This toolkit includes a primer to workplace financial wellness services, questions to consider when exploring these services, and employer experiences with provision of these services. These supports can contribute to job quality when paired with adequate compensation by helping employees manage finances and build assets. This resource includes descriptions of common services, such as financial counseling and coaching, debt management, savings products, and online financial management tools. This tool is most useful for businesses interested in adding or expanding financial wellness benefits. Partners could also share this tool with businesses or could use it to strengthen their own organizations’ financial wellness supports.
This issue brief by PHI analyzes the impacts of recent policy changes in New York state impacting home care aides and defines what a quality job looks like for a caregiver. The elements of a quality job in this occupation are organized in three categories: compensation, opportunity, and supports. While designed for care workers, the framework has relevance across industries and application for all practitioners seeking to define and assess job quality in an organization.
Investments to renew our nation’s infrastructure offer many possible benefits to our economy and our society. One of the most often cited benefits is that these investments will create good jobs. In communities across the country, much has been learned about how to invest in infrastructure projects in ways that support economic development goals and help people in the community connect to good jobs.
In this panel, hosted by the Economic Opportunities Program, speakers discuss the opportunities for work created by infrastructure projects as well as the benefits that renewed infrastructure offer for both workers and business. Panelists share examples from companies and projects around the country, highlighting the business case for investing in workers, training, and safety, not only to benefit workers, but also to improve company operations and America’s critical physical assets.
The Good Companies/Good Jobs Initiative at the Aspen Institute looks to sectors that have the potential to house good companies and good jobs, including health care and manufacturing, as well as retail, hospitality, and other service industries. It also explores tools to better align capital deployment to firms with good jobs outcomes. Mark Popovich, former vice president for The Hitachi Foundation’s Good Companies@Work program, joined EOP to direct this initiative.
This event features examples of companies that intentionally provide jobs that are good for workers and good for companies. We also shared more information about the interrelated goals of all three of The Hitachi Foundation legacy gifts, including to the MIT Sloan School of Management and Investors’ Circle.
High unemployment rates among teens and young adults have caught the attention of the popular press, policymakers, and many others. Labor market participation – working or actively seeking work – has fallen for these groups at alarming rates since 2000, especially for teens. While the declines have affected all young worker demographic groups, unemployment is even more acute for young people of color who have lower levels of labor market attachment overall.
In this event, we ask: what is causing these trends? Is the economy experiencing structural or cyclical changes that would explain it? Is it sluggish job growth or technology? Have employers just altered their preferences? This panel explores trends in young adult workforce participation and potential factors driving them. Panelists take a close look at the role employers and stronger connections to employers can play in helping teens and young adults access career-launching work experience. Panelists also discuss policies that may be contributing to the problem as well as those that may help to improve young worker access to early work experience and economic prosperity.
A good job has long been the foundation for both financial stability and economic mobility. However, labor markets are changing. Of the 30 occupations expected to have the largest growth in the next decade, 23 will require a high school diploma or less. In addition to lower wages, these jobs, in industries such as home healthcare, retail sales, food preparation and service, often have irregular hours, limited benefits and limited opportunities for advancement.
These jobs are found all across the country, which is why we took the Working in America series on the road to the Midwest. We partnered with the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City to host a luncheon forum to explore strategies for improving the quality of lower wage workers’ jobs in addition to creating opportunities for career advancement. Panelists discussed the importance and advantages, to both workers and employers, of shifting our employment and workforce strategies to focus on “building ladders and raising the floor.”
National attention is increasingly focused on growing inequality, stagnating wages, rising unrest, and economic insecurity and immobility. From Occupy Wall Street to the Fight for $15, workers and their families have raised their voices for change in recent years, calling on society to uphold its values, including equal opportunity to succeed through work. How can these voices to be translated into changes in policies and practices? Can exercises of democratic rights – to free speech and association – provide a means for workers and their families to attain fair wages, reasonable hours, and safe working conditions?
David Rolf, one of the nation’s most successful labor organizers in recent years, discusses his book The Fight for $15: The Right Wage for a Working America. He is joined by local labor leaders who share their experiences in today’s workplace and their efforts to engage their co-workers, advocating for better working conditions and revitalizing the democratic process.
In April 2015, the Aspen Institute Workforce Strategies Initiative jointly launched the Communities that Work Partnership with the US Economic Development Administration. The purpose of this initiative was to document and accelerate the development of employer-led regional workforce initiatives across the country. Seven competitively-selected sites — in Arizona, California, the District of Columbia, Georgia, New York (upstate and NYC), and Texas — participated in a learning exchange focused on bridging economic and workforce development to strengthen local talent pipelines and improve access to quality employment.
The “on-demand” or “1099” economy is reengineering how millions of Americans work, and California’s San Francisco Bay Area is at the forefront of these changes. Four members of the Bay Area team participating in the Communities that Work Partnership (CTWP) set out to understand this challenge and explore how the public workforce development system—the one-stop job centers, community colleges, and publicly funded community-based training programs—could meet the skills/needs of freelancers, and the businesses that hire them, in the region’s 1099 economy.
Restore the Promise of Work: Reducing Inequality by Raising the Floor and Building Ladders, published by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program and PHI in February 2016, encourages a broader community beyond workforce development to engage in initiatives that redesign work to expand economic opportunity and address growing social, political, and economic inequality. Restore the Promise of Work underscores that both public and private changes, in both policies and practices, are essential. This new brief calls for leaders from workforce development, education, business, philanthropy, labor, government, and more to forge a powerful, coordinated agenda to promote better quality jobs. A coordinated effort will be critical to sustaining and expanding the successes that members of this community have already attained.RR