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.

The Worker Empowerment Research Network (WERN) is an interdisciplinary network of labor market researchers. This report, “U.S. Workers’ Organizing Efforts and Collective Actions: A Review of the Current Landscape,” is the first research product of network and provides a comprehensive review of the methods U.S. workers are currently using to express their collective voices and assert power in their workplaces. The report explores various the concepts of the “voice gap” and “representation gap,” worker actions—including traditional union organizing, strikes, and work stoppages—the growth of worker centers, and new organizing forms.

The report illustrates how the issues workers care about have expanded beyond traditional wages and hours to include topics ranging from new technologies to protection from workplace abuse. For all stakeholders interested in equitable, productive, and resilient employment relationships, it serves as a starting point for discussion and knwoledge building about the conditons of the US labor movement.

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.

This report outlines the Biden-Harris Administration’s strategy to strengthening worker power, organizing, and collective bargaining, including a comprehensive list of the executive actions recommended as part of this strategy. The recommendations focus on three core areas: positioning the federal government as a model employer, enhancing transparency and worker education on their organizing rights, and utilizing purchasing power to favor employers with strong labor standards. Key initiatives include strengthening compliance with existing labor laws, improving reporting on anti-union activity, and facilitating first contracts for newly organized units. The report also addresses systemic issues like worker misclassification, advocates for legislative reform such as the PRO Act, and emphasizes the deep, unfulfilled demand for union representation, noting that nearly 60 million American workers would join a union if given the chance. While the report is now outdated in terms of federal policy, it continues to be a useful guide to strategies that could be taken by policymakers, employers, or advocates to overcome decades of declining union density and diminished worker voice, and may be especially relevant for policymakers and the state and local levels who aim to implement pro-worker policies.

This is part of 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.

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/