The only truly useful job advice I’ve ever received has come from friends who’ve been on their union’s bargaining team.

Last year, after a Democratic Socialists of America socialist night school, I watched an emergency room nurse answer a basic question about work by whipping out a stack of bound contracts. Within a few minutes, he had a table full of baristas, nonprofit grunts, and building maintenance staffers oohing and aahing while he fielded questions about how long it takes to break $100,000 per year salary, how many days off one can squeeze out of a nontraditional schedule, and which sub-specialties in nursing might best suit each of their dispositions.

In contrast, a few months later, it became clear that budget cuts meant my long-term contract job as a food science lab tech will end on schedule very soon. There haven’t been any new vacancies all year I could try to jump to, so I waylaid another comrade who’s a leader in the nearest university technical workers union and asked for advice finding a new lab tech job. He suggested a quick tour back through community college to get licensed to work in hospital labs — if I can contain plant diseases, keeping quarantine in a medical lab isn’t too different. It would nearly double my salary, and I’d get the protection, and opportunity, of joining a fighting union. Most importantly, vacancies abound.

The program he pointed me toward seemed promising: four months of classroom work at a public university, followed by a year of poorly paid, but still paid, internship, for the privilege of which I’d also pay tuition. But, in order to be accepted to the program, I’d first have to take a few undergraduate courses to meet the prerequisites, one or two at a time, on nights and weekends. Then, applications are due ten months before classes start — handy if you need to move for the program or line up complex financial aid, but really interfering with my scheme to avoid looming unemployment.

Altogether, switching from one specialty to another related field will take me over two years and $15–20,000 in tuition. I found a lower pay grade option: an entry-level lab tech job, for which you can get licensed after six months of on-the-job training. Except no one seems to offer on-the-job training. The nearest community college, however, can get you there after a mere two years of full-time classes.

Reader, I blame Bill Clinton.

Reagan and Bush offered paltry aid to workplace training programs meant to smooth the rough edges off deindustrialization. Clinton exacerbated the underlying problems with NAFTA, but realized “job training” and “apprenticeship” sound awfully working-class, and instead offered up a vision where everyone would prepare for their career by going to college.

Ever since, we’ve come to accept that the neoliberal framework that job training and education are one and the same, best to be accomplished in classrooms rather than on the shop floor — which means, of course, that the worker shoulders the cost, in unpaid time and tuition, rather than the employer. How convenient — for that employer.

Complaining about all of this feels a little petty. I grew up bathed in the ethos that securing a good job is one’s own responsibility, and if this all works out, I should be able to repay my loans eventually and enjoy a higher standard of living for the rest of my working life. The work involved in changing specialties is not the problem — I enjoy studying, and I certainly want to be competent before I run my first unsupervised blood test.

But personal woes multiplied point to policy failures. I’m reluctant to shoulder thousands in costs and years of preparation, mostly because there’s no way of knowing that, assuming I don’t wash out of the program, I’ll be able to find work with my new credentials. This is not general education which could be applied to another line of work if the markets shift in the meantime; if I pick the wrong track, I will have to start all over for the third time, broker and with a dustier resume.

The risks are even greater for workers who start out with more debt than I do, who have children or parents dependent on their income, those more likely to face workplace discrimination when they finally get to apply, and more. There are a thousand impediments that make the temporary sacrifice for future rewards unviable for many working people.

To the extent a “skills gap” in the economy is ever real, this is where it’s born. On the one hand, you have an unmet demand for labor that requires specific skills. On the other, you have a working class full of smart, frustrated people stuck in the low-paying jobs they were able to get with minimal experience or credentials, who simply can’t afford the upfront costs of paying for their own job training. On the sidelines, you have employers, throwing up their hands and complaining there’s no one to hire.

The libertarian solution is, of course, deregulation. Well-heeled media commentators are often baffled by the libertarian fixation on eliminating license requirements for everything “from psychics to dog groomers,” but I suspect this is only bizarre if you’ve never been asked to produce a qualification for a job that is more niche-specific than a bachelor’s in marketing. The intended audience is elsewhere: employers who resent the increased wages and limited applicant pool of licensed professions, and workers frustrated with navigating the whole complex on our own.

But deregulation creates a host of new problems. For workers, it’s the first step toward wage cuts. For the public, there are real dangers to removing third-party verification that, say, your pilot knows everything she might need to know about emergency landing procedures, or your cosmetologist knows which products will chemically burn your scalp if he combines them.

Instead, the middle rung of the working class might look above and below us for inspiration. In the white-collar world, academic studies are more general, with more of an emphasis on developing your personal capacities and broad knowledge. A diploma is expected to open up a host of possible career trajectories, and (outside of the unpaid internships designed to serve as a class filter) specialization is generally learned on the clock after graduation. If college were free, it would ease the costs on workers looking to move from one wing of the economy to another.

In the trades, union-run apprenticeship programs offer openings scaled to the positions available and provide specific technical education workers can take from one gig to another (which is probably why Trump is currently finagling ways to undercut them). Mandatory pay for on-the-job training might leave employers holding out hope they can poach pre-trained workers from elsewhere, but it would eliminate the practice of having interns and job hunters work for free while auditioning for a paycheck. While none of these are perfect solutions, they all beat the status quo where workers are left playing opportunity cost roulette, and for-profit colleges exploit our hopes of a steady paycheck.

I’ve spent the last few months squinting at my resume and holding it up alongside job postings, realizing I’m not too far from becoming a meat inspector, an agricultural pest inspector, working quality control at a vegan ice cream factory, or checking stool samples for tapeworms. I can wrangle a microscope and prevent cross-contamination like no one’s business. What I can’t do is pursue all these options at the same time, fronting the productivity gains I’ll later split with my boss out of my own money and free time.

We have two generations now of US workers whiplashed by shifting economic winds and tied down by stagnant wages and the student loan debt from our first, second, and third career plans. The only viable and humane solutions will require collective —not just individual — retooling.