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(upbeat music) (bell dinging) (audience chattering) - Hello, and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, October 14th.

I am Meltrice Sharp, Co-founder and Managing Partner of CLE Consulting Firm and Treasurer of the Deaconess Foundation.

I'm pleased to introduce today's forum, which is in partnership with the Deaconess Foundation, for their second annual Deborah Vesy Systems Change Champion Award.

Deborah Vesy was the longtime president and CEO of the Deaconess Foundation and retired in September, 2020.

She worked tirelessly to positively transform the workforce development system, making sure job seekers were successful in filling the needs of our local businesses.

We are grateful that Deb is able to join us here today at the City Club.

In honor of her many years of leadership, the Debra Vesy Systems Change Champion Award has been given annually to a systems change initiative and workforce development, which has potential for significant impact, addresses racial equity, and creates learning opportunities for others in our community.

Earlier today, Deaconess announced this year's awards winner.

Please join me in congratulating College Now, Greater Cleveland.

(audience clapping) A competitive labor market has given rise to a new era of worker power.

There have been successful unionization efforts at corporate juggernauts, like Amazon and and Starbucks, and companies are reconsidering wage and benefits packages to attract talent.

How can employers, workers, advocates, policy makers, and philanthropists leverage in this moment and bring about system change needed to help workers advance in their careers?

And how can we learn how to rebuild the ladder of opportunity with all key stakeholders at the table?

Join us today to discuss this with Todd Greene, an institute fellow, and the Executive Director of WorkRise, a research-to-action network on jobs, workers, and mobility, hosted by the Urban Institute.

Todd's career has focused at the intersection of economic development, workforce development, and community development.

Prior to joining WorkRise, Todd was vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, where he led the workforce development efforts across the entire Federal Reserve System.

Todd is the Chairman of the International Economic Development Council's Board of Directors and chairs the National Advisory Board of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, the State of University of New Jersey.

He also serves on the Board of the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce.

If you have a question for our speaker, you can text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

You can also tweet your question at @thecityclub, and the City Club staff will try to work it into the second half of the program.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming our Todd Greene.

(audience clapping) - Thank you for that kind introduction.

And it certainly is very much of an honor to be invited to speak at this forum, which for more than a century, has played an outsized role in strengthening democracy through the promotion of free speech, robust debate, and the exchange of ideas.

So on behalf of WorkRise and the Urban Institute, I wanna thank you, thank the City Club of Cleveland for hosting us today.

I also wanna congratulate the Deborah Vesy Systems Change Champion Awards winners today for their outstanding contributions to the field.

And I also would like to thank the Deaconess Foundation and particularly Cathy Belk for the work that they're doing as well.

And then lastly, what would an opportunity to speak be without a shout-out to one of my favorite Cleveland people, and that's Joe Marinucci, who's been a model and a hero for me.

So I thank him for all of the work that he's done, not only here in Cleveland, but also nationally.

So it's great to see you, Joe.

As I look around this room today, I see a number of individuals from workforce development, economic development, community development, and human services, organizations that are connected by shared values and a common purpose, and all of you on the front lines and what I believe is the defining challenge of our time, forging an economy in which every worker feels a sense of value and fulfillment from their job, an economy in which every Ohioan has a sense of economic security, an economy in which every Clevelander has a pathway for upward mobility.

You are a source of inspiration to me.

Your efforts are cause of encouragement to so many, in Washington DC, where my office is, and really around the country, people who share your determination to build an economy that works for everyone.

And so, I just wanna thank you for your tireless efforts.

As you can tell from my voice, I'm definitely a child of the South.

As an Atlantan for more than 30 years, I've been immersed in the history of perhaps our most famous citizen, and that is Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Nearly 55 years ago, Martin Luther King gave a speech at Glenville High School, just a few minutes from where we are today.

He spoke to a packed auditorium of young people, mostly black students.

Nearly all of them were living under a cloud of social despair and economic helplessness.

Their frustration, their anger, and their impatience for equality were palpable.

Our power does not lie in Molotov cocktails, our power does not lie in bricks and stones, our power does not lie in bottles, he implored them, our power lies in our ability to unite around concrete programs.

A year after that speech in Cleveland, Dr. King made a fateful trip to Memphis to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 1500 striking sanitation workers.

His decision to stand in solidarity with those workers was, in many respects, a public recognition, that the struggle for racial equality was inextricably linked to economic mobility.

