全球智库信息集成服务系统

See also: “Fact Sheet: A Design for Workforce Equity” by Livia Lam

Author’s note: CAP uses “Black” and “African American” interchangeably throughout many of our products. We chose to capitalize “Black” in order to reflect that we are discussing a group of people and to be consistent with the capitalization of “African American.”

Since the introduction of workplace computers in the 1970s, policymakers have been racing to outpace the workforce demands of the information age. Nearly half a century later, rapid technological advancement, globalization, climate change, and demographic shifts fuel an incomplete narrative of needing to prepare workers for a changed world. Because the reliance on smart systems and robots is expected to only increase with the growing adoption of automation, well-intentioned observers worry that the future demand for skilled workers will vastly exceed the supply.¹

To address these concerns, policymakers have promoted an expansion of skills training to help workers keep up in the changing economy. While previously, retraining responsibilities may have fallen to businesses that wanted to ensure their workers were prepared for the future, businesses are now investing less in workforce training.² Retraining programs can often be of low quality, and they are not necessarily responsive to labor market demands.³ As a consequence, workers have become obligated to discern the quality and labor market prospects of a training program; take time off from working; and contend with the costs not only of the training but also of books or fees, as well as child care, transportation, housing, health care, and all the other demands of adult life.

Importantly, all workers are not starting from the same position: Income and wealth inequality continue to rise.⁴ The reality is that even after considering protective factors such as increased education and training levels, wealth remains unevenly distributed as structural biases reinforce institutional barriers to employment. As argued by Race Forward, the overemphasis on skills attainment for many workers “fail[s] to recognize the historical and inter-generational way in which multiple systems, including not only workforce, but also education, housing, criminal justice and others, have created an inherent set of disadvantages for people of color.”⁵ The overemphasis on skills training obscures the structural character of the problem that must be addressed: equity in workforce development.

This is particularly important because training is not a guarantee of a better life. Workers in more than one-third of the fastest-growing 20 occupations in the United States⁶ make less than the average income for workers across the country.⁷ Even completing a high-quality, labor market-responsive training program that focuses on one of those occupations would not necessarily lead a worker to a job that could adequately support a family or lead to future career growth.

And it would be naive to think that low-quality job training and low-paying jobs are evenly distributed among the job-seeking population. Women and people of color at all education levels overwhelmingly make up most of the workforce in lower-paying jobs.⁸ Women and people of color are often tracked into particular occupations, regardless of suitability or earning potential. Job training can either be a bridge to more financial stability, or it can be a funnel to concentrate certain types of job seekers into low-wage occupations.

While the importance of equality is acknowledged in workforce development conversations and programming, equity—and equality—are not clearly defined at the systems level; therefore, developing priorities for achieving them are not consistently or coherently explored. This is reflected in often shallow analysis about what equity is in workforce development. Unfortunately, contemporary policies prescribing what should be done to reduce inequality are often proposals for safe changes at the margins. Because rising inequity remains a complex problem, it should be tackled in a way that is intentional and thoughtful and should be more firmly positioned in the national policy agenda.

Whether someone has been unemployed for a long time; is a veteran, a woman, a person of color, or an older worker; didn’t finish high school; has a disability; has a first language that is not English; or had past involvement with the criminal justice system, upskilling initiatives will be inconsequential without reorienting the workforce system. The old adage “one size fits all” has never been less true in workforce development. In the face of adapting to tomorrow’s world of work, a new nationwide, comprehensive, and sustained approached is required, not just for closing a skills gap but also for combating economic inequality and moving the nation toward achieving workforce equity.

Because the way people learn, work, and live is transforming, so should public policy. For these reasons, the time is now to boldly reimagine a workforce system that ensures equitable employment outcomes, not just matching skills with any job. By countering the prevailing skills-gap narrative, this report provides a new policy framework for redesigning a training and employment system aimed at improving job quality; the framework advances workforce equity as the system’s guiding priorities and core values.

This report calls for a workforce redesign and proposes building a new future-proof Workforce Equity Trust Fund (WETF) that will enshrine fundamental workforce protections into law. The major tenant of the new WETF makes job quality—not upskilling for upskilling’s sake—the driving force in anticipating the inevitable future of work. For young people newly entering the world of work, this means supporting strong connections to preapprenticeship and work-based learning opportunities in their communities. Through the WETF, the strategy for raising wages and increasing work opportunities is central to serving incumbent workers. Additionally, the WETF will ensure that approaches for improving health and well-being are incorporated into rapid reemployment strategies for dislocated workers and temporary workers in contingent employment.

