From manpower policy to workforce development: The states, national business agendas, and United States employment policy, 1960--2000

This dissertation examines the effects of the mediation of global capital by state-level governments on national employment policy in the U.S. It demonstrates that mesocorporatist arrangements at the subnational level play a role in shaping national business agendas, which in turn affect the direction of national policy. The current literature explains the direction of U.S. employment policy in terms of short-term initiatives of Congress and the executive branch, or long-term institutional constraints on the American political system. Neither approach is adequate for understanding policy changes that collectively are called “workforce development”: a switch to the private firm as the client of government programs rather than the unemployed individual, a new active role for business in policy planning, increased power of state and local workforce development boards, and greater emphasis on gathering and distributing labor market information.; The source of these changes is in state-level economic responses and political arrangements. Faced with fierce economic competition from other American states in the 1980s, state-level economic development agencies exhausted common tax incentives, and turned to demand-side or industrial policy strategies to attract industry. In their search for unique selling points for their states, states formulated a role for government in producing quality workforces. Working closely with business to match skills with job openings, they put workforce development on the political agenda of business organizations. In the process, they redefined the problem addressed by employment policy from unemployment to competitiveness, a reframing that was taken up by national business organizations. At the national level, business developed this agenda and successfully pushed for its adoption over alternatives that viewed workforce training as an anti-poverty measure. The theoretical contribution of the dissertation is to show how interest groups mediate between levels of government. The approach developed here can be applied to other federal systems and international governance structures.