The Employer Engagement Question Bank is designed to help workforce professionals engage in conversations with businesses to support the job seekers they work with. This tool can be used to learn about a business with an eye toward providing workforce services, developing expertise about industry norms and practices, and building relationships that build credibility in discussions about strategies for promoting worker retention and advancement. The tool includes questions to build understanding of the business, its workforce needs, and a range of job quality factors including compensation, opportunities for advancement, and equity and inclusion. Workforce development practioners and other professionals who support workers can adapt the tool to meet their employer engagement goals.

The Voices from the Frontline initiative produced this brief to elevate the conversation around job quality in the workforce development field and what a focus on job quality for frontline workforce professionals could look like in practice. In addition to quantitative measures such as wages, the authors note that feeling a sense of purpose and ownership over one’s work can be beneficial for workforce professionals and the workers they serve. This publication has applications for workforce development organizations as they work to assess and improve their own internal job quality metrics.

This report examines definitions and research on job quality and provides a job quality framework based on findings. It focuses on job quality elements with the potential to support economic mobility. Designed to provide common ground for discussions around job quality, this report may be useful for practitioners and employers interested in exploring job quality frameworks and the link between job quality elements, worker well-being, and upward mobility.

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 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.

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?

To achieve vibrant communities and expand economic opportunity, capital must play a key aligning role. Business lenders and investors, including those such as CDFIs that seek social impact as well as financial returns, are important contributors to the local economy and job creation. But what kinds of jobs are the businesses they finance creating? What kinds of jobs do we want them to create? Can we influence the quality of these jobs? And what can job quality advocates in workforce development and other fields learn from pioneering investors and lenders about strategies to measure job quality in firms and drive business practice change?

This event features representatives from CDFIs and investors to discuss these questions.

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.

This article discusses the barriers the lack of affordable childcare presents to parents and working people and the benefits the US would receive if this challenge were addressed