Too many jobs in the US simply do not provide what workers need to support their families and build stable lives. Workers often face low pay, unpredictable schedules, insufficient benefits, dangerous working conditions, and few opportunities to advance. Addressing these job quality challenges — fixing work — is essential to building a fairer and stronger economy that works for everyone and creates shared prosperity among businesses and workers. While organized labor has been and continues to be foundational to the work of improving job quality, over the last few decades, we have seen a variety of organizations join this effort.

To better understand this emerging field of job quality practice, the Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program interviewed 22 practitioners across sectors from around the country who are leading efforts to improve work. Their organizations ranged from worker centers and labor unions to community development financial institutions and workforce development organizations. Our interviews explored how they define job quality, the motivations behind their work, what strategies and tactics they use to improve jobs, how issues of equity appear in their work, and the challenges they face.

In this report, Fixing Work: Lesson from Job Quality Practitioners, we make the case for why job quality work is so important, present insights and lessons learned from the practitioners we interviewed, and offer recommendations to investors and practitioners about how to engage in and support job quality efforts. We hope this paper helps job quality practitioners improve upon their work and inspires others working to improve economic opportunity to find a way to contribute to building an economy where all jobs are good jobs.

This brief synthesizes existing knowledge on the landscape of benefits available to workers in the United States and the impacts of those benefits. It begins by defining workplace benefits and providing a brief history of their use. It then explores the connection between workplace benefits and job quality, mapping known impacts against key components of job quality. Finally, it reflects on opportunities for improvements in job quality and for future research.

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.

Apprenticeships and structured work-and-learn programs, once focused primarily on younger people in particular careers, are valid options for adults and those with adult responsibilities who want or need to work while gaining their education. A new generation of these models is emerging, focusing more deeply on expanding talent pipelines, creating pathways into different industries, and offering the benefits of apprenticeship and work-and-learn models to populations that have previously been marginalized from both work and learning. This brief describes several company-led models, reaching new populations and creating meaningful opportunities for both learning workers and businesses to succeed.

This brief, featuring McDonald’s Archways to Opportunity, Amazon’s Career Choice, and UPS Metropolitan College programs, describes this rare but exciting program design aspect, wherein large employers work to develop talent for opportunities beyond the business.

With rising inflation, stagnant wages, deeply rooted inequalities, and increasingly concentrated profits, the American economy is broken. More than 37 million Americans live in poverty, and although work is supposed to provide a route to a better life, 53 million people are stuck in jobs that pay low wages. Over the past 50 years, the balance of power between employers and workers has increasingly skewed toward employers. Workers have few opportunities to shape their working conditions and are too often trapped in dangerous, low-paid jobs. The United States faces a job-quality crisis. To reimagine the economy, restore a balance of power between workers and employers, and share prosperity today and for generations to come, we need bold, broad solutions. One solution gaining momentum is guaranteed income. At times understood narrowly as a replacement for income for jobs lost to automation, guaranteed income has a much longer history, with support at the nation’s founding, during the New Deal, throughout the civil rights movement, and more.

This brief explores guaranteed income as a tool for the unique and urgent economic challenges of today; it focuses on guaranteed income’s impacts on work and job quality. How might guaranteed income rebalance power and dismantle the inequalities that plague our current labor market? Can guaranteed income restore, rather than replace, the promise of work in America?

This guide is designed to help employers and managers identify signs of mental health distress and develop a plan of action to help support employees. This guide, with tools embedded throughout, presents the business case for supporting employee mental health and outlines steps to support employees and improve company culture. Employers may find this resource useful to use internally, and organizations that work with businesses may want to share it with their employer partners.

This article investigates the impact of employee ownership on business and worker outcomes, including links to improved productivity, pay, job stability, and firm survival. The article dives further into the effects and causation relationship, as well as the challenges presented by employee ownership.

Universal benefits are accessible by everyone who works, regardless of work arrangement or sector. A universal, portable safety net could better deliver benefits to individual workers, encourage a dynamic labor market, and promote economic security for all. This report explains how universal, portable benefits can contribute to a more accessible, equitable safety net and more dynamic economy; summarizes the current conversation around portable benefits; and offers actionable steps toward more portable, universal benefits.

Over the past year, UpSkill America conducted a three-phase study to learn how the pandemic and heightened attention on racial inequities have influenced companies’ employment plans for the months and years ahead. We were especially interested in the impact these changes were having on frontline and entry-level employees and employers’ education and training programs. n this third phase of the research, we spoke directly with employers and asked:

In what ways are businesses adopting technology in the workplace, and has COVID-19 accelerated these efforts?
How is digital transformation impacting skill needs for frontline workers?
What approaches are businesses taking to support development of digital skills for frontline workers?