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Choosing the High Road

Businesses face a choice about how to compete in today’s economy. They can concentrate chiefly on lowering the costs of their goods and services while improving their consistency, or “quality.” Or, while attending to those cost and quality concerns, they can concentrate chiefly on increasing their product’s distinctiveness and performance, for which customers are willing to pay a premium. Profits can be made on either route, but they have very different consequences for the communities in which those firms operate (cities, states and regions, nations).

The first strategy, which we call the “low road,” is associated with downward pressure on wages, increasing job insecurity, more outsourcing of work to low-wage regions, greater environmental damage, underinvestment in productive public goods, and resistance to public standards on private firm behavior. The second strategy, which we call the “high road,” is associated with higher and more equal wages, better labor relations, more environmentally sustainable practice, greater investment in productive public goods, and affirmative support for public standards on the private economy.

For society, the high road is clearly the better choice. But that is not the choice typically made in the U.S. In general, we keep the low road option available through relatively weak wage and benefit, environmental, and trade standards. And we haven’t supported the high road by investments in the public goods and targeted services that it needs to succeed – from education and training to other infrastructure, or modernization services for firm upgrading.

COWS' basic mission is to make the dangers of the low road strategy clearer to communities, and to work with interested stakeholders – business and labor, government and citizens – in making the high road choice easier to pursue. We do this through research, policy analysis, demonstration projects on high road reform, and evaluation and public education.

Learn more about COWS Director Joel Rogers, one of the nation's leading advocates of the "high road."