A specific type of federal agency has a direct influence on the data that states use to plan job training programs, distribute funding, and monitor whether any of it is truly effective, but it seldom makes headlines or goes viral on social media. That type of organization is the Workforce Information Advisory Council, or WIAC as it is known in policy circles. It provides the U.S. Secretary of Labor with advice on how well the nation’s labor market and workforce information systems are operating, and it does so with very little public notice.
Data specialists, economists, state labor officials, and workforce development professionals make up the council, which is officially a federal advisory committee. Its mandate, which is based on the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, is to assess the efficiency of labor market data collection, sharing, and utilization by the Department of Labor and individual states. The stakes are high, but that may sound administrative to the point of boredom. This information is used by local workforce areas to identify regions, establish performance standards, and create regional plans that dictate the actual distribution of federal workforce funding. Job seekers who are unaware that anything went wrong will be affected if the data is inaccurate or if the systems that generate it become stale.
It’s difficult to ignore how much of this type of policy infrastructure goes unnoticed by the general public. The WIAC makes official recommendations, evaluates the efficacy of the system, and convenes according to a schedule set forth in its charter, which is periodically renewed through the Federal Register. These are not moments of drama. However, given the slow pace of modernization of federal data systems, the council’s role in pushing that process seems more important than its profile would imply. Workforce development professionals believe that there is a greater discrepancy between the current labor market data and the actual state of the modern economy than most officials openly admit.
There is more to workforce data than just job numbers and unemployment rates. It’s a multi-layered picture of who is employed, in what industries, at what skill levels, and where there are the biggest gaps between available labor and open positions. States build their workforce systems in part on this foundation, and the timeliness and dependability of that foundation determine the quality of their planning. The WIAC has advocated for performance metrics that represent actual results rather than checkbox compliance, as well as improved data exchange between federal and state systems. It’s safe to say that it’s still unclear if those suggestions are fully implemented.
An intriguing parallel is provided by European Works Councils, which operate under a different legal tradition. These organizations serve to promote organized communication between management and workers in multinational corporations, guaranteeing that workers are not merely informed after decisions are made. The American model, which is based on advisory committees such as WIAC, operates at a different level: federal rather than firm-level, advisory rather than participatory. Both strategies are part of a larger belief that executive intuition should not be the only factor considered when making decisions that impact employees. The mechanisms are different. The fundamental idea is the same.
It’s evident that the current policy council environment, at least in the workforce sector, is carrying out tasks that are seldom noticed until something goes wrong, such as when data is out-of-date, systems don’t communicate, or funding ends up in the wrong place because the underlying analysis missed a regional shift in employment. The unglamorous reality of bodies like WIAC is that their worth is primarily apparent in hindsight. How frequently they appear in press releases isn’t the true indicator. It concerns whether the workforce system improves significantly over time in terms of helping those who rely on it.