Simply, workforce equity cannot be concerned only with job training and work attainment, seen in isolation. If the workforce system is redesigned the right way, every individual looking for a new job, pathways to promotions, or a career change, as well as individuals in between jobs or juggling multiple jobs, will be entitled to high-quality skill training and employment services that guarantee equality of treatment in the workforce. By redesigning for workforce equity, policymakers would create a new system that prioritizes the future financial stability and economic security of every worker.

Specifically, this report offers four policy pillars to help frame and support building a new workforce equity system:

1. Broaden the share of economic risks by requiring employers of a certain size to pay into the WETF
2. Make standard and portable a suite of wraparound services and employment benefits for every worker through the WETF
3. Improve workforce analytics by creating an accountability dashboard for multiple measures of job quality
4. Govern the WETF by a multistakeholder partnership comprising business, labor, and the public

This report provides the theoretical framing for placing equity concerns at the center of policymaking in workforce development. It also offers the conceptual underpinnings necessary to replace the norms that currently govern workforce development with a corresponding set of equity-focused policy and performance indicators.

Federal job training policy in the United States has historically placed the onus of responsibility on the unemployed and underemployed to find immediate work.⁹ The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA)—the current manifestation of federal law—authorizes workforce development programs that provide a combination of education and training services to prepare individuals, particularly those who face the greatest barriers to employment, for work and help them improve their prospects in the labor market.¹⁰

The public workforce development system was designed to respond to unemployment during economic crises. Federal job training policy has roots in the Great Depression era, influenced by the employment focus of New Deal programs, the U.S. Employment Service program under the 1933 Wagner-Peyser Act, and the federal-state unemployment insurance program established under the Social Security Act of 1935. All of these programs were aimed at putting people back to work in federal and state jobs to rebuild the economy.¹¹

However, sometime between the Employment Act of 1946 and the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) of 1962, the thinking began to shift. Workforce development and, specifically, job training policy were institutionalized as federal responsibilities for employment adjustment and economic stability, but notably, so was the federal emphasis on service delivery interventions directed at certain workers. Declared as part of the slate of War on Poverty programs under President Lyndon B. Johnson, training under the MDTA was viewed as an antipoverty program that targeted funding toward specific groups and communities based on poverty income thresholds.¹²

In its legislative analysis of federal workforce programs, the civil rights organization Race Forward notes that it was not until the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) that federal policy “employ[ed] an explicit equity lens, recognizing that workforce policy must acknowledge the root of Black unemployment.”¹³ According to Race Forward’s analysis, it was during the civil rights era that demands for better work conditions became central to changing the public system. During this time, the federal government implemented a combination of interventions aimed at dismantling structural racism, from worker training and expanded educational opportunities to increased safety nets and attention to workplace segregation. Unfortunately, economic gains stemming from these policies were only realized over the short term.¹⁴

After the EOA, several iterations of federal job training were enacted following the civil rights era. From the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act and the Job Training Partnership Act to the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) and, more recently, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the policy framework for workforce development shifted away from being race-conscious and placed a greater focus on business necessity and “bootstraps individualism,” reflecting broader policy efforts to decentralize and deregulate government at the time.¹⁵

Training and career interventions aimed at individuals are well-studied

While it is beyond the scope of this report to conduct a comprehensive literature review on job training best practices, interventions and initiatives aimed at improving individual worker skills are commonly examined in both popular and scholarly publications. The conventional wisdom holds that if individuals are not working, it’s because they do not have the skills that employers need, and if they want a different job, then they need to get trained. On the basis of this thinking, expansion of training and credentialing programs has become a silver bullet solution that has resulted in a range of policy pursuits, from boosting apprenticeship and academic and nonacademic educational credentialing to experimenting with variations of individual training accounts and income share agreement schemes.¹⁶

Indeed, an increasingly robust body of knowledge now exists. The U.S. Departments of Labor, Commerce, Education, and Health and Human Services, with input from several other federal agencies, prepared a report, “What Works in Job Training,” that synthesizes the evidence of adult and youth job training strategies and programs.¹⁷ The report highlighted a number of different workforce strategies that were effective job training programs for adults, including postsecondary education and industry recognized credentials; flexible and innovative skill-building training curricula and strategies; work-based training education; labor market information and guidance; cross-system coordination; and integrated education, training, and work supports. For youth, career preparation and career education; work experience and summer programs; work- and industry-based education, training, and career academies; and comprehensive and integrated models were found to be most effective.

