

In addition, a great deal of activity related to workforce development occurs at the subnational and local levels.

Success stories exist across North America—training for a Siemens plant in Charlotte, NC., multi-stakeholder cooperation in Querétaro’s aeronautics hub, and a multifaceted “phased action plan” in British Columbia are just some of the good-news stories.

Nevertheless, it is notable that the very strategies that have been identified as critical, including vocational training and transition to the workplace, have not yet been granted prominent roles in national and regional policy efforts.

Simply implementing these kinds of programs is not enough, however.

The three North American countries must also work to ensure that the public and stakeholders are aware of the programs’ existence and comprehend the benefits that participation creates for students, workers, and industry.

They also need to build in careful examination of results.

The United States, Mexico, and Canada should establish mechanisms to implement trilateral innovation strategies aimed at improving workforce development and formalize pathways to exchange lessons learned.

Subnational, national, and regional policies need to be synchronized, with the cooperation of government, private sector, and educators at all levels.

Priorities for Action

The USMCA, especially its Committee on Competitiveness, provides a mechanism for building workforce-development cooperation.

The competitiveness chapter (chapter 26) outlines the parties’ shared interest in strengthening regional economic growth and calls for the establishment of a Committee on Competitiveness.

USMCA’s Competitiveness Committee has begun a dialogue on workforce development and undertaken several events in 2022-23.

In the context of the North American Leaders Summit (NALS), the presidents of the US and Mexico and the Prime Minister of Canada approved a competitiveness work agenda for North America which has workforce development as an integral component.

They convened a tripartite meeting of ministers and private sector representatives from the three countries met in Washington during May 2023 to discuss how to build a stronger semiconductor industry in North America.

The conference highlighted the need for collaborative workforce development efforts in the semi-conductor sector as one of its outcomes.

We now need to look for results.

Similarly, the US-Mexico High Level Economic Dialogue has initiated a series of meetings and projects focused on workforce development as part of its ongoing agenda.

The results are not yet clear.
.
North America would benefit greatly from a public-private-academic process where governments (at all levels), the private sector, unions, educational institutions, and others could explore best practices on workforce development.

Issue 1. Expand Apprenticeships, Work-Based Learning and Technical Education

Work-based learning (WBL) or work-integrated learning programs encompass a wide range of models. Apprenticeships are a well-known example.

The mix of academic instruction and on-the-job learning equips individuals with relevant capabilities to meet the demands of the labor market and provides businesses with the trained employees they need.

WBL approaches such as apprenticeship programs can address skills gaps by immediately placing workers in unfilled jobs, and the companies offering the apprenticeships can adjust the training to fit evolving needs.

WBL also provides a career path by offering workers paying jobs, certifications, and marketable skills. However,

apprenticeships and other WBL initiatives will need to evolve with the pace of technological change and workplace needs. The OECD recommends that its member countries move away from front-loaded education systems to a model where skills are continuously updated to match changing demand.

Small and mid-sized businesses often find the cost of upskilling and reskilling programs to be prohibitive. Industry or sector partnerships with existing workforce stakeholders, especially government, can help smaller organizations to reap more benefits from training programs. But access to public funds for the efforts seems limited.

Bridging this gap is crucial for long-term North American competitiveness.

The federal governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States should agree to create shared standards for the following:

1. Define apprenticeships and other major types of work-based learning (WBL), as well as minimum criteria and quality standards.

2. Agree on broad guidelines assigning roles and responsibilities to governments, industry, and intermediaries regarding the development, implementation, and funding of apprenticeships and other WBL.

3. Create a trinational career and technical education and apprenticeship task force to identify best practices to promote apprenticeships and other WBL programs.

4. Agree on elements of a marketing strategy to increase public awareness of the advantages of WBL and change negative public misperceptions of such programs.

5. Build trinational spaces to foster ongoing dialogue between regional stakeholders to share best practices on WBL and training, and to strengthen public-private partnerships.

6. Agree among the three countries on ways to incentivize and support companies, including small and mid-sized enterprises, to develop training and learning programs for reskilling and upskilling their workforces.

Issue 2. Address the Recognition, Portability, and Transparency of Credentials

Professional credentials provide a clear sense of what skills a worker has, facilitating labor market mobility, reducing selection costs for firms, and leading to higher wages and quality of workers.

