If you spend enough time in this library, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act will eventually appear everywhere—not as background information, but as the reason why some records in this archive end where they do. For visitors, WIOA is more than just another piece of federal legislation. Before delving into the actual functions of the Act, it is important to acknowledge that it is the law that rewrote the organization behind this very website.
On July 22, 2014, President Obama signed WIOA into law, superseding the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, which had initially established the Workforce Information Council. The new law was designed to align education, training, and employment programs for three groups: young people between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four who face obstacles to education or stable employment; dislocated workers whose industries had moved on without them; and adults seeking to increase their earning potential. The majority of that assistance is provided through American Job Centers, also known as One-Stop Centers, which house training funds, career counseling, and support services like childcare or transportation assistance.
Section 308 of WIOA, which modified the Wagner-Peyser Act and essentially reorganized the Workforce Information Council into the Workforce Information Advisory Council, or WIAC, is easy to overlook unless you have studied the history of this council. It was more of a widening than a rebranding. WIAC’s charter calls for input from training providers, economic development organizations, national business organizations, labor federations, and local workforce boards, while WIC was primarily based on state labor market information directors. Although the table grew, the mission remained largely unchanged, examining labor market and workforce data and advising the Secretary of Labor on how to improve it.
The way that transition actually took place has a subtle bureaucratic quality that is almost cinematic. Co-chaired by Phil Baker of Nebraska and Michael Horrigan of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, WIC’s federal and state members met for the last time in Indianapolis on May 22, 2015, shortly after the National BLS LMI Conference. The impact of WIOA on the labor market information system and the impending transition to WIAC were the main topics of discussion that day. The original website for this council was scheduled to be deactivated in a matter of months. The peculiarity of an agency formally discussing its own sunset on the agenda and then shutting down a few months later is difficult to ignore.
Since then, WIAC has been functioning in that capacity, holding regular meetings, frequently in Washington, to examine what the Department of Labor refers to as the workforce and labor market information system and to submit written recommendations, including suggestions for a mandatory two-year improvement plan, to the Secretary. The Secretary is required by law to reply in writing to those recommendations. It’s a slower, more procedural form of influence than enacting legislation, but it serves the same fundamental purpose for which this council was established: ensuring that the data supporting workforce decisions is reliable.
The older materials in this library are not rendered obsolete by any of this. If anything, it clarifies why it’s valuable to have. The organization that eventually became WIOA produced the benefits surveys, training manuals, and meeting notes that are archived here. The questions they were attempting to address—namely, how to measure a labor market accurately enough for states to act on it—are still being addressed by WIAC. Comparing the records of the old council and the mandate of the new council reveals more about how this work actually progresses than either could by itself.
