Making Worker Power and a Worker-Centered Workforce Development System Reality

The case studies of H-CAP, ROC United, and MASH provide examples of potential directions for policy and practice. Each of these cases is successfully pursuing worker-centered workforce development organizations and working largely outside of the traditional workforce development system. The programs improve job quality, provide training programs informed by the needs of workers themselves, and expand workers’ power to improve their workplaces. These cases demonstrate the existence of a robust workforce development system, which offers valuable lessons for informing national policy.

In combination, these case studies and the GJC principles point to necessary improvements to our existing national workforce system and highlight the need for policies that integrate workers’ rights and protections into workforce development. Here, we extract these lessons to solidify the GJC policy priorities:

To center workers’ interests and needs, our workforce development system should actively create platforms and engagement structures to incorporate workers’ voices and experiences, including giving equal power and voice to workers, unions, worker centers, and community-based organizations in state and local workforce funding decisions. Engagement should ensure that workers, worker centers, and unions representing workers in the region are at the planning and decision-making table, with power equal to or greater than employers, to influence workforce development interventions and provide input on how to best identify and extend opportunities to high-road employers.

To advance worker power and worker rights, our workforce development system must support pathways for workers to organize, form unions, and collectively bargain for wages, benefits, and other working conditions, as well as address community issues both within individual jobs sites and across sectors and industries. The workforce system should fund and support worker-centered training provided through worker organizations and labor-management partnerships. This training should include programming to enforce workplace rights such as wage and hour laws, the right to collectively bargain, and workplace safety. These training programs should aim to deepen relationships with agencies that enforce workers’ rights, wage and hour regulations, safety standards, and organizing aspects of labor law. Union membership leads to higher incomes, better benefits, greater workforce stability, improved industry-wide standards, and labor-management partnerships that effectively bring in and retain new workers. Workforce policy should explicitly support the expansion of unions and the rights of workers to form unions and bargain collectively.

Strategies:

• Give workers, worker centers, and organizations that represent workers a seat at the table where state and local workforce funding decisions are made. To ensure that worker input, experience, and recommendations are considered, workers and worker organizations must have decision-making power equal to or greater than employers.
• Provide stronger worker rights, union rights, and job quality materials and training throughout the system, including training state and local workers in the national workforce system on these issues.
• Prioritize funding to worker-centered programs like the CHOW Institute, H-CAP, and MASH, which are grounded in the expressed needs of workers and emphasize creating pathways to better jobs while building worker power and advocating for a floor of job quality within the industry as a whole.
• Reduce the barriers to win and service federal grants by eliminating burdensome paperwork and reporting requirements that can be difficult for smaller organizations to navigate. Where administrative burdens cannot be eased, Congress should establish specific funding streams that help organizations meet the requirements. Current reporting and tracking requirements necessitate significant human resources capacity that many worker-based organizations struggle to maintain.
• Create funding streams focused on all incumbent workers within high-road partner employers and reduce funding restrictions on which populations can be served. Groups like ROC United and labor-management training partnerships must be allowed to train all members, regardless of their immigration status. Undocumented immigrants are the engines of the restaurant industry and must be able to take advantage of workforce development programs without restrictions.
• Bring established unions and worker-oriented organizations to the table, along with industry representatives, to develop sectoral training standards where they do not exist. Sectoral training standards should require high-road education and training programs that lead to sustainable, longitudinal career pathways and placements in high-quality jobs, and minimize ad hoc, one-off training programs that are not part of a comprehensive employment strategy and do not improve job quality for workers.
• Invest in innovation in workforce strategies where workers have a structured capacity through unions and other forms of independent organizing to suggest and secure job improvement.

Systemic barriers such as discrimination, bias, and limited access to networks may hinder individuals from underrepresented groups from pursuing non-traditional fields. Specifically, our workforce development system must confront systemic anti-Black racism. WIOA reinforces occupational segregation by directing individuals, particularly Black workers, into fields that offer low wages, rather than addressing the root causes of inequality and promoting access to high-quality occupations.¹ Our workforce development system must build greater accountability and protect workers from occupational segregation by ensuring that programs include racial and gender equity goals and benchmarks that proactively combat discrimination.

