America’s job-quality crisis and how to revive workers’ pay, dignity, job advancement, and economic well-being
Overview
The poor quality of jobs in the United States is a slow-burning crisis that has been underway for many decades and has eroded many workers’ quality of life. Too many U.S. workers—especially but not exclusively workers without college degrees—are working in jobs with lower pay, lack of opportunities, and challenging work conditions, such as unstable schedules, all of which are detrimental to these workers’ well-being.
In contrast, a good job can bring not only a paycheck but also meaning and social standing because it allows us to care for ourselves, our families, and contribute to something larger in our communities and our nation. Beyond earnings, the conditions of our work can affirm our dignity and our sense that our worth is recognized.1
As other essays in this project explain, the crisis of poor job quality has encouraged right-wing populist leaders to pitch divisive rhetoric to struggling workers and their families, even if their proposed policies do little to resolve the underlying crisis. This essay focuses on the drivers of poor job quality and concrete policy responses to address those drivers.
The slow-burning job-quality crisis and its consequences, explained
Poor-quality jobs are by no means a new phenomenon in U.S. history, but the modern variant reached different industries and populations at different times starting in the 1970s and 1980s. The steady loss of manufacturing jobs and a decline in union power eroded job quality for many workers.2 Globalization and increased automation then hit, with some workers facing acute declines in their economic situations, as well as threats to their social standing.3
Pressure from financial markets on employers to cut labor costs grew, too, and managers changed practices to reduce costs.4 The rapid growth of the low-paid service sector as manufacturing jobs declined added new twists to poor jobs—unstable schedules and limited opportunities for advancement.5
Some groups, including White men working in manufacturing, have experienced real declines in job quality and economic security over their lives. Others have faced limited opportunities throughout their working lives, including Black workers, who still face hiring biases in many firms and industries.6 Those who experienced a slide and those who have long felt stuck may feel similarly frustrated, but they often are not united in pushing for change and may not see plausible strategies for collective action.
In recent years, unusually tight labor markets have provided some relief, pushing up wages for those at the bottom and creating some short-term leverage for better working conditions.7 Still, the broad trends in wages, benefits, and many other dimensions of work experience, unfolding over decades, have left many people with a sense that their lot at work is unfair and also out of their control.
Poor job quality and a sense of limited opportunities prompts anger, fear, and sadness about being disrespected and discarded at work, which plausibly leads to a sense of being disrespected and discarded in society more broadly. And that can push many workers and their loved ones to respond eagerly to politicians who articulate emotions of anger and fear and promise change.8 This assessment builds on a very strong research base linking job quality to mental health,9 as well as compelling qualitative studies making the connections to right-wing populism.10
We need to develop—and communicate—a more holistic understanding of job quality and its impact on workers, considering psychological and social, as well as economic, implications. The economic and psychological impacts of losing one’s job are well-known, but, additionally and critically, the remaining jobs are often of poor quality, and many feel their future options for good work will be limited.
What policymakers need to understand to address the job-quality crisis
To develop a positive, holistic vision for improving job quality, policymakers need to be aware of the specific ways in which many Americans’ quality of work has declined in the past several decades. Specifically, these job-quality issues fall into at least seven areas:11
- Diminished purchasing power for low-wage workers
- Unstable work schedules
- Lack of paid leave
- Limited advancement opportunities for low-wage workers
- Lack of job security
- Work design and autonomy
- Gaps in worker voice
Diminished purchasing power for low-wage workers
Many federal laws regarding work and supporting workers have not been updated to reflect new economic realities. One obvious example is the U.S. federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which has not increased since 2009 and has fallen, in real terms, by about 30 percent since then.12 The failure to update federal wage floors reinforces the sense that, while elite employees can negotiate what they need, large numbers of ordinary workers are stuck on the wrong side of growing income inequality.
In some areas, state and local ordinances have surpassed the federal minimum wage—often creating better conditions in progressive states and on the coasts.13 Currently, 22 states have a minimum wage at or above $12 an hour, including California, Oregon, Washington state, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts. But state minimum-wage laws seldom reach workers in regions that already feel “left behind.” The effective minimum wage is still $7.25 in 20 states, including Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Texas, and more.
Unstable work schedules
Earnings obviously depend on both wage rates and work schedules. Overall, workers value stable schedules and the flexibility to adjust hours as needed for personal reasons.14 Yet there has been a clear trend toward more “just-in-time” or unstable scheduling practices, driven by employers.
