Improving Job Quality by Paul Osterman

The last decades have been anxious ones for U.S. employees. The sources of worry are not hard to identify: for most workers, wages have not grown even at the pace of productivity gains, health and pension benefi ts are harder to obtain, and job security seems increasingly shaky. For many employees, stress levels and work/family pressures have ratcheted up as the job market becomes increasingly diffi cult to navigate. In addition, at the bottom of the labor market, too many adult Americans continue to fi nd themselves in jobs that pay poverty wages and provide little in the way of a future. There are diverse explanations of these trends, some of which are well beyond the scope of this chapter. But one central concern is the decisions fi rms make about how to organize their work. As we will see, employers have alternative choices regarding their employment and human resource systems, and these choices have signifi cant implications for the quality of jobs. With this in mind, it is worthwhile to think about what kinds of policy interventions might succeed in tilting those choices in the direction of better quality employment. Unlike traditional employment and training programs that focus on the supply side, that is, on changing the characteristics of individual workers, this chapter takes up policies that operate on the demand side to infl uence fi rms. The chapter begins by briefl y laying out the facts regarding trends in job quality. It then develops a framework for thinking about interventions on the demand side of the market. The remainder of the chapter discusses various policy options. These include efforts to assist fi rms to improve the quality of the work they offer, as well as interventions in-