Building a Two-Lane High Road: UNIONS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT in Western New York

Abstract

Unions in Western New York are expanding their economic development focus from the workplace to the regional economy, from their traditional emphasis on gaining and protecting high-quality jobs through collective bargaining to one that includes creating new high quality-jobs through innovative action. Reframed union horizons, like the resulting union-driven initiatives, are grounded in recent experience.In workplaces across the relatively deindustrialized landscape of the Buffalo Niagara region, unions and employers are working together to save jobs and gain market share for increasingly diverse products and services. Mutual gains approaches incorporate the interests and the ideas of workers, unions, and managers into continuous improvement of productivity. For over two decades, labor–management cooperation at the firm level has been driven by survival, and these partnerships have provided the best protection for good jobs of varied occupations.Seasoned by such collaborative workplace experience, unions and business leaders in western New York are adding to their tool kit in building a high road for the region’s economic future. Strategies to secure the best of tomorrow’s jobs are beginning to replace the defensive practices of years past. On the labor side, a coalition known as the Economic Development Group (EDG) leads the union innovation.EDG dates to 1999, when union officials met to consider what their roles would be in the efforts of a newly formed private–public association, Buffalo Niagara Enterprise (BNE), to attract private investment to the region. The founding meetings of EDG, facilitated by Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR), generated consensus on a vision for the region’s future and on practical economic strategies that unions could pursue to realize their vision.