Scheduling software helps tightly link schedules to variations in demand, based on sales by the day or even by the hour, leading to cancelled or shortened shifts, last-minute shift extensions, little advance notice of schedules, volatility in the number of hours worked across weeks, and limited say in schedules.15 These scheduling practices have negative consequences for economic security, including income volatility and difficulties holding a second job.16
Workers with unstable schedules are more likely to face economic hardships, including hunger, housing insecurity, and difficulty paying bills.17 Unstable schedules increase the odds of workers’ quitting their jobs, prompting lost earnings for these workers in the short run.18
Unstable schedules convey that employees are expected to be at the beck and call of employers. This workplace practice harms employees’ mental health and family life, as indicated by work-family conflicts, complex and more varied child care arrangements, and worse mental health among children whose parents or single parent have unpredictable schedules.19
Salaried employees also may experience frustrations about their earnings in relation to their work hours. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, salaried workers making more than $35,568 a year are not paid for overtime hours, which means some supervisors and lower-level managers work long hours without additional pay. In my own research, salaried IT professionals earning much more than that put in very long hours and responded to emails, text, and chat any time of day or night because they frantically hoped to hold on to their IT jobs threatened by offshoring and emerging technologies.20
Even with relatively high earnings and good benefits, then, some workers still felt “owned,” disrespected, and stressed. This adds further fuel to the poor-jobs crisis.
Lack of paid leave
The United States is the only rich, industrialized country with no paid leave policy for new parents, and we are among just a few countries without paid sick leave laws.21 A lack of leave can feel like a lack of respect, and workers resent feeling forced to choose between their job and taking care of their health and their families.
Federal policies have not kept up with increases in mothers’ labor force participation, men’s caregiving, and an aging population. The Family and Medical Leave Act, passed back in 1993, guarantees the job of a leave-taker but does not provide income replacement. Moreover, due to size, tenure, and hours requirements, only 56 percent of employees are covered by FMLA-guaranteed unpaid leave, and only 49 percent of workers with just a high school education are covered.22 The inequality is obvious, with higher-income workers much more likely to have access to job-protected or paid leaves.23
Paid leave laws have been adopted by 13 states and Washington, DC. Again, most of the middle of the country has no guarantee of paid family leave, with the exceptions of Colorado and soon Minnesota.24
Limited advancement opportunities for low-wage workers
The possibility for advancement is a critical part of a quality job. Workplaces that provide training are valuable for moving up and building transferable skills that can lead to a good job elsewhere. About 59 percent of U.S. employed adults received some formal employer-provided skills training in the past year, and about 50 percent had gained skills via informal training from other employees.25 These opportunities, however, are not evenly available; training is less common for workers without a college degree, Hispanic workers, Black workers, contracted employees, and freelancers.26
Moreover, there has been a trend toward flattened firms, reductions in management positions, and outsourcing of some work roles, leaving many front-line workers without a clear career ladder for them to move up.27 While internal promotion systems have not disappeared, workers starting in low-paying occupations are more likely to move into higher-paying ones by switching employers than by staying with the same employers.28
Lack of job security
Job quality involves both adequate earnings and confidence that you can keep the job or find a similar one if needed. While the archetypal story in the news may be manufacturing workers who lost jobs to China, people in many white-collar occupations have faced job loss tied to offshoring, automation, and related pressures from financial markets to cut costs.
Job loss is often felt acutely as disrespect and triggers shame, even if workers are caught up in much broader trends.29 About half of Americans do not experience continuous employment through their 50s, and those unemployment spells reduce the odds of working into your 60s and beyond.30
Job insecurity also impacts those who manage to keep their jobs, negatively affecting health and pressuring those who “survive” a downsizing to do more and more with minimal complaint.31 Algorithmic management can prompt terminations, and often, front-line workers in warehouses, fast-food restaurants, and retail feel these decisions are out of their control.32 Insecurity is normalized, with persistent anxiety even among those who are currently employed.33
Of course, job security is completely absent from nonstandard work, such as contracting, temp, and gig work. This built-in insecurity is not uniformly negative, however, as the appeal of this work is often the ability to set one’s own schedule. But this purported flexibility also creates pressure to always hustle, putting in long hours and lining up new options to weather possible decreased demand, increased competition, or changes in algorithms for those doing platform-based work.34
Work design and autonomy
The way that work is designed—the organization of tasks into jobs—matters to workers. To take one element of work design: Workers with more autonomy (discretion over how they do their work) and more variety in the tasks entailed in their work have better mental and physical health.35 The same job can be designed either to allow for autonomy or to narrowly specify every action, communicating to workers that they are interchangeable and not seen as capable of self-direction and judgment.
Some experimental studies find that changing work practices and policies to increase autonomy and variety can reduce psychological distress, perhaps because such changes signal respect.36 Yet in many workplace settings, new technologies have further reduced autonomy and opportunities to learn. Technological surveillance of individual productivity in production, logistics, and retail settings creates even greater pressure to speed through narrowly specified tasks.37
Gaps in worker voice
Voice at work—having a say and potentially influencing what happens in your organization—affirms workers’ dignity and worth, and can be conceptualized as a dimension of job quality.38 A workplace that welcomes and incorporates worker voice conveys that employees are valued for their ideas, not just the specific tasks they complete.
