The Role of Labor Market Intermediaries in Promoting Employment Access and Mobility: A Supply- and Demand-Side Approach

Author: Laura Wolf-Powers

Dissertation School: Rutgers University

Abstract:

A major community development challenge of the new millennium is to build and strengthen career paths for low-income workers in growing occupations, especially the technology-intensive jobs that increasingly predominate in cities. In the past, skill training, career ladders, and advancement opportunities for entry-level workers often existed within large, vertically integrated firms. But because of industrial and labor market restructuring, firms today have less incentive to train workers or provide opportunities for upward mobility in-house; they have "externalized" recruitment and training to outside organizations, and the impacts of this are felt heavily by the less skilled. Labor market intermediaries (LMIs) such as temp agencies, training providers and labor unions fulfill many of the functions previously performed within firms’ internal labor markets. Research suggests that some LMIs help workers build multi-employer career paths for workers as well as matching them to jobs. Other LMIs, however, are argued to perpetuate "dead-end," low-wage work. Little systematic analysis has been done to evaluate how different LMIs’ affect the career prospects of less skilled workers; perhaps more significantly, policy makers know little about why firms choose to work with particular intermediaries, which is an important factor in developing successful models. The purposes of this dissertation are 1) to determine the factors influencing firms’ reliance on labor market intermediaries 2) to better understand how LMIs shape firms’ human resource choices and 3) to determine and document the conditions under which LMIs succeed in creating career paths for low-income entry-level workers.

The study focuses on specific LMIs – community colleges, labor unions, and for-profit and non-profit employment brokers – in three metropolitan regions, evaluating their relationships with firms and their contribution to career ladders in teledata installation and repair, a growing urban-based telecommunications sub-sector in which entry-level jobs – and opportunities for less-skilled entrants to advance to higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs – are plentiful. To test hypotheses about firms’ reliance on LMIs and the factors that help intermediaries promote career mobility for less-skilled workers, the researcher will use a three-stage methodology: a brief industry study of the teledata sector, a mail survey of teledata employers followed by semi-structured interviews, and an evaluative analysis of the intermediaries themselves, consisting of interviews and analysis of client and program data. The results of the research will enable conclusions about how and why firms choose to work with LMIs and how LMIs can promote career mobility as well as job access for less skilled, low-income workers. These conclusions will lead to policy recommendations for community and workforce development professionals who seek to build and strengthen career ladders for low-income workers in emerging jobs and occupations.

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