Despite those possible benefits, the current, fragmented system for credentials across North America forms a barrier for workers of many skills levels.

This is a major challenge across national borders, where various nontransferable credentials leave skilled and well-educated individuals underemployed.

Higher education and employment services are disjointed across the continent and too often are disconnected from employer and industry needs.

Making credentials comparable, transferable, stackable, and more transparent would support North American competitiveness and to help overcome skills gaps and mismatches.

Recommend the three North American countries work to build agreement on the following:

1. Develop a common language about credentials and competencies to facilitate understanding, quality, transferability, recognition, and the ability to stack or accumulate them.

2. Develop or strengthen national competency frameworks and aligning them to the trinational common language of credentials and competencies.

3. Develop guidelines to assess and validate informal learning and professional experience, and to identify skills associated to such experience.

Issue 3. Improve Labor Market Data Collection and Transparency

One of the biggest challenges is that neither public authorities nor the private sector and academia collect and share data on credentials, skills, workforce trends and training effectiveness.

Improved data collection can allow people to make better-informed career decisions and can bring valuable transparency to the labor market.

The speed of change in the economy increasingly requires the development of real-time labor market information platforms, databases of in-demand skills and regular evaluation of skills programs.

The following elements should be agreed upon trilaterally through a collaborative process:

1. Develop norms to collect real-time labor market data and information in a consistent and homogeneous way so it is comparable across countries and across the region as well as easily accessible.

2. Establish a North American Workforce Observatory (NAWO) aimed at developing a trinational online platform (linked to national platforms) to serve as a hub for real-time labor market data in the three countries, and for best practices from the public and private sectors.

3. Develop guidelines to make the trinational NAWO platform and data tools openly available to stakeholders.
4. Develop guidelines for metrics to evaluate workforce development programs and propose improvements.

Issue 4. Identify Best Practices to Approach/Prepare for “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”

The already rapid pace of change in the economy is likely to increase further.

The result will be a complex process of massive job creation, destruction, and transformation of workplaces and work/lifestyles that has been dubbed Industry 4.0 or the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

The pandemic has added new lessons and additional use of technology as reflected in more remote work and job shifts to new sectors.

The rapid development and use of Artificial Intelligence is likely going to complicate the elimination and emergence of new jobs and skills as part of the continuing transformation of the workplace and careers.

The World Economic Forum’s 2023 Future of Jobs Report, for example, highlights how technology adoption, including AI, is likely to drive job and workplace transformation over the next five years.

The 2023 WEF reports that employers anticipate a structural labour market churn of 23% of jobs in the next five years and that 44% of workers skills will be disrupted.

The WEF report estimates that 6 of 10 employees will require training, but that only half of workers have access to adequate training opportunities today.

These training and educational needs also underscore the vital importance of partnerships with educational institutions. Private, public, and academic sector leadership is needed to develop models of how to adapt to the pace of change.

Equity, recovery, and resilience will likely remain be priorities for governments, especially because lower-skilled workers and traditionally disadvantaged workers may well face even greater barriers.

Workforce development needs to be better incorporated into economic and industrial policies going forward with better public-private-academic collaboration. Positive lessons from the pandemic and post-pandemic recovery should be built upon e.g., distance work could be expanded across the continent when suitable; distance education/training should be continued and expanded. These successful models should be identified as “best practices” and scaled up.

The authors suggest trilateral initiatives in the following areas:

1. Identify successful examples of private and public collaboration.

2. Agree on approaches and strategies to encourage companies to collaborate with educational institutions, trade unions, sub-federal governments, and others to better align curricula with the evolving labor market needs, better connect graduates to the labor market, and foster the modernization of educational spaces.

3. Build trinational spaces to share best practices on “Industry 4.0” and lessons from the pandemic; on partnerships that link the priorities of business, academic, and government actors. Look for ways to maintain and expand models of remote or distance work that can work well across the continent and its value chains.

4. Identify best practices for small and mid-sized enterprises to keep up with technological changes and talent creation.

5. Establish trilateral research and innovation projects in strategic economic areas through grants and scholarships.

6. Invest in evaluation to assess ongoing programs, future trends and prepare for future skills needs.

Implementing the North American Agenda

The North American Workforce Development Agenda should be a collaborative effort that includes North American governments, private sector, educational institutions, unions, and nongovernmental organizations.

