Unleashing Worker Power: Building Good Jobs Beyond the Traditional Workforce System

By Emily Andrews, Breanna Betts, Laura Dresser, India Heckstall, Peter Rickman, Teófilo Reyes

The Good Jobs Collaborative (GJC) is an evolving collaboration focused on transforming the nation’s workforce development system to advance economic justice, racial and gender equity, workers’ needs, and worker voice and power. Over the past year, we have identified and learned from projects where workers are improving jobs through organizing, policy work, workforce training, job restructuring, and more.

We feature three of these cases here: the Healthcare Career Advancement Program (H-CAP), a national labor-management organization; the Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United, an organization of more than 65,000 restaurant worker members; and the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Organization (MASH), an organization of more than 1,000 service and hospitality workers.

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.

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Acknowledgments

This research report is the first in a series from the Good Jobs Collaborative, a diverse coalition that brings policy experts and worker advocates into conversation on how to build a workforce development system that is responsive to the needs of workers first. The report was originally published by New America but is a product of the coalition and cross-posted to other websites.