Introduction

Every worker deserves a job that provides family-sustaining wages and benefits, workplace protections, and a voice in the workplace. Unfortunately, millions of American workers still lack these essentials. The economy and labor market fall short in providing jobs that meet these standards, especially for women and workers of color, who often face discrimination and disproportionately occupy low-paying positions without adequate benefits. Rather than countering these harmful economic realities, our national workforce development system perpetuates inequities, reinforces occupational segregation, and subsidizes low-quality jobs. In this paper, we feature three cases where workers are transforming jobs through strategies that include organizing, policy work, workforce training, and job restructuring. The lessons from these case studies show that it is possible to radically reimagine our workforce development system, making it a force to advance economic justice, racial and gender equity, and workers’ needs, voices, and power.

In today’s economy, women constitute nearly half of the U.S. workforce but represent two-thirds of workers in the 40 lowest-paying jobs, encountering issues such as inadequate benefits, discrimination, and harassment.¹ Women earn significantly less than men for the same work, and wage gap disparities are even more stark between Black and Latine women and white men.² Controlling for age, education, and geography, Black and Hispanic women earn 30 and 35 percent less than white men, respectively.³ Additionally, the Black unemployment rate continues to consistently be twice as high as the white unemployment rate.⁴ The persistent and widening racial and gender wage gap highlights trends in economic inequality.

The history of occupational segregation and low-wage jobs is a tale of systemic inequity that has disproportionately impacted women and workers of color.⁵ Historically, women and people of color have been systematically steered into lower-paying occupations, a practice deeply rooted in gender and racial biases. In the early to mid-twentieth century, women were largely confined to professions such as secretarial work, teaching, caregiving, and nursing, which were undervalued and undercompensated. Similarly, people of color faced overt discrimination that limited their access to higher-paying jobs, pushing them into low-wage sectors. While legal strides have been made to address these disparities, occupational segregation persists, with women and people of color still being overrepresented in low-wage and undervalued occupations. These jobs often lack access to essential benefits like health care, retirement, and paid leave and generally offer unpredictable schedules and limited flexibility.⁶ With limited benefits and protections, workers earning low wages experience challenges in securing housing, food, transportation, and other basic needs. They also often lack advancement opportunities and struggle to shape positive workplaces, resulting in dehumanized work that fails to recognize their contributions.⁷

Our national workforce system should proactively counter these troubling realities, disrupt occupational segregation, prioritize high-quality jobs, build worker power and voice, lift standards in all occupations, and address systemic racism and sexism in our labor market. Unfortunately, our current system does the opposite. The nation’s primary investment in workforce development, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), was designed to assist jobseekers with accessing employment, education, training, and supportive services to help them succeed in the labor market. In 2023, WIOA allocated approximately $6 billion to employment and training services.⁸ Resources to support WIOA (and previous federal workforce development programs) have been shrinking over the past 40 years.⁹ The central priorities of universal and targeted services can reach only a tiny fraction of workers who need support.

As currently structured, WIOA is a relatively weak system that is not using its limited resources to push for higher job quality and equity of access and instead tends to perpetuate existing inequities. WIOA has a historical tendency to reinforce occupational segregation, prioritize the needs of businesses over workers, and steer Black, Latine, and Indigenous workers and women into low-wage jobs. As designed, WIOA further perpetuates racial and gender inequities in the labor market. Data indicate that upon completion of a workforce training program, Black workers, despite having the highest employment rates, consistently earn the lowest wages among all other racial and ethnic groups.¹⁰

WIOA prioritization of employers over workers reflects a potential imbalance in its objectives. While the act aims to enhance workforce development and collaboration between businesses and training programs, its focus on meeting the needs of employers can overshadow the interests and well-being of workers. WIOA’s emphasis on immediate job placement and industry-driven training leads to a more employer-centric approach, where training programs are tailored to meet specific industry demands rather than meeting the needs of workers. The risk is that this focus on employer satisfaction compromises workers’ rights, wages, and job security, potentially perpetuating a system where the workforce is treated as a commodity rather than a group with distinct needs and aspirations. Further, the system, which carefully parses the eligibility of program participants, tends to take an “all comers” approach to employers, but not all employers are the same. In fact, the employers interested in services from the system include those with the highest turnover rates. Failing to make a systemic assessment of employer quality and focusing on the best employer possible leaves the system answering the needs of some of the worst employers. Without a radical transformation in the narrative and policy objectives of the workforce development system, the majority of investments merely bolster the low-wage sectors of our economy. Our workforce system must not only address employers’ needs, but also support building organizational power for workers to ensure a fair and equitable workforce development system.

WIOA also perpetuates occupational segregation because it often channels individuals from marginalized communities into low-wage occupations.¹¹ WIOA’s emphasis on short-term training for immediate job placement often neglects to assess the long-term viability of those placements or the capacity of those jobs to provide support for individuals or families over time. This prioritizes swift job placement, with just a fraction of resources spent on worker training. The predominant focus on industries like building trades and technical careers perpetuates a historical exclusion of women and people of color, resulting in continued underrepresentation within these professions. Additionally, systemic barriers such as discrimination, bias, and limited access to networks may hinder individuals from underrepresented groups in pursuing non-traditional fields. To truly address systemic inequities, we must critically re-evaluate and reshape the workforce development system, ensuring that it not only places individuals into jobs promptly but also fosters meaningful employment opportunities that promote inclusivity and economic sustainability.

The nation’s workforce development system currently falls short of meeting the needs of workers and communities. We must radically reimagine our workforce development system with the goal of sustaining high-quality jobs, incorporating job quality standards, disrupting occupational segregation, strengthening unions and work organizations, and empowering workers. While WIOA must be reformed, the rights and opportunities of the nation’s workers are also systematically impacted by our laws and enforcement of basic labor standards, workplace safety, union rights, health care and child care structures, and immigration law—to name only a few of the systems that are shaping workers’ lives and opportunities. A comprehensive approach to workforce development must recognize and address all the current policies and systems that harm workers, perpetuate low-quality jobs, and stifle workers’ rights.

Across the country, workers and organizations are forging paths beyond the traditional and publicly funded workforce development system. They are actively improving the quality of jobs, refining training systems, and securing policy changes to optimize job opportunities and standards for every worker. Their efforts offer a glimpse of a workforce development system rooted in worker power and provide valuable insight into the potential transformation of the system through fundamental restructuring. The GJC—which advocates for reforming the workforce development system to better serve all workers, especially women; Black, Latine, Indigenous, Asian American, and Pacific Islander workers; LGBTQIA+ and nonbinary workers; and immigrants—seeks to amplify the transformative work being led by workers across the nation. Here we highlight and draw lessons from ROC United, MASH, and H-CAP. These organizations played a crucial role in shaping the principles and strategies outlined in this report, with the aim of influencing policy decisions on the future of work, worker rights, and worker representation. They embody the principles of a workforce development system that fosters economic stability, mobility, equity, respect, and a voice for workers. We offer these cases to highlight their inspiring work and draw policy lessons from them that can guide future improvements in the workforce development system.