Strategies:

• Fund targeted, race-conscious programs and create funding streams that redress the specific harms inflicted on workers of color by the workforce development system and broader labor market policies and set target goals to counter occupational segregation.
• Require that reporting data be disaggregated by race at the program level and make future funding contingent on progress toward racial and gender equity program goals.
• Include support for uninterrupted wages and benefits for participants in training and workforce development programs. Funding should also be provided for whole-person supportive services for workforce development program participants that recognize the needs of women and workers of color, such as child care, dependent care, transportation, access to technology and tech training, ongoing coaching and peer mentorship, and case management support.

The U.S. labor market is awash in low-quality jobs, and millions of workers struggle to make ends meet. We must take a holistic approach to workforce policy that includes creating universal labor standards and protections and other policies that support workers and increase workforce participation.

Strategies:

• Strengthen the right to organize by updating antiquated and ineffective labor laws through comprehensive labor law reform, including passing the Protect the Right to Organize Act and addressing the specific obstacles facing restaurant workers in their efforts to form unions.
• Enact fair scheduling laws that help create predictable schedules and incomes for hourly workers, including passing the Schedules That Work Act and the Part Time Worker Bill of Rights. Unpredictable schedules, inadequate hours, and “just-in-time” scheduling practices are shown to harm workers, their families, and their communities.²
• End the tipped minimum wage and raise the federal minimum wage to a family-sustaining level that increases annually with the cost of living.
• Pass the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act, ensuring workers can take paid leave from their jobs to welcome a new child, care for a sick family member, or care for their own medical conditions. Paid family and medical leave has been shown to increase labor market participation, improve worker retention, and reduce turnover.³

All workers are entitled to baseline job quality standards that ensure a prosperous family-sustaining wage, robust benefits, and safe working conditions, irrespective of employment arrangement. Our workforce system must include a job quality framework that sets standards for family-sustaining wages and essential benefits like health care, paid leave, retirement savings plans, and the freedom to join a union. Federal workforce dollars should be geared toward partnerships with high-road employers that meet this standard. Additionally, federal workforce dollars should provide incentives and accountability for low-road employers in low-wage, occupationally segregated sectors so they become high-road employers and develop good quality jobs. Employer partnerships should also support unionizing efforts by creating pro-union and pro-worker organization policies, including sectoral standards and approaches to increase worker power. Workers participating in workforce programs should be guaranteed high-quality employment after training, and federal dollars should not subsidize employers that do not offer worker protections and worker empowerment. Prioritizing job quality is essential for breaking the cycle of low-wage jobs and advancing a more inclusive, equitable, and resilient workforce. This will lead to sustained prosperity for individuals and communities.

Strategies:

1. Condition public workforce dollars on the program’s or employer’s ability to offer high-quality jobs with family-sustaining wages, robust benefits, and the free and fair choice to form a union.
2. Define and measure job quality metrics for public workforce investment. Require recipients of public funding to report and be assessed on the metrics with the goal of using public funding to improve job quality for workers, in addition to job attainment. Develop job quality metrics in collaboration with unions and worker organizations with clearly defined mechanisms for transparency and accountability. Disaggregate data and require impact evaluation of investments for specific targeted worker populations.
3. Prioritize funding and policy support for interventions led by labor-management partnerships where they currently exist, and encourage partnership formation by bringing labor unions and employers together to collaborate on solutions where formal collaborations do not yet exist.
4. Support expanded and diversified Registered Apprenticeship programs as a proven pathway to good jobs that will allow participants to secure training and employment opportunities.
5. Seek to establish industry-wide standards for job quality, with a process for establishing a wage and benefit floor. This includes using wage and benefit pass-through models in which portions of public funds are required to be used directly for wages and benefits; and establishing tripartite industry boards to set wages, rates, and job quality standards (as recently seen with California’s Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act, fast food industry standards boards, and other successful state and local boards⁴). Public funding or public approvals should be conditioned on adherence to industry-wide job quality standards, as with the Davis-Bacon Act’s requirements that construction companies working under federal contract pay workers prevailing wages and benefits.⁵