Resource of the Week: Good Jobs First
by Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Despite what you may think because of this resource’s name, it is not a job hunting site nor does it provide any career-oriented information. For me, it was one of those serendipitous finds, which I stumbled across while looking for something else. I stopped to browse for awhile, was amazed at the depth and breadth of information here, and thought that it deserved some attention.

Good Jobs First is a national policy resource center for grassroots groups and public officials, promoting corporate and government accountability in economic development and smart growth for working families. We provide timely, accurate information on best practices in state and local job subsidies, and on the many ties between smart growth and good jobs. Good Jobs First works with a very broad spectrum of organizations, providing research, training, communications and consulting assistance.

There are a few different ways to navigate this site. For a good overview, I’d recommend browsing via the three main focuses in the center of the home page:
+ Accountable Development
+ Smart Growth, Good Jobs
+ Corporate Subsidy Watch

Some of the same general resources are located under all three headings — e.g, a glossary, a searchable Directory of Allied Organizations (e.g, those doing work in Accountable Development, Smart Growth and/or Tax & Budget). But you’ll also find items that are unique to the focus of each section, such as research guides, training materials, and a table of the largest subsidy deals, “drawn from the annual lists of Top Deals published by Site Selection magazine in its May issues from 1999 through 2005.”

Other items of interest on the site:
+ A directory of periodicals related to accountable development and smart growth.
+ Links to the economic development departments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia
+ An archive of reports and original publications
+ A blbiography of relevant books, reports and articles by a variety of orgnizations (most with links to full text)
+ A directory of relevant web links, with brief annotations

One key affiliate of Good Jobs First is its Corporate Research Project, “a non-profit center that assists community, environmental and labor organizations in researching and analyzing companies and industries.” While it does most of its work for specific organizations and campaigns, it does make a few reports available online, such as Profiles of 12 companies that have received large contracts for cleanup and reconstruction work related to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (PDF; 558 KB). You’ll definitely want to have a look at the guide to online corporate research. Also, tucked away here is a publication with an intriguing title:

The Dirt Diggers Digest is an online newsletter for corporate researchers working for labor unions, environmental groups, public interest organizations and other progressive entities. Each issue of the Digest reports on new sources for information that may be of use to such researchers. Also covered are trends in corporate and government disclosure policies and practices. The Digest is published roughly ten times a year.

In addition to an archive of past issues, there’s an extensive alphabetical index of resources, with links, that have been discussed in the newsletter. (Big-time wow!) The editor’s e-mail address is available for those who would like a (free) subscription.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 1:01 am and is filed under Resource of the Week, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.