Strategy Two: Real Self-Sufficiency Standards

A high road strategy for your local labor market area should include setting a realistic self-sufficiency standard. 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, child care 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.

Once adopted, self-sufficiency standards can also be used to direct public resources to good union training programs. At the very least, a self-sufficiency standard can be used to keep public resources from supporting training providers and employers who don't invest in the well-being of their workers or their communities. Workforce areas may also incorporate the standard into performance measurements and benchmarks, either evaluating the overall performance of the public system in moving customers toward economic self-sufficiency or setting specific performance goals such as post-placement wages.

Again, the Institute can be helpful to WIB labor representatives in implementing this strategy. To get started, you may want to read the Institute's Action Brief entitled Self-Sufficiency and Good Jobs: Setting Standards for Wages and Eligibility for Services Under the Workforce Investment Act at /actionbriefs/PDF/SelfSufficiency.pdf.

Additional information on available self-sufficiency measures in your state may be available on a website sponsored by Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW) at http://www.sixstrategies.org. Extensive information on how to create a family budget is also available from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) at www.epinet.org under the issue guide on "poverty and family budgets".

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