In its literature review of coverage, effectiveness, flexibility, and coordination of policies and programs aimed to prepare workers for skilled technical jobs, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found several promising models that improved rates of successful completion of education and training as well as coordinated education and training opportunities tailored to employer needs.¹⁸ The study found that integration of academic education, technical training, and hands-on work experience improves outcomes and return on investment for students in secondary and postsecondary education, as well as for skilled technical workers in different career stages.¹⁹

The same NAS study found that approaches aimed at better integration of academic and technical education and training showed promise in improving the quality of postsecondary education and increasing the return on investments in education and training for skilled technical occupations. Dual-enrollment programs and early college high schools and career academies were showcased as ways to improve links between secondary and postsecondary education. Centers of excellence and strategic sector partnerships linking training and work between employers and community and technical colleges have the potential to create better-integrated learning environments that meet local employer skill requirements. Intended to increase the portability and wider recognition of acquired technical skills, application of portable credentials were also found to help students receive the education and training they need to address the needs of local industries.

Additionally, the NAS study identified promising approaches that linked employers with workers, such as joint labor-management strategies and talent pipelines. Apprenticeship is another proven worker training intervention that combines on-the-job training with classroom instruction. Yet despite the establishment of “a formal system of ‘registered apprenticeships’ in 1937,” the practice is notably underused in the United States.²⁰ In recent years, in recognition of employers’ growing calls for training more workers, policymakers have pushed to develop apprenticeship programs as a way to bridge the so-called skills gap. The U.S. Department of Labor, which administers the Registered Apprenticeship system, estimates that the average annual starting wage for an individual who has completed an apprenticeship is more than $50,000, which can add up to about $300,000 more in wages and benefits over the course of a career, compared with peers who have not completed an apprenticeship.²¹

For workers, apprenticeship means a real job that leads to a credential that is valued in the labor market. Moreover, apprentices are paid for their time spent on the job, accumulate little to no student debt, and are generally retained once they have successfully completed their programs.²² Employers benefit as well. In short, apprentices are both an effective and cost-efficient strategy for employers to build their current workforce and sustain it for the future.

Other best-practice models include the BEST Hospitality Training initiative in Boston and Capital IDEA in Texas. These are two examples of employer-driven job training that have shown positive results for workers.²³ The Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training Program (I-BEST) program in Washington state has also been highlighted over the years as an effective way to serve non-native English-speaking students seeking workforce training.²⁴ This program creates classroom teams made up of professional-technical instructors with English as a second language or adult basic education instructors, who co-teach an integrated course of language and vocational skills training.²⁵

A 2010 Sectoral Employment Impact Study conducted by Public/Private Ventures examined the extent to which various sectoral programs raised the wages of low-income and other disadvantaged workers. It found that at the three sites—the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership in Milwaukee, Jewish Vocational Service in Boston, and Per Scholas in New York City—program participants earned higher wages than control participants and were more likely to work in jobs that offered benefits such as health insurance or paid leave.²⁶

Especially in occupations measured as high growth and in high demand by employers, the skills imperative tacitly accepts the view that upskilling leads to better employment opportunities, more chances for career advancement, and greater mobility for workers.

Job training programs do not necessarily guarantee good jobs or higher wages

Despite some targeted examples, overall research on job training programs’ impact on earnings has yielded mixed results. For example, Mathematica recently completed its gold standard evaluation of the publicly funded workforce system, looking at whether providing intensive services and individual job training improved certain employment outcomes for study participants. Specifically, Mathematica found that in the 30 months after enrollment, study participants offered training from Adult or Dislocated Worker programs, compared with those receiving only core and intensive services, did not experience an increase in employment or earnings, on average.²⁷

Several studies suggest that individuals enrolled in job training programs are not necessarily connected to quality employment.²⁸ For example, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that while certificate programs increase earnings on average, programs in fields of study with high concentrations of women do not confer a substantial wage premium over a high school degree.²⁹ Meanwhile, a study from the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University examined “stackable credentials,” a strategy that organizes an associate degree program into a sequence of discrete but connected credentials that can be completed independently, and it found that few students continue beyond the first step in the stack.³⁰

Finally, in an evaluation of WorkAdvance, a sectoral-focused training model, MDRC found positive impacts on participation, completion, employment, and earnings rates across targeted sectors. At the same time, the findings also suggested that there are limits to what can be done on the worker, or supply side, of the equation.³¹ MDRC’s findings also note that the amount of time spent on and the disposition of those implementing a program can affect whether a strategy such as WorkAdvance can “bear fruit.”³² This means that on the demand side, experience in running a sector-based employment program can also be a factor. Among other issues, training providers should consider the time it takes to cultivate and deepen relationships with industry and allow for ongoing programmatic adjustment to make sure the workforce needs of employers truly offer upward advancement for those workers participating in training.

