High Road Strategy Center

Jobs and Skills Publications

Below is a list of our reports related to jobs and skills, in descending order by year published. Explore other topics here and all High Road Strategy Center reports here.

  • Bernhardt, A., L. Dresser, and E. Hatton. Moving Hotels to the High Road: Strategies That Help Workers and Firms Succeed. COWS, 2003.

    This report is about model solutions for the hospitality industry, and how they can be built. Based on detailed background research, hundreds of hours of interviews, discussions, and site visits at eight hotels in four different cities,  a comprehensive picture of this critical industry — not only how it looks right now, but also its potential to be an even stronger sector that offers better career opportunities — is shown.

    This project was supported by the Rockefeller and Russell Sage Foundations.

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  • ,. Building Quality Child Care Jobs: Model Work Standards in Action. COWS, 2003.

    Model Work Standards are intended as a quality assessment tool to be used alongside the other previously established measures to ensure that both children and adults involved in child care enjoy quality experiences. The central goal of the Model Work Standards is to achieve improvements in job quality by creating a supportive work environment, increasing shared decision making and communication, fostering teamwork and cooperation, and encouraging empowerment among child care workers.

    In this report, cases are used to show how the Model Work Standards provide positive effects across the board for centers and family providers.

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  • Hatton, E. Caring About Caregivers: Reducing Turnover of Frontline Health Care Workers in South Central Wisconsin. COWS, 2003.

    Focusing on frontline caregivers in nursing homes in the South Central Wisconsin region, this report is a follow-up to the 1999 report, extending the earlier investigation to a six-county area that includes Columbia, Dane, Dodge, Jefferson, Marquette, and Sauk Counties.

    South Central Wisconsin is home to more than 10,000 frontline caregivers in nursing homes, home health agencies, and other sectors of the region’s diverse and dynamic health care industry. In this report, we rely on data for the region’s nursing homes to investigate the challenges and correlates of turnover among frontline caregivers.

    Documents include the Full Report and Summary.

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  • ,. Raising the Floor: Who Would Benefit From a Minimum Wage Increase in Wisconsin. COWS, 2003.

    COWS investigates the effects of raising the minimum wage in Wisconsin. Since the most recent state legislative proposal would have raised Wisconsin’s wage floor to $6.80 per hour, we use that as the benchmark in our report. This report relies on data and analyses provided by the Economic Policy Institute.

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  • Dresser, L., and J. Rogers. The State of Working Wisconsin: Update 2003. COWS, 2003.

    Every two years, COWS produces The State of Working Wisconsin.

    Relying on data provided by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), COWS offers “The State of Working Wisconsin: Update 2003” as a brief investigation of the effects of the continuing economic slowdown on workers in the state.

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  • Rogers, J., M. Vidal, J. Whitford, and J. Zeitlin. Challenges & Options for Wisconsin Component Manufacturing: Final AMP Report to the Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership. COWS, 2003.

    This report summarizes research on Wisconsin component manufacturing undertaken during the recent period (June 2003). The component manufacturing industry group, heavily concentrated in the Upper Midwest, supplies parts and subsystems to the leading national end-user manufacturing industries, including autos; farm, mining, and construction equipment; and electrical appliances. As a sub-sector of manufacturing, it stands in the value chain between machine tools and the large end-user industries it feeds and provides a base. Its critical location makes it an exemplary nexus of more general pressures on U.S. manufacturing, and of great strategic importance in their resolution. Our research has examined those pressures and firm strategy of response in three areas: the relation of supplier firms and their customer OEMs (original equipment manufacturers); intermediary institutions within industry; and public policy.

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  • ,. Honoring Work in Wisconsin: State Policies to Promote Self-Sufficiency for Working Families. COWS, 2003.

    This report is a direct look at the problems that confront Wisconsin’s working poor families, and good information about how some of those problems can be solved.

    The Annie E. Casey Foundation used the release of five state-level reports to bring working poor families into the spotlight of state and national policy.

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  • ,. The Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership: Developing a Highly Qualified Workforce for the Milwaukee Metropolitan area. COWS, 2003, p. 2.

    COWS report on the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership (WRTP) and its history in Milwaukee.

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  • ,. Hotel Workers and Industry Change: Improving Competitiveness and Working Conditions in the Hospitality Sector. COWS, 2003.

    “Hotel Workers and Industry Change” is a research project of COWS. Its goal is to understand how industry restructuring has affected hotel workers — and how hotels can stay competitive while providing secure, family-supporting jobs. COWS researchers are assessing the impact of this restructuring on workers, and investigating how to mitigate its negative effects.

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  • Dresser, L., and J. Rogers. “Part of the Solution: Emerging Workforce Intermediaries In the United States”. Governing Work and Welfare in a New Economy: European and American Experiments, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 266-91.

    Chapter 10, in editors Jonathan Zeitlin and David Trubek’s Governing Work and Welfare in a New Economy: European and American Experiments.

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