About This Guide

This tool kit is designed to explore the workforce challenges facing unionized advanced manufacturing and to familiarize the reader with a comprehensive set of resources that can be used to address these challenges. The tool kit includes an economic overview and an introduction to labor market research with a manufacturing focus, detailed case studies of exemplary labor-management partnerships that address those workforce challenges facing the sector,“how-to” checklists for partnerships that want to address those challenges, and a guide to resources that can be used to adapt promising practices to new settings.

The tool kit was first developed for use at an Advanced Manufacturing Workforce Strategies Forum held in April 2006 in Dallas Texas, and was released as a publication in November 2006. While you may want to download the PDF for the publication version of the tool kit, we hope that this website version will allow users to access those elements that are most useful in their own efforts to address these challenges. The index on the left will allow you to navigate through the different chapters of the tool kit to find what you need to get started.

We believe the tool kit will be a valuable resource not only in manufacturing, but for other sectors where issues such as upgrading the skills of incumbent workers, recruiting young workers, or serving workers with limited English proficiency need to be addressed. If you are a union, unionized employer, Workforce Investment Board or other workforce or economic development practitioner interested in forging a partnership to address a workforce challenge in the manufacturing sector or other setting. we would like to hear from you. You can reach us at info@workingforamerica.org.