Today's working women and men face dramatic challenges finding and keeping the kinds of jobs that can support and nurture families. In many ways, the economy that is creating "dot-com millionaires" every day is failing vast numbers of working families, creating growing inequality and threatening the existence of America's middle class.

For two decades, as the productivity of America's workers grew, their wages fell, then stagnated. Families sent more workers into the workforce—not to get ahead and earn their way to financial freedom, but in a struggle to stay even in the face of falling real wages. And just to keep from falling further behind, workers put in more and more hours on the job—so many, in fact, that today U.S. workers out-work their counterparts in other developed nations.

How has this happened?

1. America's manufacturing industries—historically the route to secure middle-class life for unskilled and semi-skilled workers—have lost jobs. Globalization has encouraged employers to move production from the United States to low-wage countries. Meanwhile, U.S. jobs in many sectors have been outsourced and shifted to lower wage, nonunion workforces. For unskilled workers, most job growth has been in the low-wage service sector.
2. In the 1980s and early 1990s, unemployment was high and the labor market featured a surplus of skilled workers. In their quest for fatter quarterly profit reports, employers dismantled job training programs, destroying entryways to jobs and career paths. Even today, when companies in certain industries acknowledge a severe shortage of skilled workers, employer training budgets continue to shrink—and corporations invest most of their shrunken training budgets in their most educated and highly paid workers.
3. Many secure, full-time jobs have been replaced with temporary, contingent and part-time positions—often employing the same workers who once held full-time jobs. Today, the largest employer in America is a temporary service, Manpower, Inc.

In short, too many employers have chosen to take a "low road" path through our increasingly global economy. They have decided to build their strategies for profit-making around low wages, few benefits, no job security and a polarized and disempowered workforce.

The low road, of course, is a flawed strategy. What we have now is an economy that depends on high levels of education and skills but doesn't provide them, that values family self-sufficiency but eliminates family-supporting benefits, that thrives on the creation of good jobs but rewards companies that move good jobs away—and that holds down wages so that too many workers can't even afford to buy the products they make.

While the low road may make a handful of people rich in the short term, it is not a lasting path to prosperity.

Nowhere is it written that this low road is the only path through the new economy. There is a choice. There is another way to meet the challenges of the 21st century—and that's to take the high road.On the high road, we invest in workers by providing education and training and opportunities for advancement. And we provide those opportunities to everyone, so no one is left behind.

On the high road, companies compete not by paying the lowest possible wages, but by offering the highest quality and value and innovation.

On the high road, workers have a voice in decisions about their jobs, and communities have a voice in decisions about their economic development.

On the high road, there are plenty of jobs to go around—not low-wage, dead-end jobs, but meaningful work with career ladders and rewards for good work and initiative.

The high road, in other words, takes us to a high-skill, high-wage economy. And that is precisely where we need to be.

How do we get America on the high road? The answer, I believe, lies in partnerships—partnerships between unions and employers, between industry groups and community groups, between workers and academic and political leaders, between foundations and government agencies and schools and colleges.

These are partnerships that unite stakeholders around a mission to boost their regional economies. They think big and act bold. They develop strategic plans—plans to preserve good jobs by rescuing and modernizing ailing industries, plans to convert low-wage jobs into high-paying family-sustaining jobs and plans to generate a steady supply of highly skilled workers to fill them. And then they rally the resources and expertise to execute those plans.

Of course, these partnerships can only succeed if unions play a major role. History shows, after all, that unions are most often the defining difference between a good job and a poor job. Union membership has proven to be the most effective way for workers to have a voice in their workplaces and in their future. And unions are uniquely positioned to be the catalysts—the ones that bring all of a community's players together around mutual job creation and job training goals, and that provide firsthand knowledge of what's happening to the job market and ideas about how to fix it.

Some may say that taking responsibility for how the economy works and getting involved in industry and business strategies go far beyond the traditional notion of what unions do. But in today's world, it's no longer possible to confine our role to that of collective bargaining or grievance handling. It's simply not enough to react to downsizing and layoffs with objections and protests. If workers are to have a voice in the new economy, unions must help create good jobs and develop the skills needed for those jobs—as well as making sure those jobs pay well.

But we also know we can't forge the high road without partners. If we get to the promised high-wage, high-skill economy, it will be because all of us—community groups and foundations, elected leaders and government agencies, businesses, vocational and technical schools and higher education institutions—helped lead the way.

It will take all of us working together to raise standards and expectations in our communities, to solve the problems of labor shortages and lagging productivity in our industries, to increase the skill and employment levels in our inner cities and to eliminate the fundamental inequalities and injustices in today's economy.

It will take all of us working together to redirect our public policies to create opportunities for lifelong learning and advancement for all workers, to pass living wage laws that will block the path to the low road, to make the Workforce Investment Act a useful tool in the fight for good jobs and wage standards and to make sure that people who move from welfare to work don't wind up with less and aren't stuck in dead-end jobs with no chance to get ahead.

When the AFL-CIO created the Working for America Institute in 1998, one of our priorities was to better understand emerging partnerships that brought together unions, employers, communities, foundations and government to create and retain good jobs with successful employers in strong communities. We call them "high road partnerships." They come in different shapes and sizes, utilize different tools and tactics and are at different stages of development. We believe they can be important tools in leading America on the right path through the global economy, so we charged the institute to identify the elements that make their success more likely, the barriers that stand in their way and the technical assistance that could expand their reach and effectiveness.

This High Road Partnerships Report is the result.

We encourage employers, representatives of all levels of government, community groups, foundations and all friends of working families to learn from these promising partnerships and to join today's unions on the high road path through the new economy.