High Road Network Strategic Agenda

Why Adopt A Strategic Agenda?

• Without a strategic view of the labor market, Workforce Investment Boards can become mired in compliance or administrative details around the use of Workforce Investment Act (WIA) funding.  WIB members should be taking action to assure that their Board meets the promise of WIA in playing a strategic role in guiding their local economy.
  
  
• Adopted at the first annual meeting in June 2006, the High Road Network agenda is designed to help WIB labor representatives and their allies promote 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 board members to learn more about their regional economies and assure that their board uses public resources to set the kind of job quality that working families need.

Board Member’s Role

• In the pages that follow on each “plank” of the strategic agenda, we focus on the role of an individual board member in moving the strategy.  It is important that progressive members understand that they can use their positions on state and local workforce boards to advance a high road working families’ agenda while also blocking low-road strategies and practices.
  
  
• In the case of labor representatives, this is important in fulfilling the member’s statutory role as the voice of all workers and job seekers in the WIA system.

Elements of the Strategic Agenda

Information on additional agenda items will be added to this site as soon as they are available.  Click on the links below for explanation of each element of the strategic agenda and guides for board members to move the agenda in their communities.

• HIGH ROAD COMMUNITY AUDITS
• SELF SUFFICIENCY STANDARDS
• SUBSIDY ACCOUNTABILITY
• MEETING THE NEEDS OF SPECIFIC POPULATIONS
  • LIMITED ENGLISH PROFICIENT WORKERS
  • RETURNING VETERANS
  • INCUMBENT WORKERS
• SCHOOL-TO-WORK ALIGNMENT

Progress to date

• The first three agenda items were the subject of a 2003 survey conducted by the Working for America Institute.  The survey assessed the extent to which the nation’s workforce boards where using three critical techniques – community audits, self-sufficiency standards, and subsidy accountability – to raise community standards.
  
  
  • The results of the survey were published in a report entitled OFF TO A GOOD START: A Report on High Road Workforce Investment Board Policies and Practices.  The title was chosen to reflect the progress that boards were making in utilizing these techniques and the broad policy discretion they are given in WIA to raise community standards and to put the public workforce system on the high road.
    
    
  • WIB members who embrace the elements of the strategic agenda can use these findings to demonstrate that these policies are being used elsewhere in the country and that their board will be joining a growing group of high road boards if they adopt elements of the strategic agenda.
    
    
• The AFL-CIO Working for America Institute is in the process of conducting a 2006 WIB survey, which collects additional information on the issue of setting and using realistic self-sufficiency standards, along with collecting new information on policies and practices on serving limited English proficient workers.  Findings will be published later this year.