Working Partnerships' economic analysis and research seeks to transform the discussion about the New Economy, exposing the problems of income inequality and the middle-class squeeze in order to open up a real discussion on how to create an economy that works for everyone. Just as the GI Bill opened up access to college for a generation, the growth of labor unions raised wages and benefits to build a strong middle class, and the mortgage interest deduction made it possible for millions of Americans to own their homes, so too in the new economy, we must develop public policies that seek to restore the American dream by building an economy capable of generating broadly shared prosperity.

Our analysis incorporates a focus on how this economic shift impacts particular groups of working people, including union members, immigrants, women, and contingent workers.

Current Projects

The Working Families Index

The Silicon Valley Economy

Working Partnerships’ research into Silicon Valley as the center of the “new economy” has three broad goals: to understand how current and future economic trends affect working families; to shift the terms of the media and policy debate over the state of the Silicon Valley economy; and to provide community members with the tools needed to transform their thinking about growth, economic development, and their own community involvement.

Silicon Valley’s close ties with high tech and global networks are both our economic strength and our weakness. The global economy has brought great benefits, but the manner in which globalization is now being exploited creates new problems that our society has yet to tackle, among them outsourcing, the shift to temporary and contingent work, loss of upward mobility within companies, and the “race to the bottom” for wages and working conditions. As a leader in the global economy, Silicon Valley is been hit first and hardest by these trends.

The 1990s brought unprecedented growth to the US economy, but working people often were left behind.  As the center of the tech boom, Silicon Valley developed a reputation as the land of milk and honey, where the streets were paved with microchips and everyone was a dot-com millionaire.

Yet this image excluded most of Silicon Valley’s residents: the teachers and restaurant workers, nurses and janitors, parents and retirees who were struggling to keep up in a region where the cost of making ends meet was higher than almost anywhere else.  San Jose and Santa Clara County became extreme examples of the movement of the United States towards an “hourglass economy”: an increasing division into wealthy and low income households, with the middle class being squeezed tighter and tighter.

Then came the bust – the 2001 recession.  The Santa Clara County economy was devastated, losing 20% of its job base, even more than the Bay Area as a whole.  Hundreds of thousands of families suffered as unemployment soared, wages stagnated, and even those who hung on to their jobs worried about the future.
Five years later, businesses are rebounding, sales and stock prices are back up, but business growth and increasing productivity have not brought back the jobs that we lost.  Middle-class and working families in Silicon Valley may well ask, “Economic growth? What growth?”

We have leapt from the hourglass economy to an economy shaped like an old-fashioned Victorian gown : small on top, squeezed ever tighter in the middle, and ballooning out at the bottom, as more and more families are pulled down by low wages, precarious employment, and the continuing high costs of housing, energy, health care and education.

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