That was true in 1968, and it remains true today.

So we're gonna talk today about how we can collectively think about our approach to jobs with the goal of producing real economic security and mobility.

I'm gonna share with you some research, also some insights, and some case studies that can help shape our approach to building job market that works for both employers and also for workers.

But first, let me just spend a few moments at the outset to paint a picture that illustrates the collective challenge we're confronting today.

So I use the word collective because mobility, or the lack of it, impacts all of us in one way or another.

In the four decades that immediately preceded the pandemic, the real median wage for prime age workers, that is wages adjusted for inflation for workers between the ages of 25 and 64, increased by only 7.5%.

Worse, consistent positive wage growth occurred only in 10 of those 40 years that I just talked about, between 1996 and 2001, and again, between 2014 and 2019.

Much of the increase in wages that have occurred at the bottom half of the income distribution is a result of the rise in women's labor force participation.

Wage increases for men in the bottom half of careers were almost nonexistent.

Over that 40-year period that led up to 2020, workers in the middle of the income scale saw their wages increased by an average far below 1%.

For all intents and purposes, their wages basically remained flat.

So during that same period though, from 1979-2019, two other things happened, now listen to this.

The overall US economy nearly doubled in size, and workers in the 90th percentile, that's the top 10% of wage earners, they saw their wages grow by 39%.

In other words, it grew for the people at the top, but wage growth for workers at the bottom half was non-existent.

Against this background of stark economic disparity, the world has suddenly hit by, once again, a once-in-a-century pandemic.

COVID, as we all know, exacerbated those economic inequalities.

It hit hardest among people who were already hurting, and those people are mainly black and brown people.

Today, people of color continue to be disproportionately represented in occupations with lower pay and less mobility.

Workers of color continue to earn lower wages, they experience higher unemployment and job turnover, and they are increasingly working in non-standard work arrangements that offer less protections and fewer supports than more traditional employment relationships.

As my former colleague at the Urban Institute, Steven Brown observes, these gaps are not the result of individual failures.

Let me just say that again, they're not the result of individual failures, they reflect the effects of a host of structural disadvantages and discriminatory practices, like longstanding, racial discrimination in hiring and promotion, mismatches between where people of color live and where good jobs are located, the quality of schools and neighborhoods where people of color live, the decline of unions and weakened worker protections, the deleterious consequences of mass incarceration in communities of color, and wealth disparities that arise from a legacy of racism.

Today, nearly a half a century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination, particularly in hiring, is a standard feature of the labor market.

I know that many of you have already heard this, but it bears repeating that a foundational study found that resumes with white-sounding names received 50% more callbacks than resumes with black-sounding names, despite identical levels of experience in qualifications.

Another study found that white applicants with a criminal record were more likely to get callbacks for entry-level jobs than black men without a criminal record.

Economic mobility, racial equality, they're inextricably linked, just as they were forever.

So now let's talk about economic mobility and what it really means when we say this.

A few years ago, some other colleagues at the Urban Institute played a supportive role in a seminal study that sought to produce a definition of economic mobility.

Now, their research examined virtually all of the relevant studies, but also went into great lengths to seek input from a diverse subset of people who've experienced poverty firsthand.

So one of the key insights from their research was that economic mobility is more than about wages and income and material wealth.

Wages, of course, are foundational to upward mobility, but mobility is comprised of three other core principles: economic success, power and autonomy, and being valued in a community.

These three principles are interrelated.

If your wages increase, you'll probably experience a growing sense of autonomy and a higher social status.

On the other hand, suppose your employer doubled your pay, but then demanded that you work erratic and unpredictable hours.

You probably lose a sense of autonomy, and you'll find it's challenging to participate in your family and community life.

Further, when we think about economic mobility, there are really two types.

One is intergenerational, so, mobility, which refers to changes between a person or household compared to the previous generation.

And another way of thinking about it is intragenerational mobility, which is the change a person or household experiences over time within their own lifetime.

So, promoting intragenerational mobility in the labor market, particularly as it relates to workers in low-income jobs, that's our central focus at WorkRise, the organization that I run.

Our approaches begin with an understanding that labor markets are comprised of and influenced by wage, a wide range of stakeholders, and they are workers and employers of course, but also elected officials and policy-makers.

They're advocates, worker advocates and labor unions, academics and scholars all play a part of that.

Workforce development practitioners, economic development practitioners, the media, philanthropy, each of these disparate entities exerts influence and shapes the labor market, but too often they work in isolation.

