As the challenges of today's global economy confront America's working families, a promising response is emerging. Across the country, unions, community groups, government, foundations and far-sighted employers are teaming up to build a future of good jobs, successful industries and strong communities.

They are forming "high road partnerships." These partnerships vary in structure, employ different strategies and have different funding sources, but they share a common, broad goal: to build an economy based on skills, innovation, opportunity, sustainability and equitably shared prosperity rather than on low-road practices that lower living and working standards and weaken communities.

In this High Road Partnership Report, the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute examines 14 high road partnerships to identify elements likely to lead to success, barriers to effectiveness and tools to help these and other partnerships reach their potential.

Many of these partnerships are young—it is impossible to label their levels of success conclusively or point to extensive outcomes. But by their nature as meeting grounds for key players in local and regional economies, they demonstrate potential. Each player brings to a high road partnerships unique assets:

• Unions bring their long history of training and placing workers, their role as a voice for workers who have the greatest insight into how to make their workplaces more effective, political strength and contacts that can leverage public funds and their ability to bargain with employers for good wages, benefits, career ladders and training and education funds.
• Employers bring the ability to strengthen communities by providing good jobs to current and new workers, intimate knowledge of their industries, funds for training and the political strength that can attract public funds for innovative programs.
• Community groups bring long years of service to the most disadvantaged sectors of society, and help recruit unemployed and low-income workers and youths into training and education programs. Some bring important advocacy skills to public policy debates, and the ability to build bridges between unions and constituency groups. Community groups also contribute a long-term perspective of the needs of the community as a whole.

Because they bring together unions, employers, community groups and often government, high road partnerships have the potential to create lasting improvements in jobs, skills and opportunities. They can achieve scale by reaching many people. They can achieve depth because of their deep roots in communities. And they can achieve broad scope by providing a range of training, modernization and economic development advantages to their participants.

The services offered by many of the 14 high road partnerships studied here go beyond standard worker training and re-training to include plant modernization and market development help for employers, targeted assistance for minority and women job-seekers, technology-testing operations and high school equivalency and English as a second language (ESL) education,. The range of structures, services provided and funding sources contributing to these ventures demonstrate the breadth of the solutions that are needed—and possible—to tame the challenges of today's global economy.