Yet today there is a sizable voice gap, captured by the difference workers report in the say or influence they believe they ought to have and the say they currently have. The largest gaps are on topics such as compensation, benefits, job security, and changes in technology.39
Working in an environment where you feel you can use your voice with confidence is associated with better well-being, higher job satisfaction, and less interest in quitting.40 What’s more, a field experiment in warehouses by me and my colleagues finds that a new voice channel—specifically, a committee of front-line workers and a few managers, who hear and respond to employees’ concerns and ideas—significantly reduces turnover and also improves mental health in the short term.41
Unions are a critical and classic channel for worker voice, providing a structured and collective process for elevating workers’ concerns and bargaining with management. General approval of unions has grown to 70 percent in 2024, a level not seen since the late 1970s, and younger workers are more supportive of unions than other workers.42
Nonetheless, the percentage of U.S. workers who are members of a labor union has dropped from 20.1 percent in 1983 to 9.9 percent in 2024.43 This decline has implications not only for worker voice, but also for the financial and physical well-being of these workers and their families over the long term. Recent studies estimate that being a union member throughout one’s career results in an average of $1.3 million in additional lifetime earnings44 and also supports physical health.45 Additionally, the racial wealth gap is narrower among union members.46
As noted by other authors in this series, unions improve job quality and also connect workers in a “collective social fabric” that helps “increase workers’ social status and guard against the social divisiveness that is at the heart of right-wing populism.”47
Directions for policy and practice to improve job quality
Policymakers need to pursue both familiar and new approaches for addressing the job-quality crisis and its implications for U.S. democracy. The focus is not on a novel approach but a coordinated vision for a fair future of work that takes into account the numerous ways in which job quality has declined. Specifically, policymakers need to take action to:
- Improve economic security
- Address the economic and care needs of working families
- Facilitate opportunities for job advancement and autonomy
- Support worker power and union organizing
Let’s delve into each in turn.
Improve economic security
While the federal minimum wage only applies to a small proportion of the workforce, updating it and ideally indexing it to inflation would improve job quality for a critical segment of low-wage workers and symbolize a renewed commitment to those earners across the entire nation. Many progressive states and cities have done more to set the minimum wage above the federal floor, but some movement also is evident in more conservative political contexts, with ballot measures passed in 2024 in Missouri and Alaska.48 More states need to take this step in lieu of changes at the federal level.
Importantly, the evidence is clear that increasing the minimum wage does not reduce jobs. A recent review concludes that “minimum wage policies have had limited direct employment effects while significantly increasing the earnings of low-wage workers.”49 Some research suggests, however, that injuries may rise in the wake of minimum-wage increases, perhaps because employers push workers harder to increase productivity.50
Wage theft—including minimum-wage violations, failure to pay for all hours worked, and violations of overtime pay requirements—occurs routinely and is patently unfair.51 The misclassification of workers as independent contractors when they should be counted as employees also robs them of minimum-wage protections and overtime pay, as well as Unemployment Insurance and coverage by other labor laws.52 Enforcement could certainly be increased, and the financial penalties for violations also should be adjusted to motivate compliance and level the playing field for firms that follow the law.53
Currently, most employers who are identified as violating the minimum-wage law only pay back wages; civil monetary penalties are assessed in less than half of cases, even for repeat and/or willful violators.54 Specifically, the Wages and Hours Division at the U.S. Department of Labor could levy back-pay damages and pursue civil monetary damages more aggressively. Additionally, some states have required violating employers to pay triple or quadruple back pay and have pursued criminal penalties for repeat offenders.55
Address the economic and care needs of working families
Earnings are critical to workers, but jobs also must work with employees’ personal and family responsibilities. Scheduling reforms and paid leave help people stay in decent or good jobs when they have them.
Scheduling laws, often referred to as fair workweek, fair scheduling, or predictive scheduling laws, aim to shift employers’ scheduling practices by requiring more stable schedules, advance notice of schedules, or commitments to minimum hours. These regulations are standard in many countries and could be expanded in the United States.
An evaluation of Seattle’s Secure Scheduling Ordinance, for example, finds that “eliminating schedule unpredictability would reduce the share of workers experiencing at least one material hardship by 45 percentage points (from 64% to 19%).”56 Additionally, that policy evaluation and a study of a stable-scheduling initiative at GAP Inc. stores find workers’ well-being and sleep improved with more schedule stability.57 The GAP study also demonstrates benefits to the firm via reduced turnover among experienced employees and increased productivity.58
Passing paid leave laws also is an important priority for improving job quality for working families. Laws enacted in 13 states and Washington, DC demonstrate feasibility.59 Paid leave recognizes workers’ legitimate needs and signals respect for workers and their families. Paid leave also supports economic security by keeping people employed and providing income replacement at a critical time.