WorkRise exist to really convene and collaborate with these frequently siloed groups.

In fact, next week we're bringing together these various groups for our annual conference, which we are calling "Charting a Resilient Future for US workers."

We'd love for you to join us.

You can register by going to our website, workrisenetwork.org.

Our purpose at WorkRise is to forge consensus around key questions that require answers to generate ideas that are shaped by all of these relevant stakeholders and to really identify some bold ideas.

And then we test them, and then we share them.

And that's what I'm doing here today, to share some of these ideas.

We also fund research on promising practices, policies and programs underway, across the country.

And during our conference next week, we'll be announcing our next slate of grantees, and I strongly encourage you to tune in because, perhaps, there will be a Cleveland-based grantee.

We'll be funding nine promising projects that will test innovative programs aimed at strengthening workers through things like development of digital skills, social and economic supports, and skills-based hiring.

These grants will support research into a handful of innovative programs that aim to expand economic opportunity to workers who've been left behind.

We also generate data and evidence that strengthens employers, informs policy-making, and provide genuine economic mobility and securities for workers.

So, now that I've talked a little bit about what it is we do and creating some of the tools that help the work, I wanna maybe talk a little bit about some of our research.

So now that you have a better understanding of what WorkRise does, I wanna share some of these insights that we've uncovered more recently, as it relates to just two areas I wanna speak about today.

The first is about good jobs, what do we mean by it?

Both the elements that constitute a good job in the context of mobility and the importance of creating a common understanding of what those elements mean among all of those stakeholders.

And the second is about employer practices.

So, what can employers do?

We wanna talk about some of these challenges facing employers, as well as potential solutions gleaned from the research.

So before I share some of the interesting findings of work, let's take a step back and answer two questions that are foundational, and set the stage: what is a good job, and why do good jobs matter.

We might instinctively know what a good job or a quality job is, but I think it's important that we develop a common framework that stakeholders to use when we talk about what a quality job is.

Understanding how various job quality elements affect workers' wellbeing is a critical first step toward creating good jobs.

And while you can guess some of these, you may be surprised around some of these other elements.

So, at Urban Institute, we've initiated a study to create this framework that really gets to what a good job is.

Now, we consider 11 prominent definitions of job quality.

Now understand, this is from a diverse literature and sources.

And although these definitions vary in scope and complexity, they share a few common elements, and our framework synthesizes these, and I wanna share these with you.

First is pay.

It refers to not only the level of pay, but also predictability.

The second is benefits.

This includes health insurance, retirement plan, paid or unpaid leave, educational benefits and tuition assistance.

The third category is working conditions.

This includes control over hours and the location of work, but it also talks about job security, safety, which we know that came up in the pandemic, and also non-discrimination.

Now, the fourth element is around business culture and job design.

Now this includes things like a culture of belonging, a culture of diversity, equity and inclusivity, strong organizational mission, meaningfulness of the tasks that one is performing, personal growth, autonomy and power to change things, and the diversity of the task that you're actually doing so that you have opportunities to move that forward, and then also, clearly-defined career paths.

And the fifth element that we came up with around what constitutes a good job is on the job skill development.

The category includes specific items like training for specific tasks, cross-training, and training and education for advancement.

Now, each of these elements in isolation improve workers' lives in some way to varying degrees, each one provides either a measure of greater financial stability or increased autonomy or power, or a higher sense of being valued in the community.

We know this because it's demonstrated by the research.

But in other cases, the evidence is somewhat more limited and more research is needed.

So for example, we know that better wages leads to healthier workers.

We know this because one study demonstrates a link between low earnings and higher mortality.

Another study shows higher wages are associated with improved physical health.

We also know that a well-designed retirement plan are especially important for low-wage workers and especially workers of color, who have not historically had opportunities to increase retirement wealth.

Paid family leave is also associated with improved maternal mental health, and better long-term outcomes for children, and it leads to higher labor force participation and higher wage growth for women.

Family leave that extends to both men and women, and paid family leave for more individuals that involve fathers, created more equitable parenting, which in turn had positive impacts for children and parental income.

So that's what the research tells us.

Unpredictable and erratic work schedules, it's associated with earnings volatility, where workers can't plan for the future because they don't have control of their time, and they don't have a sense of what future earnings will look like.

Unpredictable schedules are also associated with psychological distress, that includes not only uncertainty of guaranteed hours needed to pay bills, but also the difficulty in accessing skill development programs, figuring out bus schedules, and the like.