There is also growing recognition that credentials can provide currency in the labor market.³³ Educational systems, states, and the private sector are all placing greater emphasis on college and career readiness for students—especially those from underserved communities—claiming that credential attainment serves as a key point along their path to economic opportunity.³⁴

However, according to the National Academy of Sciences, the available research on certifications indicates that outcomes are highly dependent on context. Certifications appear to have more labor market value in some sectors than others, and some degree of quality control is exercised through third-party review or accreditation. For example, certificates that require long periods of study and are aligned with industry certifications provide more benefits to holders relative to those that require short periods of study.³⁵

A 2019 Excellence in Education and Burning Glass Technologies study found that of the 24 states for which data were available and analyzed, none were highly aligned in terms of supply for credentials earned by high school students and the demand for those credentials in the job market.³⁶ As discussed above, the Mathematica evaluation found inconclusive evidence of the connection between job training and increased employment earnings. At the same time, researchers in the study also showed an increased likelihood of participants receiving a credential if they completed a full set of training services, which may suggest an oversupply of credentials that lack labor market demand. Here, a misalignment of education and career goals with employer needs—rather than a misalignment of skills and employer needs—has the potential to exacerbate employment gaps.³⁷

Federal legislative history shows that policymakers have continually resorted to employing job training programs as a form of economic intervention during recessions and expansions. Except for a short period of time during the civil rights era, overemphasis on individualism has remained pervasive in U.S. public workforce policy. Contemporary rhetoric on skills gaps continues a legacy based on the assumption of meritocracy.

Consequently, other types of mismatch that determine the level of labor market efficiency have been less closely examined in the workforce policy sphere. Drawing from a diversity of academic disciplines, what follows is a review of key literature that is intended to build a conceptual framework for defining economic equity as a core value driving workforce development.

Multiple mismatches in the labor market affect job seekers

This conceptual framework contends that the normative assumptions undergirding the skills mismatch narrative are oversimplified and incomplete.³⁸ This is not to suggest that educational attainment does not help workers secure job outcomes that matter. There is well-established research linking higher levels of education with higher earnings, better health, and longer lives. Additionally, planning for an uncertain future of work may render certain occupations susceptible to displacement, leading to increasing calls for new skills.

Yet an individual’s ability to gain and maintain employment is also dependent on personal and social circumstances. Likewise, the extent to which employers fill open jobs is affected by their own characteristics and practices.³⁹ Research⁴⁰ on hiring,⁴¹ homeownership,⁴² and education⁴³ suggests links between these practices and disparities in income, wages, wealth, and economic mobility. For example, economist David Neumark’s research on wage differences across groups shows labor market discrimination and generally indicate that hiring discrimination is pervasive.⁴⁴ In particular, he delineates two types of hiring discrimination that have policy implications. While “taste discrimination” is tied to prejudice in hiring based on preconceived notions of a particular group, “statistical discrimination” happens when employer stereotypes about the productivity of a group hold for a particular person. To reduce or even eliminate hiring bias based on taste discrimination, Neumark recommends policymakers consider rule changes that would raise the cost of discrimination.⁴⁵ With statistical discrimination, it may make sense for policymakers to simply put rules in place that provide more information about each individual job applicant.⁴⁶

In other words, the conditions that affect people’s ability to find jobs that match their qualifications, interest, and needs vary. Beyond educational attainment, unemployment due to mismatch has been explained in economic literature as a function of multiple factors, such as changes in market structure, information gaps caused by inefficient job matching processes, lack of workforce flexibility, wages, and search channels used by job seekers.⁴⁷

Taking a multidisciplinary look at the literature from both macro and micro perspectives, sociologist Arne Kalleberg presents illustrative data on how changes in labor markets and the workforce have led to seven types of mismatches or conflicts between workers and jobs within the United States.⁴⁸ Prominently, when it comes to skills, workers are mismatched not only by being underqualified but also by being overqualified. For example, economists Alicia Sasser Modestino, Daniel Shoag, and Joshua Ballance show that the skills gap during the Great Recession was a consequence of high unemployment, as there were more qualified workers from which employers could choose.⁴⁹ In addition, geographical mismatch can indicate fit between workers and the quality of their e