Labor Market Intermediaries and Community Organizations

By the term "labor market intermediaries", we mean the full range of groups and organizations that operate outside the boundaries of individual firms. Their functions are to support the mobility of workers across jobs and the matching of workers to job opportunities, coordinate employers and/or labor-management joint efforts, provide training and educational services, or advocate for worker and/or family and community concerns. This is an illustrative, not exhaustive list, designed to make two simple points. The variety of intermediaries is expanding, and their importance as labor market institutions is growing, ranging from temporary help firms to recruiters in Silicon Valley and other tight labor markets, various family and work advisory services, cross-firm consortia, public and private training programs, and a host of Internet-based job placement services.

Equally impressive is the growth in the number and range of community groups and organizations engaged in promoting worker interests in community politics and worker advocacy activities. Here the boundary between "unions" and other groups gets increasingly blurred. The more than forty living-wage ordinances achieved through coalitions of labor organizations and community activists are a prime example.^[14] Another example is the new roles that central labor councils are taking. For example, the one in Silicon Valley runs the gamut from being a temporary help service to a training and education center to a political mobilizing force. Indeed, a key challenge for unions and community organizations lies in developing sustained coalitions that both last beyond any single political campaign and that transition to ongoing sources of power and support inside employment relationships.

It may seem ironic to be arguing, as I am here, that in today's global world the local community and labor market will become a more important arena and institutional environment for shaping work in the future. But this is exactly the locus in which family and work responsibilities are joined, where most dual-career couples search for opportunities in tandem with their partners, where opportunities for lifelong learning can be created and used most fully, and where the all-important social and professional networks are formed and sustained. Our history of policy and institutional innovation has strong localand state-level roots. We would do well to learn from this history and invest heavily in building and supporting the local infrastructures needed to give future workers and employers greater control over their destinies.

^[14]Giving Life to a Living Wage 1999. See also Uchitelle (1999).