This report addresses worsening job quality during the COVID-19 pandemic, using data from the 2020 Great Jobs Survey and building on the 2019 Great Jobs report. Among other insights, the report addresses how COVID-19 had a differential impact on high wage versus low wage workers, how job quality before the pandemic predicted job quality changes during the pandemic, and how COVID-19 has created new job quality challenges, such as increased remote work.

This report includes 23 practices to embed racial equity into your organization by developing, recognizing, and promoting frontline employees of color. Employers and practitioners can use this resource to structure and implement equitable policies for advancement to strengthen their business.

This resource provides guidance on language to help organizations more effectively communicate about racial economic equity. This document includes definitions of important terms and concepts for understanding racial economic equity, the racial wealth divide, and racial wealth equity as well as design guidelines on visually depicting diverse communities. This guide has relevance for a range of organizations interested in communicating about the important link between racial equity and job quality for those who want to advance racial equity.

Building a race equity culture can support organizations’ capacity to reduce racial disparities within their organizations and through their external strategies. This resource is designed to support practitioners to strengthen internal organizational culture as it relates to race equity. This publication can support a range of organizations to prioritize racial equity, embed equitable practices, and monitor outcomes.

Before the pandemic, food and drinking establishments were an important part of the business fabric in communities across the country, and these businesses employed over 12 million people. But as food businesses lost customers during the crisis, millions of restaurant workers lost work. Food and drinking establishments have been an important source of employment for women and people of color, who are over-represented in the industry’s lower paid occupations.

In this conversation we talk about ideas for business practices, public policies, and partnerships, including an innovative public/private effort that’s addressing the interests that workers, small business owners, and communities all share in a thriving restaurant sector.

The pandemic placed the economy into a sickening tailspin. Did it also catalyze advantageous changes that expand opportunity and equity? Companies can share economic success through various models. Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), worker cooperatives, profit sharing, and forms of equity participation all present different opportunities to share that success. Employee-owned firms have also shown strong resilience through economic downturns and often use management approaches that lead to higher-quality jobs. How can these strategies help shape economic rebuilding? How can they address the inequalities and inequities that have divided our society and help us build a more resilient economy?

In this event, Eduardo Porter discusses his book, American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise, in which he examines “how racial animus has stunted the development of nearly every institution crucial for a healthy society, including organized labor, public education, and the social safety net.” This book talk with the Eduardo discusses how we arrived here and the lessons history holds for finding a better way forward.

Workforce development has long recognized the importance of a quality job to a person’s life and has well-developed tools and strategies for preparing people to succeed in quality jobs. But what role can workforce leaders play on the demand side of the labor market equation to improve the odds that a quality job will be there for a qualified worker?

This conversation explores how workforce development leaders can encourage improved job quality in their communities, hearing from innovators from different types of organizations and engaged in very different local labor markets. We consider the role workforce organizations play with respect to influencing public systems, incentivizing changed business practice, empowering worker constituencies, and leveraging their own organizational practices.

In her book Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It, Heather Boushey, President and CEO of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, considers how inequality is restricting growth and imagines how a more equitable economy would function. The book also raises two key questions: How can we better measure our economy to understand how it can improve the lives of individuals and how do we better support working families so we can set them and their children up for success?

The Economic Opportunities Program, Ascend, Financial Security Program, and Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation hosted a book talk with Heather and a panel discussion including other experts to explore these questions about defining and measuring economic success and how we can work more broadly to create growth with purpose.

Lack of access to quality jobs is a key contributor to rising inequality. Race, gender, and place all play a critical role in who has access to quality work and economic mobility. How can leaders across fields take concrete steps to assess and address disparities in job quality in a regional labor market and improve outcomes for all workers? This event explores the following questions: Why prioritize and measure job quality in your work? What data sources, tools, and approaches can you put to work immediately to assess job quality in your local labor market? How can you disaggregate data by race, gender, and place, and analyze disparities in job quality in a region?