California’s leave law, for example, nearly doubled access to pay during leaves, increasing benefits especially for low-income and less-educated workers and for men.60 New paid leave laws at the federal level would address these variations across states and help meet the needs of lower-income workers who are not as well-served by the federal unpaid family leave law and employer-provided benefits.
Facilitate opportunities for advancement and autonomy
Public policy can help expand collaborative training initiatives that engage multiple employers within a given industry. Such sectoral programs typically provide training for jobs in specific industries, such as health care, life sciences, and technology, that have both good starting wages and promotion opportunities.61
Rigorously evaluated programs, such as Project Quest and Year Up United, combine the training for these fields with soft-skills training, job-placement support, and a variety of services, including transportation support and child care. Successful sectoral programs increase employment in high-wage jobs, but public investments and long-term commitments are needed to scale these programs.62 For instance, the Economic Development Administration within the U.S. Department of Commerce recently supported new communities of practice focused on specific industries’ or regions’ workforce development initiatives.
Other strategies include encouraging employers to remove educational credentials from job listings when alternative training could prepare people for those jobs.63 Yet research is needed on the impact of those changes. A recent audit study finds employers are less likely to hire applicants with alternative training and related work experience than degree holders; this is still true for employers who have removed educational credentials from their job postings.64
Policymakers also can also champion and incentivize employers who design work with autonomy and learning in mind. A long tradition of “high-performance work systems” research finds that the combination of certain practices, such as building autonomy, cross-training and other skills development, and performance-based pay, can improve productivity, raise pay in some settings, and also support workers’ well-being.65
Public procurement policies that incorporate job-quality data could encourage employers to design work in these ways.66 Additionally, local policymakers and community leaders can establish community benefit agreements with developers and new employers, encouraging job-quality standards, the hiring of local workers, and more.67
Support worker power and union organizing
Worker power, including collective bargaining by unions, can advance all the elements of job quality discussed here. To protect workers’ rights to organize and pursue their own job-quality priorities, we need to strengthen the enforcement of existing laws and ideally update federal labor law as well.68
Given how few U.S. workers are currently represented by unions and the limitations of current federal law, though, it is also important to pursue organizing innovations and state and local changes.69 One such innovation is the industry standard board, also known as a workforce standard board or sectoral co-regulation. These boards involve employers, state officials, and worker representatives in certain industries. They give workers a formalized role in setting wage rates and benefits, often improving pay for those already above the minimum wage. Additionally, these boards can support the effective enforcement of labor laws, acting as partners to educate workers, employers, and the broader community.70
“Bargaining for the common good” is another strategic innovation in which unions and other local organizations develop integrated campaigns focused on community concerns, such as housing, climate, racial justice, schools, and also decent jobs.71 This approach may foster solidarity across people with different employment statuses, work experiences, and backgrounds and provide a path toward feeling respected and recognized both at work and in the larger community.
Vision 2020
In Conversation
In Conversation with Daron Acemoglu
May 8, 2023
Conclusion
This may seem like a daunting set of policy challenges, but the time to begin articulating a better vision of work is now. Rebuilding a fair economy over the next decade is particularly critical because of expected disruptions in the U.S. labor market tied to AI technologies and transitions in energy production. As jobs are altered and many jobs are lost while others emerge, there is a clear risk of greater alienation and despair unless another model of quality work is on the horizon.
About the author
Erin L. Kelly is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and co-director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research.
Did you find this content informative and engaging?
Get updates and stay in tune with U.S. economic inequality and growth!
End Notes
1. Michèle Lamont, Seeing Others: How Recognition Works—and How It Can Heal a Divided World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2023), available at https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Seeing-Others/Michele-Lamont/9781982153793; Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), available at https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674009929.
2. William Julius Wilson, When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor (New York: Vintage, 1997); Christine J. Walley, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), available at https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo13487662.html.
3. David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson, “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States,” American Economic Review 103 (6) (2013): 2121–68, available at https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.103.6.2121; Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), available at https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190785/deaths-of-despair-and-the-future-of-capitalism; David Autor and others, “Places versus People: The Ins and Outs of Labor Market Adjustment to Globalization.” Working Paper 33424 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2025), available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w33424.
4. Arne Kalleberg, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s-2000s (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), available at https://arnekalleberg.web.unc.edu/books/good-jobs-bad-jobs/; David Weil, The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), available at https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674975446; Peter Cappelli, Our Least Important Asset: Why the Relentless Focus on Finance and Accounting is Bad for Business and Employees (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023), available at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/our-least-important-asset-9780197629802.
5. Susan Lambert, “Passing the buck: Labor flexibility practices that transfer risk onto hourly workers,” Human Relations 61 (9) (2008), available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0018726708094910; Adam Reich and Peter Bearman, Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), available at https://cup.columbia.edu/book/working-for-respect/9780231188425; Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett, “Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being,” American Sociological Review 84 (1) (2019), available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122418823184.
