JOB TRAINING BY APPRENTICESHIP
By Rick Tetzeli

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Starting this fall, high school students in Maine will have a fourth option besides dropping out, trying to enter the work force with only a high school degree, or going on to college: an apprenticeship. Some 50 of them will enter pilot programs that will offer 20 weeks of school classes followed by 30 weeks of on-the-job training. Employers will pay the students the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour for the work they do; the money will be spread over the whole year. Companies that have signed on to the idea include Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Parker Hannifin's Nichols Portland division, which makes auto parts, and UNUM, an insurer. The program's big proponent: Governor John McKernan, who hopes that by 1997 a third of the 12,000 who graduate in Maine each year will become apprentices. Says he: ''We have to enhance the skill of our workers in this country.'' About 15 similar pilot programs are already in place in the U.S. Like Maine's, many are inspired by job training in Germany and Denmark, where typically 60% of apprentices go on to full-time jobs at the companies that taught them. McKernan hopes a skilled labor pool will attract employers to his state. Unions are suspicious that employers might use low-paid labor to replace senior workers. In Pennsylvania, which just ended the first year of an ongoing program, almost all 94 companies involved are non-union. An exception: Textron's Lycoming plant, which makes engines for small planes. Since fall, six apprentices minded by union mentors have been learning to run metalworking machinery and to draft designs on computers. Says project director Jean Wolfe: ''The kids are more interested in learning how to do math when they have to figure out at what angle to cut a piece of metal, or English when they have to write a memo to their boss.'' -- R.T.