Too many jobs in the US simply do not provide what workers need to support their families and build stable lives. Workers often face low pay, unpredictable schedules, insufficient benefits, dangerous working conditions, and few opportunities to advance. Addressing these job quality challenges — fixing work — is essential to building a fairer and stronger economy that works for everyone and creates shared prosperity among businesses and workers. While organized labor has been and continues to be foundational to the work of improving job quality, over the last few decades, we have seen a variety of organizations join this effort.

To better understand this emerging field of job quality practice, the Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program interviewed 22 practitioners across sectors from around the country who are leading efforts to improve work. Their organizations ranged from worker centers and labor unions to community development financial institutions and workforce development organizations. Our interviews explored how they define job quality, the motivations behind their work, what strategies and tactics they use to improve jobs, how issues of equity appear in their work, and the challenges they face.

In this report, Fixing Work: Lesson from Job Quality Practitioners, we make the case for why job quality work is so important, present insights and lessons learned from the practitioners we interviewed, and offer recommendations to investors and practitioners about how to engage in and support job quality efforts. We hope this paper helps job quality practitioners improve upon their work and inspires others working to improve economic opportunity to find a way to contribute to building an economy where all jobs are good jobs.

Job quality is vital not only for workers, but also for small businesses and communities. Yet too many jobs today miss the mark on one of the key characteristics of a good job: providing enough pay to live on. Only 56% of full-time workers in the United States make enough money to cover their families basic needs. This problem is particularly acute at small businesses. Nearly 60% of low-wage workers work at businesses with fewer than 100 employees, and 35% of low-wage workers work at micro-businesses with fewer than 10 employees. Small businesses also struggle to address other characteristics of a good job, like providing adequate benefits, stable scheduling, and a positive work culture.

Recognizing this context, in 2022, the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program (EOP) launched the Shared Success project, funded by the Gates Foundation. The project supports 11 community development financial institutions (CDFIs) across the country to integrate job quality support into their small business services with the goal of improving job quality for small business employees and building business resilience. Three years later, EOP has seen how grantees have used innovative approaches to recruit, advise, and incentivize small businesses to improve job quality.

In this event recording, leaders of CDFIs, their small business clients, philanthropic supporters, and other experts discuss the lessons learned from Shared Success, ranging from practical tips about strategies for engaging small businesses in discussions of job quality to the range of job quality improvements CDFI clients helped their businesses make.

Developed as part of the Shared Success Demonstration, this tool offers guidance for business advisors at CDFIs on how to have conversations with small business owners on job quality improvements. It centers business value and includes a variety of information and resources to assist business owners in addressing poor job quality.

For a guide of resources that complement this tool, see our topic guide on Small Business Job Quality Advising.

As part of the Good Jobs, Good Business Toolkit this guide demonstrates the importance of stable scheduling and paid leave for business success and employee retention. It outlines the steps that small businesses can take to implement these practices.

As part of the Good Jobs, Good Business Toolkit, this tool guides small business owners to explore which healthcare options are right for their business, bottom line, and workers. It outlines what is needed for legal compliance along with an array of options to begin to offer health insurance coverage.

This calculator tool helps small business advisors illustrate the cost of employee turnover, encouraging business owners to invest in their staff to increase retention.

These toolkits are designed to eliminate bias across different areas of the workplace, using specific “bias interrupters” that change existing norms and practices to create more equitable workplaces. Toolkits include: Compensation, Hiring and Recruitment, Family Leave, and more. Employers may find this tool useful for developing successful, equitable workplace practices. Additionally, workforce development and worker advocacy professionals may find this toolkit helpful to share with their employer-partners.

The National Center for Employee Ownership’s (NCEO) Data and Research Center includes statistics on employee ownership, lists of employee owned companies in the United States, data on ESOP company practices, and research on employee ownership’s impact on the economy. Here, you may find resources published by NCEO and by other organizations. These resources can be helpful for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and anyone else interested in learning about the landscape of employee ownership in the United States.

This guide was prepared as part of the Shared Success project, through which the Aspen Economic Opportunities Program has been working with a cohort of 11 community development financial institutions (CDFIs) on strategies to advance good jobs. Through this work, have consistently heard that small businesses are facing ongoing hurdles navigating and staying up to date on relevant compliance requirements at the local, state, and federal levels.

This resource guide is intended to help spur ideas for how small businesses can overcome compliance hurdles and navigate quickly evolving regulatory landscapes. The guide is also designed to help advisors or entities working with small business owners, such as CDFIs, facilitate access to potential partners to help their clients effectively address these matters in a more timely, high-quality, and consistent manner. This document is not meant to be legal advice or an exhaustive list of organizations, but rather a snapshot of potential regional and national resources where organizations could seek guidance and further partnership or support.

This framework can help employers and their partners define job quality and design high-quality job opportunities in collaboration with workers, based on a menu of components of a quality job. The tool is built around three pillars that can help to attract and retain talent: foundational elements of a quality job such as wages and benefits, support elements such as training, and opportunity elements such as recognition.