Jobs and Skills Publications

Greening Wisconsin’s Workforce: Training, Recovery, and the Clean Energy Economy tackles the question of how Wisconsin can best pursue the greener and more equitable promise of the clean energy economy. It looks at how the state can use Recovery Act dollars and a first-rate technical college system to ensure that the emerging green economy benefits Wisconsin’s working families.

This report, based on joint work by COWS (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and the Powell Center for Construction & Environment (University of Florida), suggests a way to get at least policy-level answers to the question of what kinds of jobs result from investment in building energy efficiency (EE). Program designers, armed with better knowledge of the building stock, energy costs, specific EE measures likely to be supported, and other local data, will be able to provide much more robust estimates as they move toward program implementation.

Government reformers in the United States have recently focused on running public agencies more like private firms by emphasizing economic rewards, such as merit pay. Meanwhile, a body of literature has grown that indicates that public servants respond to factors that financially based reward initiatives tend to ignore.

Held October 29, 2009, in Madison, Wisconsin, this publication provides a brief summary of the discussion and findings of the Women, Jobs and Wisconsin’s Green Economy Public Policy Roundtable. COWS was a key participant and the Proceedings document many of our views on the Green Economy.

In what will play a major role in Wisconsin’s economic recovery, more than 426,000 “middle-skill” job openings — those that require more than a high school diploma, but less than a four-year degree — are projected for the state by 2016, concludes this study by The Workforce Alliance (TWA) and the Skills2Compete-Wisconsin campaign, of which of COWS is a lead partner.

The report, which tracks Wisconsin’s jobs at the middle-skill level, notes that funds from federal economic recovery legislation, especially the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, are expected to create more than one million new jobs across the country and that Wisconsin has a number of exemplary middle-skill education and training opportunities. These opportunities must continue to keep up with the anticipated demand for middle-skill workers.

Skills2Compete-Wisconsin believes every Wisconsinite should have access to education or training past high school — leading to a technical college degree or diploma, occupational credential, industry certification, or one’s first two years of college — to be pursued at whatever point and pace makes sense for individual workers and industries.

Developed by COWS for Regional Industry Skills Education (RISE), Key Middle-Skill Opportunities in Wisconsinprovides a detailed look at projected job opportunities and wages in well-paying occupations that typically do not require a four-year college degree.

Developed by COWS for Regional Industry Skills Education (RISE), this report breaks down demographically those individuals who could use higher skills and better wages.

The State of Working Wisconsin – Update 2009 gives a snapshot of the effects of the recession on Wisconsin workers and their families, and reports on other key trends.

Across the United States, growing numbers of employers are breaking, bending, or evading long-established laws and standards designed to protect workers, from the minimum wage to job safety rules to the right to organize. This “gloves-off economy,” no longer confined to a marginal set of sweatshops and fly-by-night small businesses, is sending shock waves into every corner of the low-wage — and sometimes not so low-wage — labor market. What can be done to reverse this dangerous trend?

This report, based on the book The Gloves-Off Economy: Labor Standards at the Bottom of America’s Labor Market (a Labor and Employment Relations Association volume published by Cornell University Press), provides a comprehensive yet compact summary of gloves-off practices, the workers who are affected by them, and strategies for enforcing workplace standards. The editors, four prominent labor scholars including COWS’ Associate Director Laura Dresser, have brought together economists, sociologists, labor attorneys, union strategists, and other experts to offer varying perspectives on both the problem and the creative, practical solutions currently being developed in a wide range of communities and industries. Bernhardt, Boushey, Dresser, and Tilly and the volume’s 18 other authors combine rigorous analysis with a stirring call to renew worker protections.

This report evaluates Madison Area Technical College‘s (MATC’s) Science/Math Bridge, a pilot initiative to increase opportunities for lower-skill individuals to access – and succeed in – the college’s science-based postsecondary programs.