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.

As growing numbers of business owners retire, efforts are underway to help them convert their business to employee ownership, including worker cooperatives. Despite this momentum, however, worker cooperatives remain a small part of the US economy, and growing the model can be challenging. In this event, panelists share success stories — at home and abroad — and discuss what we can learn from them, including how to remove barriers to cooperatives’ growth.

The Worker Empowerment Research Network (WERN) is an interdisciplinary network of labor market researchers. This report, “U.S. Workers’ Organizing Efforts and Collective Actions: A Review of the Current Landscape,” is the first research product of network and provides a comprehensive review of the methods U.S. workers are currently using to express their collective voices and assert power in their workplaces. The report explores various the concepts of the “voice gap” and “representation gap,” worker actions—including traditional union organizing, strikes, and work stoppages—the growth of worker centers, and new organizing forms.

The report illustrates how the issues workers care about have expanded beyond traditional wages and hours to include topics ranging from new technologies to protection from workplace abuse. For all stakeholders interested in equitable, productive, and resilient employment relationships, it serves as a starting point for discussion and knwoledge building about the conditons of the US labor movement.

It takes intention to design a workplace culture that fully leverages the strengths of employee ownership. In this event, panelists discuss the diverse ways that employee ownership can be realized for a business, including employee stock ownership plans, employee ownership trusts, worker-owned cooperatives, and equity compensation programs. Each holds different advantages and disadvantages, and they can differ in their profit sharing, costs, flexibility, and how workers are involved in decision making.

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.

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/

This piece reflects on the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program’s event “Democratizing Work: The Role, Opportunities, and Challenges of Worker Cooperatives in the US,” which introduced the US movement for worker cooperatives and discussed their potnetial to improve job quality.

This piece from the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program discusses how placing trust in workers is not just important for job quality but also improves business outcomes, as well as reflecting on the economy-wide implications of increasing trust in workers.

This article summarizes “The Rewards of Work: Lessons from the Fair Labor Standards Actt,” an Opportunity in America event EOP hosted in 2022 to explore the history of the FLSA and how it could be updated and strengthenedt to improve workers’ wages and working conditions.

This article summarizes “Worker Power and the National Labor Relations Act,” an Opportunity in America event EOP hosted in 2022 to explore how the NLRA could be updated and strengthenedt to support workers’ right to organize and join a union.

This article discusses the growing use of subcontracting work in the tech industry and the negative consequences this “fissuring” has had on job quality for workers.