Executive Summary

Every worker deserves a job that provides family-sustaining wages and benefits, workplace protections, and a voice in the workplace. The U.S. labor market fails to meet these minimal expectations, especially for women and workers of color who often face discrimination and disproportionately occupy low-paying positions without adequate benefits. To add insult to injury, the nation’s workforce development system is woefully inadequate, inattentive to job quality, and indifferent to building workers’ rights and power. Despite these challenges, workers across the nation are reimagining and restructuring jobs and training. They are building workforce development strategies outside the national workforce system. Their work showcases the shortcomings of the traditional system and offers concrete examples of what a workforce system rooted in worker power could look like.

With their focus squarely on service sector jobs, each of these three cases shows that workforce development rooted in worker power is possible and full of promise:

• The Healthcare Career Advancement Program (H-CAP), a national labor-management organization, is building the workforce for quality care through worker-centered workforce development infrastructure and training by partnering with unions, workers, employers, health care recipients, and communities.
• The Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United, an organization of more than 65,000 restaurant worker members, is the country’s oldest and largest restaurant worker-led organization. ROC United works to improve restaurant workers’ lives by building worker power and uniting workers of various backgrounds around shared goals and values.
• The Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Organization (MASH), an organization of more than 1,000 service and hospitality workers, is focused on improving job quality and the labor market for service workers in Milwaukee through unionization, community organizing, and work inside the industry to restructure and improve jobs.

These three cases illustrate the influence of workers and worker organizations in shaping workforce development, thereby actualizing the definitions of worker power by the GJC and how that transforms the workforce development system. In these cases, worker power is evident where workers come together through unions or other collective means to improve job quality through policy, organizing, work restructuring, and training strategies, while also using their frontline understanding of jobs to address industry problems. Worker-centered workforce development only occurs when workers have functional power in organizations, worksites, and industries. These cases show that worker power can transform workforce development.

We conclude by discussing how these cases demonstrate and elaborate upon GJC policies and principles and clarify how to improve the workforce development system. Most fundamentally, we hope that these cases will inspire interest, innovation, and concrete policy action to build a workforce development system that centers workers, tears down inequity in our labor markets, and raises the quality of jobs for all.