This detailed assessment is a tool to help employers generate a report about their social and environment impact, including impact on workers, and to benchmark against peer companies. It includes measures of job quality, including compensation, benefits, safety, and worker ownership. Practitioners who work with businesses could direct them to this tool or even walk them through it.

This piece provides a summary and highlights from “Job Quality in the Fields: Improving Farm Work in the US,” an Opportunity in America event that highlighted the challenges of agricultural workers and ideas for improving their working conditions.

This report examines findings from phase two of the Gig Worker Learning Project, an effort of The Workers Lab and the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program. The purpose of this effort is to understand more about gig work and workers directly from gig workers themselves – motivations to do gig work; challenges being faced; and solutions that would impact gig workers personally, their families, and their work. The first phase of the Gig Worker Learning Project produced an analysis of existing research and recommendations. The phase two findings presented in this latest report emerged from participatory research which included more than a dozen focus groups and several participatory analysis sessions led by an incredibly diverse set of workers. It marks the beginning of The Workers Lab’s plan to help build greater advocacy for gig workers nationally.

In late 2023, Lee Health, one of the largest public health systems in Florida, began a virtual nursing pilot designed to understand the opportunities and implications of shifting this vital role into a virtual environment. I sat down with three Lee Health leaders responsible for the design and implementation of the virtual nursing pilot — Kim Gault, MSN, RN, business system analyst for virtual health and telemedicine; Max Rousseau, supervisor of virtual health and telemedicine; and Jonathan Witenko, system director, virtual health and telemedicine — to learn more about why this was a priority for the organization, the considerations they made, and the outcomes they’re seeking. This conversation took place over two interviews and has been edited for clarity.

Working people want more power over the terms and conditions of their work. Instead of viewing this shift as a threat or incursion, enlightened employers will find the opportunity in it. The same mechanisms that make a workplace more democratic, collaborative, and fair also can support and expand existing company priorities, from improving products and adopting new technologies to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. While some business leaders have opted for the same tired tactics to undermine worker empowerment in favor of top-down control, a raft of innovations in worker voice, worker representation, and collaborations with labor unions offer an alternative path forward.

To help organizations apply these ideas, the Aspen Business Roundtable on Organized Labor and Charter, a media company focused on the future of work, have partnered to produce “The Shared Power Advantage: How to build a thriving company where workers have a seat at the table.” The playbook includes strategies for leaders hoping to strengthen their workplaces by empowering their employees.

In this brief, the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program discusses Participatory Decision Making (PDM), including its history, the outcomes it helps create for workers and businesses, its importance in helping firms navigate technological changes and design work-based learning, and numerous examples including those from employee-owned companies.The scope of this brief is intended to help organizations working at the intersection of job quality and business competitiveness better understand how incorporating workers’ ingenuity through PDM is important for firm success and good jobs. This brief is a resource for workforce and economic development organizations, community development finance institutions, and other organizations that advise businesses or focus on or fund employer practice change, to help inform their job quality conversations and efforts with employer partners.

This piece provides an overview of job quality challenges affecting LGBTQ+ workers, including economic need, discrimination, and barriers to career advancement. The piece also contextualizes these challenges in the current landscape of anti-LGBTQ+ policies being passed in the United States.

In this event, Benjamin Lorr, author of “The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket,” traces the history and evolution of the modern-day supermarket, exposes the grocery supply chain, and reveals the often exploited and underpaid labor that goes into making sure shelves are stocked. Lorr paints a vivid picture of how agricultural and meat processing workers, fisherman, truck drivers, and grocery store workers, among others, often endure poverty and sometimes worse as they work to feed our country.

This is 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.

The Overview document provides a list of all resources contained in this archive and links out to these documents in the folder; this document will be the easiest starting point to search for relevant resources.

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/

In this event, panelists discuss the long-standing challenges that farmworkers face and how to build good jobs in this essential sector. In short, better jobs are possible and within reach. Multiple states have led the way in legislating better pay and protections, including the right to organize, a right these essential workers have long been excluded from.