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.

As one of our nation’s strongest training models, apprenticeship provides individuals the unique opportunity to work and develop their skills at the same time through a mix of paid on-the-job training and classroom instruction. In this report, Aspen WSI examines completion and cancellation rates in construction apprenticeship, the challenges apprentices experience in completing their programs, and strategies that are being used to support the success of these individuals. The report is based on national and state-level analysis of apprenticeship completion rates and dozens of interviews and focus groups with apprentices, journey workers, union representatives, construction contractors, pre-apprenticeship program leaders, and other stakeholders in the industry.

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

In May, we celebrate Mother’s Day, a holiday created by Americans to honor our moms and their influence in society. With the presence of women with children in the workforce increasing, mothers are not only the glue that holds our homes together, but they are also the fuel helping to drive our economic recovery. Two-thirds of women with young children now work and nearly half are the primary breadwinner within their family. As more moms enter the workforce and “lean in” to build a successful career and household, however, the affordable, quality early care and education system their families need to lean on is noticeably absent. The women and moms working in the early care and education industry also face significant challenges. Low wages, few benefits and limited training or advancement opportunities are widespread in the early care and education industry, which contributes to high worker turnover, further eroding the quality of care.

In this event, speakers discuss how we can have both an early care and education system that provides good jobs and quality, affordable care.

This is the fourth conversation in a roundtable series in 2012 titled “Reinventing Low Wage Work: Ideas That Can Work for Employees, Employers and the Economy.” Low wage jobs are a growing part of the U.S. economy, and the Aspen Institute Workforce Strategies Initiative is excited to continue this conversation about the nature of low wage work, the challenges it presents to workers, businesses and the economy, and the opportunities we have for addressing these challenges at the Aspen Institute at a time when jobs and the economy are such critical topics for our country.