The agenda should provide mechanisms to convene both federal and subnational governments to collaborate and innovate on best practices.

USMCA impressively grew trade among all three North American countries approximately 30% in its first three years,

The NALS agenda similarly holds great promise for boosting prosperity and well-being in North America as well as improved competitiveness if seriously pursued.

To guide and support future progress, however, the three national governments need to invest more and more smartly in workforce development.

They should establish an overarching senior level trilateral workforce development taskforce with substantial private sector and academic participation.

The taskforce would name public/private/academic and federal/sub-federal working groups to develop specific action proposals in the four areas described above and ensure that programs are effectively communicated to the public to reach intended participants.

The bottom line is that North America’s workers and businesses will benefit greatly from pursuing an active dialogue and enhanced cooperation on workforce development.

North American Workforce Development Agenda 2.0
Elements that should be agreed among the three countries in a public-private multistakeholder process
Issue 1. Investing in Apprenticeships and Other Work-based Learning and Education
1. Define apprenticeships and other major types of work-based learning (WBL), as well as minimum criteria and quality standards.
2. Agree on broad guidelines assigning roles and responsibilities to governments, industry, and intermediaries regarding the development, implementation, and funding of apprenticeships and other WBL.
3. Create a trinational Career and Technical Education (CTE) and apprenticeship taskforce to identify best practices in strategies to promote apprenticeships and other WBL programs.
4. Agree on elements of a marketing strategy to increase public awareness of the advantages of WBL in order to change negative public misperceptions of such programs.
5. Build spaces to foster ongoing dialogue between regional stakeholders in order to share best practices on WBL and training, and to strengthen public-private partnerships.
6. Agree among the three countries on ways to incentivize and support companies, including small and mid-sized enterprises, to develop training and learning programs for reskilling and upskilling their workforces.
Issue 2. Addressing Credentials and Related Issues
1. Develop a common language about credentials and competencies to facilitate understanding, quality, transferability, and recognition.
2. Develop or strengthen national competency frameworks and align them to a shared trinational common language regarding credentials and competencies.
3. Develop guidelines to assess and validate informal learning and professional experience, and to identify skills associated to such experience. Share and emulate best practices across the continent.
Issue 3. Improving Labor Market Data Collection and Transparency
1. Develop norms to collect real-time labor market data and information in a consistent and homogeneous way so it is comparable across countries and across the region as well as easily accessible.
2. Establish a North American Workforce Observatory (NAWO) aimed at developing a trinational online platform (linked to national platforms) to serve as a hub for real-time labor market data in the three countries, and for best practices from the public and private sectors.
3. Develop guidelines to make the trinational NAWO platform and data tools openly available to stakeholders, while allowing space for the development of private sector initiatives.
Issue 4. Learning Best Practices for “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” and the Future of Work
1. Identify successful examples of private and public collaboration, with emphasis on highlighting promising steps and tools to incentivize companies to invest in worker reskilling and upskilling, to provide mid-career training and learning opportunities, and to develop agile training and learning programs to ease the transition and improve the quality of work transformations.
2. Agree on approaches and strategies to encourage companies to collaborate with educational institutions, trade unions, and other interested parties to better align curricula with the evolving labor market needs, better connect graduates to the labor market, foster the modernization of educational spaces, and promote larger participation of women and other underrepresented populations in the workforce.
3. Build trinational spaces to share best practices from pandemic work experiences, the implementation of Industry 4.0 and existing partnerships to better link the priorities of the business, academic, and government actors.
4. Identify best practices for small and mid-sized enterprises to keep up with technological changes and talent creation.
5. Establish trilateral research and innovation projects in strategic economic areas through grants and scholarships. Invest in evaluation to assess future trends and prepare for future skills needs.


Endnotes

Pressing ahead with better workforce development and educational cooperation in North America.
Earl Anthony Wayne is a Public Policy Fellow at the Wilson Center, distinguished diplomat in residence at American University, and Career Ambassador, with posts including U.S. Ambassador to Mexico (2011-15) and Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs.
Sergio Alcocer is President of the Mexican Council of Foreign Relations and the former Under Secretary for North America, Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the former Under Secretary for Energy Planning and Technology Development, Ministry of Energy.