The Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership

Developing a highly qualified workforce for the Milwaukee metropolitan area

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The Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership (WRTP) is a program that serves the needs of Milwaukee-area employers, unions, and community residents. Its purpose is three-fold: to help local companies modernize plants and adopt new workplace practices; to upgrade the skills of current workers; and to recruit, train, and mentor new employees.

Why Milwaukee? The 1980s was a decade of devastation for Wisconsin’s largest city; in just ten years, Milwaukee County lost fully a third of its traditional industrial base. Unemployment and poverty rates rose sharply, union membership plummeted, and laid-off workers — many of whom had few transferable skills — could not find new jobs. In the meantime, companies that stayed in the area began adopting new technologies that their employees lacked the know-how to use. If firms were going to modernize, the local workforce would have to be brought up to speed.

That’s where the WRTP came in. In the early 1990s, local labor leaders brought together employers and unions to address common problems: How to keep companies competitive and productive? How to provide them with skilled staffs? The partnership began with just a dozen large unionized firms. Today, the WRTP consists of 125 worksite-partners covering some 65,000 employees.

At first, the WRTP trained its sights on the manufacturing sector, still vital to Milwaukee’s economic recovery in spite of its decline. By the second half of the 1990s, only five percent of the area’s job growth was in manufacturing, but fully 25 percent of job openings were in manufacturing! The WRTP took up the challenge by providing technical assistance to help firms stay competitive, enhancing workers’ skills through technical training, and preparing new employees to fill newly available jobs.

More recently, the WRTP has branched out into other sectors. In the summer of 1997, it began receiving support from the Milwaukee Jobs Initiative (MJI), a program set up to help central-city residents find employment in an era of welfare reform. (The MJI is funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.) With the MJI’s assistance, the WRTP has established employer-union partnerships in the hospitality, health care, construction, technology, and transportation fields.

The results have been impressive. Between 1995 and 2000, the WRTP’s worksite-partners invested more than $100 million in education and training. That investment has paid off in the form of higher productivity, higher wages, and the creation of some 6,000 new jobs. In addition, the WRTP has placed more than 1,300 community residents in jobs — good jobs that offer an average starting wage of more than $10 per hour, plus health insurance, pension, and other benefits. In their first year on the job, workers showed a jump in earnings from $9,000 to $23,000! About 75 percent were still working after that first year, well over half of them in the same or a better job. Of workers placed in jobs under MJI programs, 90 percent are people of color, and about half received some form of public assistance before becoming gainfully employed.

To reach even more prospective employees, the WRTP is strengthening its ties to community-based organizations. It has also joined with the YWCA of Greater Milwaukee (one of several private agencies administering Wisconsin’s welfare program) to create a state-of-the-art Workforce Training Center, where trainees learn to install plumbing or electricity, pour concrete, process bank transactions, or care for patients in nursing homes.

While the WRTP is not alone in linking employers and workers, its approach is unique. Unlike conventional job training programs, it prepares people for actual jobs that participating employers need to fill. And in contrast with traditional staffing agencies, the WRTP operates on the principle that workers deserve family-sustaining wages and benefits, not poorly paid part-time or temporary jobs.

The WRTP starts out with the premise that, unless employers can operate productively and profitably, strategies for economic revival won’t succeed. Unions and community residents can and do play a vital role in helping employers to compete. But companies that stay on top by taking the “low road” — that is, by cutting wages or scaling back local investment — won’t bring our cities back. As the WRTP has demonstrated, the “high road” to recovery is a partnership — not a one-way street.