Scheduling predictability is so important, and that some workers are willing to actually accept jobs with reduced wages to avoid schedules that are being set on short notice.

This is especially the case for mothers who bear a disproportionate responsibility for childcare.

Finding childcare is nearly impossible for a working mother who doesn't know when she'll need it or how much it will cost her because her work schedule is erratic and unpredictable.

Workers also find jobs with greater autonomy to be more meaningful.

Workers with autonomy in their jobs reported higher levels of psychological wellbeing.

And we also note that employer-provided training, that also increases wages.

So this framework, it provides a basis for empirically-backed understanding of what workers really want and what they need and what's needed to be successful.

Now's the time is when I say that hot lights and a ball head don't go together.

(audience laughs) Our radio audience won't get that.

(audience chuckling) Okay.

So if we wanna make work more attractive, we have to start with a clear picture of specific factors that make a job attractive.

But the framework does something else for us that is critically important.

It also enables stakeholders to unify around something that's concrete as opposed to an abstract interpretation of what constitutes a good job.

So with this framework, we don't have to rely on our instincts, or emotions, or gut institutions about what we think, intuitions rather, of what we think is a good job.

We know what a good job is.

And I wanna just maybe share with you how this is worked in a real framework, not theoretical.

So two years ago, some stakeholders in Atlanta decided it was time to put together a bold blueprint for economic development, a strategy centered on equity that, among other things, aimed to increase access to good jobs.

But as many of you know, Atlanta has experienced extraordinary growth over the last 40 years.

Numerous Fortune 500 companies established headquarters or large employment hubs there.

Yet, for all of that investment, Atlanta routinely ranks near the bottom of an economic mobility among the 50 largest cities.

So stakeholders there were specifically interested in creating good middle-wage jobs, and they were able to unite around an agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a good job, a job that enables upward mobility.

So in Atlanta, our economic development efforts are now focused around middle-wage jobs that pay a certain amount per hour.

We agree to what that is.

It provides full benefits, so economic development is not pursuing projects or supporting businesses that aren't doing that, and it gives workers access to training.

And that definition is intentional, and it was arrived through this deliberative process and a thoughtful process that was based on a framework.

So last year, for the first time, Atlanta began tracking the creation of middle-wage jobs that align with their framework.

Again, a good jobs framework.

Atlanta created 877 of these good middle income jobs in year one.

So we know that because they've been tracking that.

This year, the city began taking steps to cultivate these jobs by creating incentives for companies up to a couple thousand dollars per job to offset employer tax obligations when they're creating these types of jobs.

So let me just tell you, I just find that really exciting, I hope you do too, and it's incredibly rewarding when communities are able to transform job markets as a result of stakeholders and their ecosystem and working together toward a common good.

Okay, now I'm gonna turn the page just a bit.

I wanna spend some time talking about employers, in the context of worker mobility.

Now, every employer I meet, and I meet a lot of them, talks to me about what can they do to attract a stable workforce.

Oh, we're short on workers, okay.

And as you know, this is an issue that's challenging employers in virtually every community across and really in every industry sector.

Roughly half of American businesses have job openings that they're unable to fill.

There are nearly two job openings for every unemployed worker, and more than 5 million jobs are currently open.

All of that's to say is that, in this environment especially, it's more important than ever that employers understand what the elements are that differentiate undesirable jobs from good jobs.

So let's go over some of those things that employers can do to improve job quality, increased access to good jobs, and improved short and long-term outcomes for workers.

So, to every employer who wants to help reverse this 40-year trend of stalled economic mobility, here's a couple things I would say.

If we wanna create jobs with mobility, we've got to rethink the concept of a job.

A job that has been defined as centuries the way we think about, it just isn't enough.

When a company's values and culture puts people first, it becomes a lot easier to create jobs that align with the framework that we discussed to attract workers.

And while I know a lot of companies have moved in that direction, it's also encouraging, but here's some insights I wanna share from our research that actually supports this.

So the first is, scheduling matters.

We've already touched on the fact that unstable and unpredictable scheduling reduces economic security.

It makes income unreliable, it creates work-life imbalance, and it drives people to quit.

And the research tells us that stable schedules reduce employee turnover while increasing productivity.

Leave benefits, they're important.

They are very rare in low-wage jobs, and it will probably require some public policy interventions to make them more commonplace.