6. Patrick Kline, Evan K. Rose, and Christopher R. Walters, “Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 137 (4) (2022), available at https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjac024; Lincoln Quillian and John J. Lee, “Trends in racial and ethnic discrimination in hiring in six Western countries,” PNAS 120 (6) (2023), available at https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2212875120; Lincoln Quillian and others, “Meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time,” PNAS 114 (41) (2017), available at https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1706255114.
7. Clem Aeppli and Nathan Wilmers, “Rapid wage growth at the bottom has offset rising US inequality,” PNAS 119 (42) (2022), available at https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2204305119; David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew, “The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Labor Market.” Working Paper 31010 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2024), available at https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010; Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs, Moving the Needle: What tight labor markets do for the poor (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023), available at https://www.ucpress.edu/books/moving-the-needle/hardcover.
8. Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, Rachel Navarre, and Stephen M. Utych, “Populist psychology: Economics, culture, and emotions,” The Journal of Politics 83 (4) (2021): 1559–1572, available at https://doi.org/10.1086/715168; George Ward and others, “The role of negative affect in shaping populist support: Converging field evidence from across the globe,” American Psychologist 80 (3) (2025), available at https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001326.
9. Lisa Berkman, Ichiro Kawachi, and Töres Theorell, “Working Conditions and Health.” In Lisa F. Berkman, Ichiro Kawachi, and M. Maria Glymour (eds.), Social Epidemiology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014).
10. Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016), available at https://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land; Arlie Hochschild, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (New York: The New Press, 2024), available at https://thenewpress.com/books/stolen-pride; Lamont, Seeing Others: How Recognition Works—And How it Can Heal a Divided World. Additional research, however, that traces (or adjusts) this proposed chain from work experiences to these feelings to political expression would be valuable.
11. Definitions of job quality and frameworks for assessing it abound. One key framework was developed by a broad coalition and is summarized here: “Statement on Good Jobs,” available at https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/good-jobs-champions-group/ (last accessed May 2025).
12. Jasmine Payne-Patterson and Adewale A. Maye, “A history of the federal minimum wage” (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2023), available at https://www.epi.org/blog/a-history-of-the-federal-minimum-wage-85-years-later-the-minimum-wage-is-far-from-equitable/; “After the longest period in history without an increase, the federal minimum wage today is worth 30% less than 15 years ago–and 41% less than in 1968,” available at https://economic.github.io/real_minimum_wage/ (last accessed May 2025). The current federal subminimum wage for tipped workers was set at $2.31 in 1991.
13. “Minimum Wage Tracker,” available at https://www.epi.org/minimum-wage-tracker/#/min_wage/ (last accessed May 2025).
14. Alexandre Mas and Amanda Pallais, “Valuing alternative work arrangements,” American Economic Review 107 (12) (2017): 3722–3759, available at https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20161500; Arindrajit Dube, Suresh Naidu, and Adam D. Reich, Power and Dignity in the Low-Wage Labor Market: Theory and Evidence from Wal-Mart Workers.” Working Paper 30441 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2022), available at https://www.nber.org/papers/w30441.
15. Lambert, “Passing the buck: Labor flexibility practices that transfer risk onto hourly workers”; Susan Lambert, “Fair work schedules for the U.S. economy and society: What’s reasonable, feasible, and effective” (Washington: Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 2022), available at http://equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/lambert.pdf.
16. Susan Lambert, Julia R. Henly, and Jaeseung Kim, “Precarious Work Schedules as a Source of Economic Insecurity and Institutional Distrust,” The Russel Sage Foundation Journal of Social Sciences 5 (4) (2019), available at https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/4/218; Mahdi Hashemian, Zeynep Ton, and Hazhir Rahmandad, “The Effect of Unstable Schedules on Unit and Employee Productivity.” Working Paper (2021), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3839673.
17. Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett, “Hard Times: Routine Schedule Unpredictability and Material Hardship among Service Sector Workers,” Social Forces 99 (4) (2021), available at https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/99/4/1682/5890832.
18. Joshua Choper, Daniel Schneider, and Kristen Harknett, “Uncertain Time: Precarious Schedules and Job Turnover in the US Service Sector,” ILR Review 75 (5) (2021), available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00197939211048484.
19. “The Shift Project: Home,” available at https://shift.hks.harvard.edu/ (last accessed May 2025); Schneider and Harknett, “Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being”; Kristen Harknett, Daniel Schneider, and Sigrid Luhr, “Who Cares if Parents have Unpredictable Work Schedules?: Just-in-Time Work Schedules and Child Care Arrangements,” Social Problems 69 (1) (2022), available at https://academic-oup-com.libproxy.mit.edu/socpro/article/69/1/164/5905573; Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett, “Maternal exposure to work schedule unpredictability and child behavior,” Journal of Marriage and Family 84 (1) (2021), available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jomf.12800
20. Erin L. Kelly and Phyllis Moen, Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do about It (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), available at https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691227085/overload
21. “Is paid leave available for both parents of infants?” available at https://www.worldpolicycenter.org/policies/is-paid-leave-available-for-both-parents-of-infants (last accessed May 2025); “Are workers entitled to paid sick leave from the first day of illness?” available at https://www.worldpolicycenter.org/policies/are-workers-entitled-to-paid-sick-leave-from-the-first-day-of-illness (last accessed May 2025).
