Political and business leaders talk a lot about the need for workers in certain fields, and how the country and economy need them.

That’s not the pitch to workers they think it is.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote from America’s Talent Strategy, the Trump Administration’s workforce blueprint:

That’s certainly a notion. It’s also one that seems supported by Assorted Business Guys who talk to this White House.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink:

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang:

I understand the why of these comments. The talent needs in vital industries are very much real. Here is some research on the rapidly graying manufacturing workforce—you’ve probably seen it before. There also is something to part of what Huang says above, which is that college is seen as a bigger accomplishment than earning a good living in a job that doesn't require a degree. (I’ll have more to say about that in next Tuesday’s newsletter.)

Constructively, though, comments like the ones above are a really crappy way of pitching these jobs to workers. Workers generally don’t care about national economic needs or corporate ones because it’s their lives and their livelihoods at stake. Workers, being people, want the predominant say in those things—even if it involves getting a college degree that people with microphones (and their own college degrees) think costs workers more than it gets them.

This approach also comes off as asking workers to make up for problems that they largely didn’t cause. To stick with manufacturing, that sector’s talent issues were preceded by decades of cutting headcount and underinvesting in talent development. The latter frequently drives some manufacturing executives crazy because they can't get their colleagues to invest in it now.

But perhaps the biggest reason this isn’t an effective pitch? Business and political leaders haven't made it easier for workers to enter those fields or switch careers into them.

To its credit, the Trump workforce blueprint does seem to get that it takes more to wrangle a career switch than a CEO saying “We’d very much like you to be an electrician instead of an insurance adjuster.”

This makes sense. If you’re going to get workers to do the life rearrangement to move from one industry to another, you’ve got to make it easier for them and give them some certainty to move toward.

The problem is that I’m not sure the Administration has really done anything to see through those good ideas. Under the hood of Trump II’s actual workforce spending, I’ve not seen effective and clear requirements for hiring commitments or other efforts to de-risk job changes on the worker side. Rather, the watchword has been a recurring phrase and policy direction: “employer-led.”

Employers are awfully important—they do seem to be the ones who hire people—and as I wrote last week, there also are significant questions about how “employer-led” current workforce policy really is. But employers also are only one half of the hiring equation, and they’re not the half needed to fill jobs employers say they need filled.

If you want workers to switch into a job you think they need, you’re going to need to recruit them, and recruiting them often involves proving to them that they can afford the change. That means that they can support themselves (and their families) during the process of changing a career and that it’s going to be financially worth their while when they get there.

By and large, that’s something many companies in need of talent—and federal workforce leaders, for that matter—haven’t seemed willing to do. Workforce training programs, particularly the publicly funded variety, tend not to pay workers wages while they gain job skills. Wages are a good idea for a workforce program because they let workers, you know, purchase the goods and services people need to survive. They aren’t necessarily a must-have, though, if the program helps with those goods and services by paying for things like childcare, groceries, and the cost of gas.

However, due to funding limitations or just a stubborn reluctance built into the field, it’s hard to find workforce programs that cover those costs. That’s incredibly frustrating—and limiting—because even if a program does pay a wage, that’s not guaranteed to address the personal needs that can decide whether a worker finishes a program.

Let’s zoom in on apprenticeship, which I have heard policymakers and business leaders portray as a “complete” workforce strategy. I understand why. Under the federal registered system, wages must rise as workers gain skills and experience.

At the same time, the federal system only requires that apprentice wages start at the federal, local, or state minimum wage—whichever is the highest. Registered apprenticeships in manufacturing are a good example of how this can make these pathways less attractive to workers, even if you eventually end up with a pretty good wage.

Below are four states among those with the greatest number of federally registered apprentices in manufacturing, per the U.S. Department of Labor.

As the data show, the floor for a manufacturing apprentice’s pay can start well below a living wage, which MIT defines based on the cost of covering just the essentials. The gap is especially stark in Texas, where the living wage is more than three times the minimum wage.

In three of these four states, the median wage for manufacturing apprentices is at least three dollars more than the living wage. That is good news—but it comes with a big asterisk because of what a median wage means. The median is the wage in the dead middle of all the apprentice wages in those states. That means close to half of apprentices in those states are making below the living wage. In Virginia, more than half of all manufacturing apprentices are earning below the living wage for the state.

Based on how federally registered apprenticeship is set up, workers are more likely to start nearer to the minimum wage, not the median. In fact, a problem I’ve researched in apprenticeship is how some programs ask workers to start from square one even if they have experience placing them at square 12.

This is just one small piece of the broader picture, but given the political heft behind apprenticeship, it's a rather telling illustration of the gap between policymakers' expectations and the realities facing workers on the ground.

While the Administration has published good ideas on this front, its overfocus on employers can shape public money in ways that make it less effective at recruiting workers to fields where it wants more talent.

Case in point: by the end of this month, the Administration will have directed around $126 million will be paid out through what the it calls the “Industry-Driven Skills Training Fund”—also talked up in America’s Talent Strategy. The funds pay employers to retrain their current staff in needed skills, or to hire and train new workers.

DOL guidance on these funds explicitly prohibits the states administering the dollars from spending them on workers’ basic human needs, things that workforce policy typically labels “supportive services” or “wraparound services.” Instead, the guidance suggests that grantees “leverage” dollars allotted to states by formula through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the United States’ most consistent source of workforce funding.

In theory, WIOA formula dollars allow spending on these services (under legal provisions that likely prohibit the Administration’s complete ban on supportive services spending for these funds). In reality, that WIOA support for supportive services is nonexistent. Many career-swapping workers might not be able to qualify under the law for supportive services funding because they've made too much money or don't have enough skills needs.

If they did qualify, they’re probably still not getting this help because of how DOL has traditionally directed states and localities to spend this cash. I spent a chunk of last year researching how states and localities spend—or don’t spend—WIOA funding on supportive services. Many states and localities have adopted restrictive policies that make workers prove they can't get the help anywhere else. If workers do get the money, it's often in installments so small and tightly capped that they aren't likely to cover workers' needs.

Or to put it more succinctly: to help employers who need workers, Trump II has made a policy choice that makes it impossible for a key program to cover costs that actually help workers fill those jobs. And it’s done so based on a misconception about how DOL’s own programs work on the ground.

There are a lot of answers to that question—and one of them is that we sure as hell need to pay people more if we want them to take certain jobs. But what I kept coming back to is the massive relatability gap between workers and the leaders who want them in different jobs.

Wealth disparities and age differences certainly factor in here—much as they do in carving out the huge gap between political leaders and American parents on the costs of childcare. But a big part of this problem is that key decisionmakers only know the workers they're talking about in the abstract. At times, I suspect some corporate leaders and policymakers only talk about workers among… other corporate leaders and policymakers.

That’s a problem, to understate it by several orders of magnitude. It’s a self-perpetuating one at that. In my experience, workers can be reluctant to open up due to the tenuous nature of at-will employment and a history of decisionmakers not caring what they say.

But if you listen and seem like you care about what they have to say, they will you what you need to know to make better public policy. Because if you want workers to give a crap about filling jobs that fit "national economic needs," you need to understand what it takes for those jobs to meet workers' personal needs.