Counseling Customers About Income Goals, Career Paths and Work Supports

• Seattle/King County Workforce Development Council, WA
• Chicago Workforce Board and Illinois Department of Employment Security, IL
• Maine Jobs Council
• Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board, PA

Overview

The Maine Jobs Council’s 2005-2007 State Plan places a system-wide focus on promoting employment and skill training opportunities that provide “livable” wages leading to worker economic security. The six-point plan includes establishing state level policies that target career development and advancement credentials for low income adults and entry level incumbent workers. The focus will be on training and job placement opportunities with employers in growing industries who offer their workers training and advancement opportunities through a clearly defined “career ladder”.

The State Plan mandates that procedures be put in place to fully inform low-income customers about temporary work supports and that expands access to support services such as child care and transportation. The Plan also includes increasing the number of job placements that provide access to health care benefits.
At the same time, the Plan established self-sufficiency benchmarks. Through a focused planning process, the Council set a wage standard at one fixed dollar amount applicable to all individuals on a statewide basis.

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History

The Maine Center for Economic Policy released a report in 2004 that analyzed the status of Maine families’ ability to reach economic stability within the current labor market. The report found that the gap between those who are well off and those with lower income was widening. Poverty had risen and incomes were falling while costs were rising. Already engaged in discussions about how to improve the quality of workforce development services in the state, the MJC used the findings of the report to help guide them in their own planning and build on the momentum created by the release of the report.
The Maine Jobs Council (MJC) concurred with the report’s observations that it is not enough to provide Maine workers with access to jobs. Rather, the MJC agreed that the goal should be to ensure workers have a chance to become economically stable. This notion converged as the central element in MJC’s planning process. In refocusing its goals, MJC placed an emphasis on career ladders for low-income job seekers.

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Partners and Funding

In 2004, the Maine Jobs Council began a planning process to establish a new set of goals that would focus on the current and emerging workforce development needs of the state. Additionally, the Maine Jobs Council wanted to take a proactive stance in anticipation of the completion of the WIA 5-year strategic plan and looming WIA reauthorization. The WIA Strategic Plan development team included the Bureau of Unemployment Compensation, Division of Labor Market Services, Bureau of Rehabilitation Services. Departments of Education and Economic and Community Development, Aroostook County Action Program, Coastal Economic Development Corporation, Western Maine Community Action, Training Resource Center and the Training and Development Corporation.

To ensure that the WIA Strategic Plan Modification had broad-based input and support, the Maine Jobs Council consulted with numerous stakeholders, including the Local Workforce Boards, and strategic WIA partners and collaborators. The Plan modification process also solicited local level service provider input from the Career Center management team, local adult education agencies and key state and local community-based organizations. Ultimately the Plan came to reflect the interests of a diverse group of stakeholders who sought to align the state's economic vision with the needs of the workforce and the business community.

Challenges

The most significant challenge was creating a common understanding among partners and staff on how the workforce system can effectively promote self-sufficiency/living wages through strategies that encourage income growth such as providing economic literacy training and developing career plans that include wage progression. The MJC is addressing this through statewide outreach, education, and data collection efforts.

To date, the Maine Jobs Council has set livable wage/self-sufficiency benchmarks at a fixed dollar amount applied to all individuals on a statewide basis. They are promoting local/regional self-sufficiency standards as guidelines for setting wage progression goals. The challenge will be to identify a set of common tools, such as a statewide budget calculator, and to augment existing counseling tools with high level of training and education of workforce system staff within the CareerCenters and beyond.

Maine Jobs Council is committed to engaging the business community as a partner in the effort to move workers toward self-sufficiency. While this has proven challenging, Maine Jobs Council is successfully developing approaches to engage businesses and to present issues in a manner that is responsive and not alienating to employers interests. A report published by the Office of Policy and Legal Analysis of the Maine Legislature provides the Council provides some possible solutions to taking the burden off business to be exclusively responsible for ensuring that Maine workers have access to livable wages. Recommendations in the report include expanding the Maine state earned income tax credit, increasing access to affordable child care and greater access to health care. Among the more challenging aspects of ensuring that workers earn livable wages include increasing the state minimum wage and including the payment of livable wages in the state contracting process.

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Keys to Successful Implementation

A broad goal of the Maine Jobs Council is to refocus the state’s workforce development system to embrace a livable wage framework. They plan to begin by focusing on three key areas:

• Outreach : Help customers understand the concept of a livable wage and the impact of training employment decisions on one’s ability to provide for themselves and their families.
• Education : Teach job seekers to develop income growth strategies that take into account individual and family budget needs and to set incremental and ultimate goals.
• Work Supports : Promote access to income supports for low-wage workers engaged in training or pursuing career mobility.
• Data Collection and Evaluation : Implement strategies (outreach, education, basic budget calculator) to record and evaluate impact that the workforce system providers can have on individuals.

The Maine Jobs Council decided it would not promote the attainment of livable wages as a performance standard at this point. Instead, MJC put several other strategies in place first. The MJC created a set of tools for businesses and jobseekers to increase their understanding of the impact that setting sustainable wage goals can have on promoting the economic stability of the community. MJC is incorporating living wage conversations into counseling and other interactions with customers. The MJC believes that if they focus their customer services on improving customer understanding, skills and planning, they will get the result they want, and their wage performance measures will improve substantially as a consequence.

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Model Materials

• Maine WIA 2005 - 2007 State Plan: Self-Sufficiency-Focused Excerpts
  [DOC, 79KB]
• Key objectives identified in the 2005 - 2007 State Plan
  [DOC, 30KB]

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