22. “Workers’ Experience with Family and Medical Leave,” available at https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/women.s.bureau.department.of.labor/viz/shared/GS56TJD35 (last accessed May 2025).
23. “Percentage of civilian workers with access to paid leave by wage category,” available at https://www.bls.gov/charts/employee-benefits/percent-access-paid-leave-by-wage.htm (last accessed May 2025); McLeod Brown and Kristen Monaco, “Employee access to sick leave before and during the COVID-19 pandemic” (Washington: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021), available at https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2021/article/employee-access-to-sick-leave.htm.
24. Bipartisan Policy Center, “State Paid Family Leave Laws Across the U.S.” (2024), available at https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/state-paid-family-leave-laws-across-the-u-s/.
25. Paul Osterman, “How American Adults Obtain Work Skills: Results of a New National Survey,” ILR Review 75 (3) (2022), available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00197939211018191.
26. Ibid. Note that Black workers are not significantly less likely to have access to formal training but are less likely to have access to informal training opportunities.
27. Erin Kelly and others, “How Do Employer Practices Affect Economic Mobility?” ILR Review 76 (5) (2023), available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00197939231186607.
28. Paul Osterman, “Reconsidering Occupational Internal Labor Markets: Incidence and Consequences,” ILR Review 77 (3) (2024), available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00197939241242089; Nathan Wilmers and William Kimball, “How Internal Hiring Affects Occupational Stratification,” Social Forces 101 (1) (2022), available at https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/101/1/111/6423719.
29. Hochschild, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right; Sarah Damaske, The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), available at https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691200149/the-tolls-of-uncertainty; Ofer Sharone, Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), available at https://oxfordjournals.org/chicago-scholarship-online/book/13649/.
30. Lisa F. Berkman and Beth C. Truesdale, eds., Overtime: America’s Aging Workforce and the Future of Working Longer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2022), available at https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/overtime/TheBook.
31. Sarah A. Burgard, Jennie E. Brand, and James S. House, “Toward a Better Estimation of the Effect of Job Loss on Health,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 48 (4) (2007), available at https://doi.org/10.1177/002214650704800403; Sarah A. Burgard and Sarah Seelye, “Histories of Perceived Job Insecurity and Psychological Distress among Older U.S. Adults,” Society and Mental Health 7 (1) (2017), available at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28824825/
32. Steven P. Vallas, Hannah Johnston, and Yaya Mommadova, “Prime Suspect: Mechanisms of Labor Control at Amazon’s Warehouses,” Work and Occupations 49 (4) (2022), available at https://doi.org/10.1177/07308884221106922; Paul Glavin, Alex Bierman, and Scott Schieman, “Über-Alienated: Powerless and Alone in the Gig Economy,” Work and Occupations 48 (4) (2021), available at https://doi.org/10.1177/07308884211024711; Katherine C. Kellogg, Melissa A. Valentine, and Angèle Christin, “Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control,” Academy of Management Annals 14 (1) (2020), available at https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2018.0174.
33. Marianne Cooper, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014), available at https://www.ucpress.edu/books/cut-adrift/paper; Allison J. Pugh, ed., Beyond the Cubicle: Job Insecurity, Intimacy, and the Flexible Self (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), available at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/beyond-the-cubicle-9780199957781; Kelly and Moen, Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do about It.
34. Lindsey D. Cameron, “The Making of the “Good Bad” Job: How Algorithmic Management Manufactures Consent Through Constant and Confined Choices,” Administrative Science Quarterly 69 (2) (2024), available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00018392241236163; Alexandrea J. Ravenelle, Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019), available at https://www.ucpress.edu/books/hustle-and-gig/paper; Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), available at https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691127958/gurus-hired-guns-and-warm-bodies.
35. Berkman, Kawachi, and Theorell, “Working Conditions and Health”; Jeffrey Pfeffer, Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), available at https://www.harpercollins.com/products/dying-for-a-paycheck-jeffrey-pfeffer?variant=32117263597602
36. Kimberly E. Fox and others, “Organisational- and group-level workplace interventions and their effect on multiple domains of worker well-being: A systematic review,” Work & Stress 36 (1) (2021), available at https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2021.1969476.
37. Kellogg, Valentine, and Christin, “Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control”; Vallas, Johnston, and Mommadova, “Prime Suspect: Mechanisms of Labor Control at Amazon’s Warehouses”; Joya Misra and Kyla Walters, Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022), available at https://www.ucpress.edu/books/walking-mannequins/paper. Even in these contexts, workers strategize to exert control and claim agency. See, for example, Lindsey D. Cameron and Hatim Rahman, “Expanding the Locus of Resistance: Understanding the Co-constitution of Control and Resistance in the Gig Economy,” Organization Science 33 (1) (2021), available at https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10.1287/orsc.2021.1557.
