Good Jobs America: Making Work Better for Everyone

As the United States tries to maneuver its way out of the Great Recession, some injurious trends in the organization of employment and employment institutions seem starker than ever. Job quality increasingly is polarized, between a substantial sector of “good ” jobs providing anywhere from living to astronomically high wages, benefits, opportunities for advancement and train-ing, and a substantial sector of “bad, ” dead-end jobs (about 25 % of all jobs, according to Osterman and Shulman) paying minimum or near-minimum wages (creating an unacceptably large population of working poor). Employment precariousness has spread across the occupational and professional spectrum: few employees, even those with good jobs, are exempt from labor market volatility and possible job loss due to layoffs, restructuring, and outsourcing. Unprecedentedly high long-term unemployment rates exacerbate the deleterious effects of both polarization and precariousness. Combined, these trends have put virtually everyone at risk. They threaten the quality of individual, family and community life, and, some would argue, democracy itself. Understanding how to moderate or reverse them is a major challenge for policy makers and policy-oriented researchers