Take the High Road on Economic Development

The High Road promotes high-wage, high-productivity, worker-friendly economic development.  Our goals include such items as targeted training, access to health care, affordable housing, a living wage and an adequate social safety net for our working families.

Building such basics is an investment in our economy, and experience and analysis shows that this type of social spending has an eventual payback far exceeding original costs. We know that a progressive infrastructure takes resources, and that economic development can also mean community, environmental and human development. 

We’ve seen the sights on the low road, where firms wield the power and reap the benefits of public resources, giving little in return.  The low road is dotted with crumbling schools, abandoned buildings, poorly planned transportation systems, unemployment and job insecurity, and a profound lack of corporate accountability. Workers who live there are considered interchangeable, and worker skill development is driven by price competition to the lowest common denominator.  Low roads tend to stretch all the way  from the central city to remote suburbs, where industry flocks toward abatements and away from declining cities all the while building new buildings and highways.   

So where’s the high road?    It is where business sees high-skilled labor as an asset, and ties its own economic health to the health of the community.  It is where the public and private meet to find and improve existing resources so that enterprises can sustain themselves more efficiently, rather than following the tear-down build-up tear-down cycles of the low-road.  It is where collaborations between industry and workers, planners and researchers seek first to revitalize communities abandoned by business, reduce sprawl, and invest in public goods like education, transportation systems and infrastructure.  It’s where quality production and a skilled workforce make profits, instead of low costs and downsizing. 

The red box to your right houses the best practices for taking the high road to worker-friendly economic development.  Start the journey.  There is a choice

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