This guide highlights existing research on the link between the racial wealth divide and business ownership. Because lower levels of business and financial assets held by Black and Latino households is a key factor perpetuating the racial wealth divide, business ownership may be an important means to narrow the gap. This guide may be useful for economic development organizations, investors, lenders, and other practitioners seeking to understand and respond to the racial wealth divide.

Also known as the “gig economy,” “consumer-to-consumer sharing,” and “peer-to-peer marketplaces,” the term “sharing economy” is used to describe a wide variety of exchanges between people, including property, skills, labor, or space.

Sharing economy companies include Airbnb (rent a room or your house), Uber (provide rides), TaskRabbit (do chores for others), and Instacart (be a personal grocery shopper), to name a few. There were an estimated 80 million sharers in the United States in 2013 – although that included 33 million “resharers,” those who buy and/or sell pre-owned goods online at sites like Craigslist (Vision Critical and Crowd Companies).

Revenue estimates vary from $3.5 billion in the U.S. in 2013 (Forbes) to $335 billion globally in 2025 (PricewaterhouseCoopers). Many have touted this system’s benefits for consumers, including convenient and affordable services and shared goods. But what are the benefits — and the downsides — of the sharing economy for the workers who provide the services? What is the influence of the sharing economy on the future of work? What are the implications for public policy and business practice?

Panelists explored these issues and more.

A good job is the most important factor in helping people escape poverty. How do some employers create consistently high-quality jobs for even front-line employees, while their competitors offer only middling pay and poor employee satisfaction? This event highlights how companies can invest in their front-line workers to create a better workplace and strong results for customers and shareholders.

The event features three companies from the Hitachi Foundation’s Pioneer Employers Initiative, which focuses on the business case for investing in front-line workers. This initiative has identified nearly 100 companies that are securing a sustainable competitive advantage through increased productivity, revenues from new market segments, and improved quality of product or service by creating genuine opportunities for employees to thrive in the workplace and move up the economic ladder.

In MIT Sloan professor Zeynep Ton’s game-changing book, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs & Boost Profits, she discusses how companies such as Costco offer good jobs to workers, low prices and excellent service to customers, and great returns to shareholders all at the same time. What makes good jobs not only possible but very profitable—even in low-cost service businesses—is a set of counterintuitive choices that transforms the company’s investment in workers into high performance. What are these choices? Offer less, combine standardization with empowerment, cross-train, and operate with slack. It’s a combination that lowers operating costs, increases worker productivity, and, as “The Good Jobs Strategy” shows over and over, puts workers — yes, even cashiers and stockroom workers—at the center of a company’s success. In this strategy, “everyone — employees, customers, and investors — wins.”

In this discussion, Zeynep Ton and Richard Galanti, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Director of Costco Wholesale Corporation, explore how the strategy works in a company like Costco and the implications for creating better jobs in our economy.

This foundational brief encourages the workforce development field to implement a broader range of workforce interventions to improve the lives of workers in low-wage work by focusing on both career mobility and basic economic stability. It provides a useful framework for job quality efforts, identifying approaches that not only build ladders, or help low-wage workers advance into better jobs, but also raise the floor, or help make workers’ current jobs more stable so that they can take advantage of upskilling and mobility opportunities.

In MIT Sloan professor Zeynep Ton’s game-changing book, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs & Boost Profits, she proves that it is possible to offer good jobs to workers, low prices and excellent service to customers, and great returns to shareholders all at the same time. What makes good jobs not only possible but very profitable—even in low-cost service businesses—is a set of counterintuitive choices that transforms the company’s investment in workers into high performance. What are these choices? Offer less, combine standardization with empowerment, cross-train, and operate with slack. It’s a combination that lowers operating costs, increases worker productivity, and, as The Good Jobs Strategy shows over and over, puts workers—yes, even cashiers and stockroom workers—at the center of a company’s success.

In this book talk, Ton discusses The Good Jobs Strategy and its implications.

In the United States today, roughly 25 million workers, over 16 percent of all workers, are foreign-born. Immigrant workers contribute skills, knowledge and labor to the U.S. economy through employment in a diversity of sectors, including hospitality, construction, information technology, health care and others.

Foreign-born workers also start businesses at higher rates than native born workers, contributing to economic growth and job creation. While some immigrant workers and business owners achieve great economic success, others operate marginal businesses or are employed in jobs where wages are low, working conditions are poor, and safety standards are disregarded. For foreign-born workers that wish to improve their education and upgrade their skills, other barriers may stand in their way, such as limited English skills or poor access to financial aid. Millions of these workers have toiled in the shadows of the labor market, but soon, the nation may have opportunities to both improve job quality and offer ways for these workers to build their skills. These opportunities can help improve employment for the labor market and economy overall in ways that benefit all Americans.

Panelists discussed the immigrant workforce in the U.S. today, focusing on its past and potential economic contributions, opportunities for gaining skills as well as the implications of immigration and immigration reform for job quality. This is the third conversation in the Aspen Institute’s Working in America series that highlights a variety of job quality issues affecting low and moderate income working Americans.

In this brief, we provide an overview of work in the direct-care industry and profile PHI (Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute), an organization dedicated to improving job quality in the industry. Our goal is to offer information to those involved in workforce development about the challenges of work in the direct-care industry and the strategies PHI uses to promote job quality improvements.

This report details the state of low-wage work in the restaurant industry and provides a profile of Restaurant Opportunities Center-United, an organization striving to empower low-wage restaurant workers, employers, and consumers to collectively improve job quality in the industry.

This report details the dynamics and challenges of the residential construction industry and provides a profile of the Workers Defense Project, a non-profit and membership-based organization based in Austin, Texas that seeks to provide low-wage workers, particularly those in the construction industry, with resources to improve their working and living conditions