U.S. productivity remains the highest in the world, and U.S. performance in job generation is the envy of OECD Europe. Over the past quarter century, however, the essentially market-driven “American model” has also generated enormous increases in income inequality, real wage losses for large portions of the working population, and little economy-wide improvement in rates of productivity growth. In response to both the income and productivity concerns, much recent policy reform in the U.S. has focused on enhancing the skill sets of workers, and on improving the effectiveness of U.S. training systems in reaching “frontline” (production and non-supervisory) workers. Such efforts at building a more advanced and satisfying human capital system, however, suffer from uneven employer demand for training, low levels of employer organisation, and weak labour and community involvement – which together have the effect of limiting the scope, leverage, and precision of policy intervention. After reviewing this background, this paper considers a series of efforts (largely independent of government) to promote new sorts of labour market organisation to deal with these problems. Typically organised on a sectoral basis within regional labour markets, such organisations may play a growing role in an ever more “devolved” U.S. labour market regulatory system