38. John W. Budd, Employment with a Human Face: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), available at https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801472602/employment-with-a-human-face; Yaminette Díaz-Linhart and others, “Does Voice Gap Influence Workers’ Job Attitudes and Well-Being? Measuring Voice as a Dimension of Job Quality,” BJIR (2024), available at https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12866.
39. Thomas A. Kochan and others, “Worker Voice in America: Is There a Gap between What Workers Expect and What They Experience?,” ILR Review 71 (1) (2019), available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793918806250; Díaz-Linhart and others, “Does Voice Gap Influence Workers’ Job Attitudes and Well-Being? Measuring Voice as a Dimension of Job Quality.”
40. Yaminette Díaz-Linhart and others, “Being Able to Express Yourself: Does Voice Environment Matter for Employee Well-being?” Working Paper (2025, unpublished), available from elkelly@mit.edu.
41. Alexander M. Kowalski and others, “Can a Voice Channel Reduce Turnover? Evidence on Employee Voice and Exit from a Cluster-randomized Trial in U.S. Fulfillment Centers.” Working paper (2025), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5193024; Kirsten F. Siebach and others, “Effectiveness of a Participatory Voice Intervention on Psychological Well-being among Warehouse Workers: Results from the Fulfillment Center Intervention Study.” Working Paper (2025, unpublished), available from elkelly@mit.edu.
42. “Labor Unions,” available at https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx (last accessed May 2025); John S. Ahlquist, Jake Grumbach, and Thomas Kochan, “The rise of the ‘union curious’: Support for unionization among America’s frontline workers” (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2024), available at https://www.epi.org/publication/rise-of-the-union-curious/#full-report
43. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Members—2024,” Press release, January 28, 2025, available at https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf.
44. Zachary Parolin and Tom VanHeuvelen, “The Cumulative Advantage of a Unionized Career for Lifetime Earnings,” ILR Review 76 (2) (2022), available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00197939221129261; Ioana Marinescu and Jake Rosenfeld, “Worker Power and Economic Mobility: A Landscape Report” (Washington: WorkRise, 2022), available at https://www.workrisenetwork.org/publications/worker-power-and-economic-mobility-landscape-report.
45. Xiaowen Han and others, “Cumulative Unionization and Physical Health Disparities among Older Adults,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 65 (2) (2023), available at https://doi.org/10.1177/00221465231205266.
46. Madeline Baxter, “The Racial Wealth Gap Is Smaller among Union Members” (Washington: WorkRise, 2024), available at https://www.workrisenetwork.org/working-knowledge/racial-wealth-gap-smaller-among-union-members.
47. Adam Dean and James McCallum, “The political implications of bad jobs and union decline” (Washington: Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 2025).
48. “Minimum Wage Tracker,” available at https://www.epi.org/minimum-wage-tracker/#/min_wage; Sebastian Martinez Hickey, “Over 9.2 million workers will get a raise on January 1 from 21 states raising their minimum wages” (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2024), available at https://www.epi.org/blog/over-9-2-million-workers-will-get-a-raise-on-january-1-from-21-states-raising-their-minimum-wages/.
49. Arindrajit Dube and Attila S. Lindner, “Minimum Wages in the 21st Century.” Working Paper 32878 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2024), available at https://www.nber.org/papers/w32878.
50. Michael Davies, R. Jisung Park, and Anna Stansbury, “Minimum Wages and Workplace Injuries.” (2024), available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=5062047
51. It is challenging to estimate the extent of wage theft, but research suggests it is common. See David Cooper and Teresa Kroeger, “Employers steal billions from workers’ paychecks each year” (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2017), available at https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-from-workers-paychecks-each-year/; Janice Fine and others, “Strategic enforcement and co-enforcement of U.S. labor standards are needed to protect workers through the coronavirus recession” (Washington: Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 2021), available at https://equitablegrowth.org/strategic-enforcement-and-co-enforcement-of-u-s-labor-standards-are-needed-to-protect-workers-through-the-coronavirus-recession/.
52. Adewale A. Maye, Daniel Perez, and Margaret Poydock, “Misclassifying workers as independent contractors is costly for workers and states” (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2025), available at https://www.epi.org/publication/misclassifying-workers-2025-update/.
53. Anna Stansbury, “Incentives to Comply with the Minimum Wage in the United States and the United Kingdom,” ILR Review 78 (1) (2024), available at https://doi.org/10.1177/00197939241299417.
54. Ibid.
55. Terri Gerstein, “How district attorneys and state attorneys general are fighting workplace abuses” (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2021), available at https://www.epi.org/publication/fighting-workplace-abuses-criminal-prosecutions-of-wage-theft-and-other-employer-crimes-against-workers/.
