Improving job quality not only transforms workers’ lives, but it also benefits businesses’ performance and bottom lines. Highlighted in this brief is Sunrise Treatment Center, a leader in the addiction treatment sector that provides stable, sustainable jobs. Founder Dr. Jeffrey Bill, Chief Operating Officer Steven Smith, and Chief Human Resources Officer Brett Burns developed strategies to simultaneously meet the needs of their patients and their commitment to employees. Sunrise Treatment Center saw sustained growth and improvement in both capacity and caregiving by ensuring that the focus of the organization was explicitly two-fold: to provide the highest quality treatment for patients with substance abuse issues and mental illness, and to offer a great place to work for employees.

Government, business, labor, and education leaders need to consider ideas to build and strengthen inclusive systems of lifelong learning that provide opportunities for adult workers to develop and improve the knowledge and skills they can apply to their jobs. This brief explores one such approach: separating training from specific jobs, so that workers can accumulate the benefits of training as they work across multiple jobs or switch jobs frequently, an approach we call portable training. In the following sections, we first contextualize portable training in the current landscape of worker education and training in the US. We then consider the potential strengths and risks of a portable approach. Finally, we look abroad and consider several portable training programs that have been established in France, Singapore, Canada, and Scotland, highlighting how program design choices can mediate the possible challenges of a more portable system of training.

In “To Build Back Better, Job Quality is the Key,” Maureen Conway (The Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program), Jeannine LaPrad (Corporation for a Skilled Workforce), Amanda Cage (National Fund for Workforce Solutions), and Sarah Miller (Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta) make the case that improving job quality should be a central goal of economic recovery and rebuilding efforts, and they lay out practical policy ideas toward that end. The report includes a framework illustrating the multiple dimensions of job quality and outlines the variety of institutions and organizations that can play a role in improving job quality. Particular attention is given to the role of federal policy and to the practices of local governments, economic development, and workforce development organizations.

This resource from the National Center for Employee Ownership offers a quick overview of four forms of employee ownership: Employee Stock Option Plans (ESOPs), Equity Grants, Employee Owned Trusts, and Worker Cooperatives. The resource gives an introduction to which types of companies these forms of employee ownership are best suited to, the tax implications, how equity works within each model, and more questions on governance and execution.

This research brief and landscape analysis focuses on pervasive racial disparities in elements of job quality (e.g., pay, health & safety, adequate hours) and some of the causes behind them. The authors pull together research on established laws, institutional practices, and cultural norms (e.g., occupational segregation, nonstandard work arrangements like the independent contractor classification, hiring discrimination) to create a cohesive narrative outlining how these structures have resulted in systemic disadvantages and discrimination for workers of color, particularly Black workers. These racial disparities not only persist today but were magnified during the ongoing COVID-19 and resulting racial reckoning. Individuals involved in work influencing policy decisions and institutional practices to improve labor market opportunities for workers of color may find this resource helpful.

This brief provides a framework to help HR leaders design benefits programs aimed at improving employees’ financial health, a common equity concern and component of job quality. The guidance offered centers equity approaches such as broadening access to supports and targeting outreach efforts to financially vulnerable groups. Employers who are interested in embedding a DEI lens into the design of their benefits programs and closing financial health gaps among their workforce may find this resource helpful. Workforce development and worker advocacy professionals may also want to share this with their employer networks.

Work-based learning (WBL) can help young adults of color get the experience, education, credentials, and relationships necessary to succeed in the workforce, now and in the future. It can also provide an entry point into jobs in industries where they have been historically underrepresented. WBL can provide opportunities for young adults to demonstrate their value and abilities to employers and to change biases around hiring and career advancement.

This research report describes how four organizations involved with the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Generation Work initiative engage with young adults and employers to design and manage WBL opportunities. Learn about the behind-the-scenes programming and relationship-building work that practitioners engage in with employers and how practitioners have tailored their programs to meet the needs of young adults of color and to support employers in their work to develop, structure, and support WBL opportunities.

This report introduces behavioral design as an approach that can help disrupt behaviors that perpetuate the U.S. gender pay gap. An alternative to individual-focused bias and diversity training, this approach can help employers design interventions to address systems and norms. The report aims to help employers shift behaviors away from those that disadvantage women and toward those that benefit all employees. Although written to help employers reimagine their role in creating fair and dignified workplaces, this report may also be useful for organizations that work with businesses, to share with employer partners.

As a crucial source of employment in local communities, small businesses have an important role to play in advancing economic opportunity and job quality. Yet even before the pandemic, time and resource constraints could make it challenging for small business owners to invest in workers. Around the country, innovative community development finance and economic development organizations are pursuing strategies to support small businesses to navigate the pandemic and strengthen job quality for workers. During the webinar, you’ll hear from leaders using these approaches – and forging innovative partnerships with local organizations – to encourage small business practices that are good for workers, good for business, and good for communities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the value of caregiving work and the need for equitable and affordable access to care – for children, for elders, for those with a disability, and for all of us in hard times. Yet care work remains underpaid and often invisible, contributing to the inadequacies of the US care system and deepening challenges for caregivers and families. As we move from crisis to recovery, how can policy contribute to building a care economy that dignifies the work of caregivers and expands access to quality, affordable care? How can our systems center gender and racial equity to construct a care economy that serves all families? And how can our society support a healthy and sustainable caregiving system for our post-pandemic future, one in which the demand for caregiving is poised to continue to grow?