Advancement & Training Archives - Page 6 of 16 - Job Quality Center of Excellence

The Roadmap for Investing in Good Jobs is a guide developed by the U.S. Department of Labor to help governments—at the federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial levels—leverage the Biden administration’s Investing in America agenda (including BIL, CHIPS, and IRA) to create high-quality, good-paying, union jobs. This resource provides recommended language to embed in grants, loans, and contracts, which outlines requirements, preferences, and encouraging job quality practices in projects. While created for the Investing in America initative, this language in applicable beyond these projects and provides a tangible guide for employers and other organizations aiming to embed job quality more formally in their project documentation and contracts.

The Roadmap is organized around key elements of job quality and worker empowerment, such as mandating and incentivizing fair pay (e.g., prevailing wages and pay equity audits), committing to worker rights protections (like project labor agreements and union neutrality agreements), promoting skills and career advancement through proven models like registered apprenticeship programs, providing family-sustaining benefits (like paid leave and health insurance), adopting DEIA workforce plans to promote opportunities for underserved communities, and safeguarding job security and working conditions by combating worker misclassification and establishing joint labor-management safety and health committees.

This is part of a collection of resources created by the Department of Labor and other federal agencies, relating to job quality and implementing good jobs priorities through federal investments and beyond. Many of these resources are no longer publicly available on government websites, though they were all at one point public and shared with the intent of preserving these resources for public use.

Please note that we cannot guarantee that information contained in these resources related to specific programs, policies, and processes remains accurate, though many best practices and examples remain useful. In addition, many of these resources link out to government websites that do not exist anymore. You may be able to find these linked resources in the archive itself by searching the Overview document. For more resources, please visit the Data Rescue Project website, at https://www.datarescueproject.org/

In this event, Zeynep Ton, author of “The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work,” discusses the components of a “good jobs” system, which ensures a living wage, dignity, and opportunities for growth to employees, and helps to foster shared success for both workers and organizations. Ton — a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and president and co-founder of the Good Jobs Institute — explores the benefits of this approach; the disadvantages of low-paying and high-turnover jobs; how labor investments can pay for themselves; the obstacles to creating a good jobs system; and how leaders can break free and overcome these challenges to create good jobs.

In this event, Rick Wartzman, author of “Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism,” considers the experience and history of Walmart moving toward a more conscious capitalism and the recent efforts the company has made to provide higher wages and better benefits and opportunities for its employees. Wartzman raises important questions about how much an individual company can do on its own to improve the quality of jobs and people’s ability to earn a living through their work; the degree to which business imperatives encourage companies to improve jobs and when those incentives conflict with that goal; and whether public sector action, through either labor market regulation or the provision of social supports, needs to be strengthened to ensure that work in today’s economy is contributing to an inclusive economy in which all can thrive.

The Job Quality Toolkit is a comprehensive but beginner friendly resource for employers trying to improve job quality and retain their workforce. The toolkit walks the reader through components of job quality and provides strategies and resources for each component: Recruitment & Hiring; Benefits; Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Accessibility; Empowerment & Representation; Job Security & Working Conditions; Organizational Culture; Pay; and Skills & Career Advancement.

In this event, panelists discuss the promise of work-based learning. When designed well, work-based learning provides a number of benefits to workers and businesses. Approaches such as apprenticeship, on-the-job training, and other forms of employer-sponsored training can offer workers the opportunity for upward mobility and the chance to earn and learn at the same time, while employers gain a more engaged and skilled workforce.

The Hartford has a large workers’ compensation business, ranked 2nd in the nation based on direct written premiums. Workers’ compensation is insurance that provides coverage in the form of cash payments or medical care for workers who are injured on the job. Recently, the company discovered that a significant proportion of claims that were made through the workers’ compensation department were relatively simple claims, referred to as “medical only,” that required only coverage for medications or medical care and not more complex areas such as lost wages or time off work. Medical-only also includes claims that do not require any significant medical intervention or service, as well as claims where the treatment was completed before the claim was filed. This area represented a prime opportunity for automation, where work previously done by a claim administrator would instead be automated using custom-built computer algorithms, freeing up staff members to do more complex work. They determined that some medical-only claims processes could be automated, eliminating multiple human touchpoints without sacrificing compliance or customer outcomes. As with other automation efforts, AI often creates significant financial returns and efficiency gains, giving work previously done by humans to a machine. Unlike many automation efforts, though, The Hartford did not find savings through eliminating workforce. Rather, they took the opportunity created by the automation and reformed roles to fill different business needs, enabling the entire workers’ compensation department to handle more, more efficiently.

This issue brief reviews the history and current state of job design, highlights the benefits workers and businesses receive when jobs are designed with worker well-being in mind, and notes emerging issues and practices in job design related to technology, work-based learning, and employee ownership. We hope this brief sparks new thinking and conversations about how we can all encourage and contribute to designing work and workplaces that promote quality jobs.

This piece draws a line between investment in climate infrastructure and the opportunity to invest in good jobs, achieving climate goals by investing in workers, families, and communities.

This piece features video excerpts from interviews with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment Northwest Workforce Area, as well as Carpet One Floor and Home, to hear about their partnership in a small business advising pilot aiming to improve job quality.

This publication compiles seven lessons for small business prospecting, recruitment, and ongoing engagement. The lessons outlined in this tool are based on our experience working with Pacific Community Ventures and workforce partners to conduct job quality-focused business advising pilots with small businesses across the country. Although there is no one-size-fits-all approach to developing relationships with employers, we have found that asking lots of questions and tailoring engagement to the local context is key.