56. Kristen Harknett, Daniel Schneider, and Véronique Irwin, “Improving health and economic security by reducing work schedule uncertainty,” Social Sciences 118 (42) (2021), available at https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107828118.
57. Ibid.; Joan Williams and others, “Stable Scheduling Study: Health Outcomes Report.” (2022), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4019693.
58. Saravanan Kesavan and others, “Doing Well by Doing Good: Improving Retail Store Performance with Responsible Scheduling Practices at the Gap, Inc.,” Management Science 68 (11) (2022), available at https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4291.
59. Vicki Shabo, “Explainer: Paid and Unpaid Leave Policies in the United States” (Washington: New America, 2025), available at https://www.newamerica.org/better-life-lab/briefs/explainer-paid-and-unpaid-leave-policies-in-the-united-states/.
60. Maya Rossin-Slater, Christopher J. Ruhm, and Jane Waldfogel, “The Effects of California’s Paid Family Leave Program on Mothers’ Leave-Taking and Subsequent Labor Market Outcomes,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 32 (2) (2013), available at https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.21676; Charles L. Baum II and Christopher J. Ruhm, “The Effects of Paid Family Leave in California on Labor Market Outcomes,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 35 (2) (2016), available at https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.21894. Men had not been covered by California’s temporary disability insurance system, which previously provided some pay for birth mothers.
61. David Autor, Anran Li, and Matthew Notowidigdo, “Prepareing for the Work of the Future” (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, 2019), available at https://www.povertyactionlab.org/sites/default/files/review-paper/WOF_research-agenda_2019.04.02.pdf; Lawrence F. Katz and others, “Why Do Sectoral Employment Programs Work? Lessons from WorkAdvance.” Working Paper 28248 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020), available at https://www.nber.org/papers/w28248.
62. “Year Up United’s Groundbreaking Results,” available at https://www.yearup.org/research/pace (last accessed May 2025); Steve Lohr, “These Job-Training Programs Work, and May Show Others the Way,” The New York Times, October 3, 2022, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/business/these-job-training-programs-work-and-may-show-others-the-way.html; U.S. Economic Development Administration, “Good Jobs Challenge: Supporting Americans in Good Jobs” (n.d.), available at https://www.eda.gov/funding/programs/good-jobs-challenge.
63. “Opportunity @ Work: Home,” available at https://opportunityatwork.org/ (last accessed May 2025).
64. Mariana Oseguera, “Tearing the paper ceiling: Educational credentials and alternative routes in contemporary labor markets.” (People & Organizations Conference at University of Pennsylvania, September 2024), available from mo978@georgetown.edu.
65. Thomas Kochan and Lee Dyer, Shaping the Future of Work: A Handbook for Action and a New Social Contract (London: Routledge, 2020), available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003050001; Hazhir Rahmandad and Zeynep Ton, “If Higher Pay Is Profitable, Why Is It So Rare? Modeling Competing Strategies in Mass Market Services,” Organization Science 31 (5) (2020), available at https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.2019.1347?af=R; Zeynep Ton, The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2023), available at https://store.hbr.org/product/the-case-for-good-jobs-how-great-companies-bring-dignity-pay-and-meaning-to-everyone-s-work/10579; Dylan Nelson, Nathan Wilmers, and Letian Zhang, “Work Organization and Cumulative Advantage.” Working Papers 25-18 (Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau, 2025).
66. Mark G. Popovich and Maureen Conway, “Procurement with Purpose: Improving Job Quality and Equity Through Public Procurement Reform” (Washington: Aspen Institute, 2022), available at https://www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/procurement-with-purpose-improving-job-quality-and-equity-through-public-procurement-reform/
67. For example, see Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program, “Community Benefits Agreements: A Tool for Creating Good Jobs (Event Recording)” (2024), available at https://www.aspeninstitute.org/videos/community-benefits-agreements-a-tool-for-creating-good-jobs-event-recording/.
68. Marinescu and Rosenfeld, “Worker Power and Economic Mobility: A Landscape Report.”
69. CLJE:Lab, “Building Worker Power in Cities and States: A Toolkit for State and Local Labor Policy Innovation” (2024), available at https://clje.law.harvard.edu/publication/building-worker-power-in-cities-states/.
70. [1] CJLE:Lab, “Building Worker Power in Cities and States: Workers’ Boards” (2024), available at https://clje.law.harvard.edu/publication/building-worker-power-in-cities-states/workers-boards/; Harold Meyerson, “Turning the Tables in Minnesota,” The American Prospect, March 13, 2024, available at https://prospect.org/labor/2024-03-13-turning-tables-minnesota-labor-unions/.
71. “What is Bargaining for the Common Good?,” available at https://smlr.rutgers.edu/faculty-research-engagement/center-innovation-worker-organization-ciwo/bargaining-common-good (last accessed May 2025).
