Working For America - Workforce Investment Act of 1998

As part of a recent series of training conferences for WIB labor representatives, the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute has developed a new three-part agenda to strengthen regional economies through the nation's more than 600 state and local Workforce Investment Boards (WIBs). The new agenda is designed to help WIB labor representatives ensure that the workforce investment system embraces the principles of a high road economy that competes on the basis of innovation, quality and skill, rather than on low wages and limited benefits. Just as importantly, the agenda allows today’s unions and their allies to learn more about their regional economies and to use public resources to set the kind of job quality that working families need. The agenda consists of three strategies:

High Road Community Audits

A community audit is an essential—but often underutilized—tool that can assist Workforce Investment Boards in strategic planning and decision-making.

Many Workforce Investment Boards (WIBs) currently use the term in a limited way to describe the practice of distributing and evaluating employer surveys. Often, without a more strategic way of assessing community needs, WIBs invest their resources in supporting economic development strategies that produce low-wage, low-skill jobs such as training and placing workers at retail outlets or providing large regional employers with entry-level workers who have little opportunity for advancement. The U.S. Department of Labor and the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute strongly encourage WIB representatives to take a more comprehensive, systematic approach to community audits.

When community audits are based on reliable research and embrace the needs of workers and the community as well as employers, they can provide a more complete picture of the labor market and a framework for understanding the needs of employers and workers. Comprehensive community audits—what we call High Road Community Audits—can provide the critical information that WIB representatives need to create and implement successful workforce investment plans.

Real Self-Sufficiency Standards

Under the Workforce Investment Act, self-sufficiency standards play a critical role in determining the eligibility of working adults for training services. Specifically, adults and dislocated workers earning below the self-sufficiency standard are eligible for intensive services and training using local WIA funds. Thus the higher the standard, the more people - including union members - will be eligible for services. If an area fails to set their own self-sufficiency standard, the Department of Labor prescribes a lower standard that leaves many working families ineligible for training.

Labor's goal - in general as well as in workforce development - is to raise the living standards of working families and to ensure that the system provides training opportunities to everyone who needs them. Adopting a self-sufficiency standard that truly represents a family-sustaining wage is a key part of those goals. This is why it is important that labor representatives urge the adoption of local standards that are based on family composition, and local costs associated with working, including transportation, childcare and taxes. As with community audits, advocating for self-sufficiency standards presents a great opportunity for labor to build coalitions with other WIB members and community groups. By defining good jobs and good career paths, self-sufficiency standards can help set thresholds for what constitutes responsible public investment, as well as serve as the basis for demonstrating the need to raise wages in bargaining and organizing drives or living wage campaigns.

Subsidy Accountability

Subsidy disclosure laws and “clawbacks” in economic development contracts require re-payment of public monies if employers do not live up to their promised level of job creation. Virtually unknown ten years ago, these laws have become a regular part of the practice in public economic development. These same techniques can also be used in workforce development to enforce standards on job quality and to let taxpayers know where their money is going. Specifically, when entering into a contract with an employer for on-the-job training (OJT) or customized training, the WIB board could use a legally binding instrument to commit the employer to both the number and quality of jobs to be created. The workforce board could also set guidelines to recapture or “clawback” funds if those commitments are not met.

For more information, visit our website at www.workingforamerica.org