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Table of Contents
- Introduction: A Pivotal Moment to Transform the Way We Work
- Five Key Principles for Designing an Equitable and Effective Future of Work
- I. Doing Digital Work Right (Digital and Hybrid Workplaces)
- II. “Be Awesome at Both”—Make the Most of Hybrid Digital & In-Person Work
- III. Make Essential Work Good Work
- IV. Human-centered Public Policies are Good for Business
- V. Case Studies
- VI. Resources
III. Make Essential Work Good Work
The Future of Work is Already Here
In the past 50 years, the “good” jobs that provided many workers with living wages and hours and the support and stability to live good middle class lives with opportunity for upward mobility have been hollowed out. The new jobs created are, like two ends of a heavy barbell, either good, high-paying, and professional jobs for highly educated workers, or crummy, precarious service, retail, and contract work. In our increasingly polarized workforce, these new precarious jobs often offer low pay, unpredictable hours and schedules, few, if any, benefits like health care, and no job security or path to advancement. These jobs are filled largely by women and people of color. They’re the essential, invisible workers we all rely on—grocery workers, care workers, restaurant, and retail workers—who have been striking or quitting at unprecedented rates in the hopes of finding something better to support themselves and their families. It should come as a surprise to exactly no one that, as help wanted signs litter the windows of businesses across the country, organizations willing to pay living wages and offer fair hours and decent benefits, like White Castle, &pizza, and othe, are the ones filling positions. And don’t blame pandemic expanded unemployment benefits for unfilled jobs, as some have. Research out of the San Francisco Federal Reserve and elsewhere has found that the short period that workers had access to humane unemployment insurance had only a slight, if any, impact on unemployed workers’ motivation to seek a new job.
In all the talk of automation and the future of work, this is the real issue: the “crapification” of jobs and impoverishment of workers even as wealth at the top of the ladder grows. Worker compensation as a share of gross domestic product has been dropping steadily since 1971, due largely to corporate consolidation, globalization, and shrinking labor unions, as David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times. In other words, increasing productivity and wealth without shared prosperity and wellbeing. Yes, continuing automation will destroy some jobs. It will create others. And the real question is, will these new jobs be “big enough” to support a life? And, if what has happened to so many jobs in the past few decades is any indication, the answer is likely no. And then what? If we choose to allow these essential jobs to remain bad jobs, if we choose to continue to allow companies to treat these workers as expendable, and if we choose not to rise to the challenge and work together for the public investments and public policies that support workers—and no longer just those at the very top—then we may be destined to become, as MIT economist David Autor writes, a grotesquely unequal society of “the servers and the served.” And that’s not a future anyone would want to live in. We can change that future. Here’s how.
- Get the Basics Right
Fair pay. Fair hours. Living and equal wages. Safe working conditions. Benefits that support stability and quality of life. The right to organize. Pay transparency. Work-life boundaries. Systems that ensure respectful cultures—in person and virtually—free of harassment where all can thrive. Research shows that companies that pay workers well tend to have higher labor productivity and can be just as profitable or more than companies that don’t. If you’re not sure what to pay, check out the MIT Living Wage Calculator.Paying well is good for business. Research shows that worries about finances can make it difficult to focus at work and even reduce a worker’s cognitive capacity—equal to going without a good night’s sleep. Other studies have found that when workers aren’t worried about money, they’re more productive and make fewer mistakes.
- Make Schedules Stable
Many hourly, retail, and service workers, many of whom are women, mothers, and people of color, are often given unpredictable schedules—different numbers of hours every week, different shifts scheduled at different times, and with very short notice. That means workers often have no idea when they’ll be working and how much they’ll earn from week to week, making it difficult to pay bills, arrange child care or plan for their lives.The unpredictable schedules are often the result of algorithmic scheduling—companies using technology to attempt to match labor with demand in order to keep labor costs low. But what this now-common practice ignores is that unstable schedules are not only bad for workers and their families but also for business. Companies can see labor costs on their books, but they fail to see the “future lost sales” of disillusioned customers who can’t find experienced workers to help them and never make a purchase. Research has also found that stable schedules have not only increased productivity, but also sales.
- Cross Train
Instead of hiring part-time workers and sending them home or laying them off when demand falls off, research by Zeynap Ton, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and founder of the Good Jobs Institute, has found that companies can offer more stable jobs by cross-training workers to work in different departments to better meet fluctuating demand. For instance, Wegmans, the grocery store chain, never laid workers off when the pandemic hit, instead it trained workers for new tasks—learning to bake bread or cut seafood or working as a runner to help customers with curbside pickup. Cross training is a way of upskilling workers and offering potential paths to advancement. The key is to have good systems, Ton says. “Simplified work, empowered standardization, giving enough time, which I call operating with slack, and cross-training are all part of a system that enables people to shine and be a lot more productive and contribute higher,” Ton told Charte “But you can’t just do one and not the others.” - Provide Pathways to Advancement from Within
Offer on-the-job training, development, and opportunities to improve skills to help the upward economic mobility of workers, ensuring they don’t get stuck, as many do now. Surveys show an often wide disconnect between employers and essential workers and, in workplaces where workers are treated as expendable, little trust. But treating workers well and providing opportunities to advance from within leads to greater job sat and lower turnover, which, in itself can be a huge cost savings.
“In the pandemic, people have talked a lot about essential workers, but we actually treat them as essential jobs. We treat the workers as quite replaceable. So that's the most important thing. Remember that all the people who are working for you are actually people and should be treated as such … My hope is that there'll be a set of companies who say, ‘Wait a minute. We can actually operate in a very different way’—and not just being distributed or remote or out of the office, but actually caring for our people in a different way because the business benefit is—we're going to be more profitable and keep people around longer and be able to attract better people. And the human benefit is the human beings actually are healthier, enjoy what they're doing, which then also benefits the business in the end.” – Laszlo Bock, co-founder and CEO of Humu, a human resources company, and former vice president of people operations at Google told NPR