Paid leave, though it does promote job continuity, we also know it's important for maintaining women's labor force participation.

Hiring practices, they can make a difference.

The data suggests there are a lot of jobs out there requiring degrees that don't necessarily need degrees.

I see a lot of heads nodding.

Loosening these requirements is one way to support mobility for non-college workers, there are a lot organizations that are working toward that.

Promotion practices.

Now this could really have an impact.

Internal promotion, our research tells us, is not currently a dominant pathway out of low-wage work.

Part of the reason for that is that low-wage workers are often segregated into separate job tracks, and another reason is that there simply aren't enough high-wage positions available for them to move into.

Structured career ladders that avoid segregating marginalized groups at the bottom, they're needed.

Likewise, some low-wage workers may benefit from clear pathways for building skills and advancing better-paying roles.

So much has been talked about diversity and inclusion, and what do we really know about that, so I'll just share with you that they can broaden DEI, as what we call them.

These practices can broaden access to good jobs for workers of color who experience historic and structural disadvantages in the labor market.

They can also create more inclusive environments that keep historically-disadvantaged workers in those jobs.

But establishing numerical targets or goals for diversifying the workforce, it broadens access to jobs that pay more or offer more advancement opportunities by encouraging hiring managers to prioritize applicants from traditionally underrepresented groups.

Employee resource groups, task forces that these also show promise, they've been effective in diversifying management ranks, for example.

And overall, they can solidify organizational commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion by pulling managers and employees together across departments and job roles.

So I wanna book in this portion of our discussion with an important bookend.

All of the policies we just covered contribute to worker satisfaction and mobility, and employers need to know that.

But employers can also maximize the benefit of each specific practice when they deploy multiples, complimentary practices in place.

When these practices are initiated in isolation, or when contradictory practices are implemented, typically the impact of those policies are at best modest.

So just think about this.

A company says, "Oh, I'm gonna have a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee, but yet, I'm not going to look at my hiring and promotion policies."

So that often doesn't really jive.

You think you're doing something right, but really, you may be causing, as an employee, you may be causing yourself harm.

And I wanna maybe now change a little bit to talk about a case study, this is another one from Atlanta.

And I know that you all have a lot of work going on in Cleveland, I was able to hear about a lot of it today.

It's been so exciting to learn everything that you have going on.

I wanna just maybe share another one here.

So the challenge of rebuilding labor markets, it's really complex, and it can't be tackled by any single entity in the community, it requires involvement and buy-in from all sorts of stakeholders that I mentioned, and we refer to this as building a comprehensive ecosystem.

And it requires this building relationships on a foundation of trust and shared values, and it does not happen overnight.

But when we build comprehensive ecosystems, we have a powerful mechanism for change.

So I wanna share with you a case study that I think is instructive.

So about 10 years ago, a handful of leaders in Metro Atlanta came together with a shared objective.

They were interested in creating meaningful connections and cooperation amongst stakeholders in its workforce system.

Now, there were five workforce boards operating in the Atlanta area, despite there being just one labor market in Atlanta.

Job seekers struggled with the maze of unconnected workforce development programs and ones that could help them with skills and training and employment services.

And then employers, they complained that the Metro Atlanta, the metro area, the workforce delivery system, it simply didn't work for them, despite the fact that they were on workforce boards and they took hundreds of surveys through the years, it just wasn't working.

So by January, 2014, a steering committee was formed, and within a few months, the committee conducted a survey of providers to learn about their services, service areas, customers, funding and partnerships.

And what they learned from the survey certainly validated the perspectives of these workers and employers.

The survey revealed that there were over 500 providers of workforce development services in the Metro Atlanta area, with over 800 unique locations where these workforce services were being provided.

None of us knew that there were 500 providers, trust me, when this survey was undertaken.

Now, some of these organizations were large organizations and the ones that you would expect, but then some were also very small, churches and other ones.

Most were for nonprofit, but some were for profit.

There was no effective mechanism to connect the various workforce providers to one another.

If a job seeker needed a particular workforce service that that provider didn't offer, for example, let's just say it was a certified nursing assistant training.

That provider could only...

They had a little ability to even know who to refer them to if they themselves didn't offer that.

And employers, they also just found this situation just too complicated, too difficult to figure out how to access workers or how to access training.

So given the large geography of the metro area, and coupled with the relatively limited transit system, it was disheartening to learn that some job seekers were in training programs clear across town from their home without even knowing that that same training was offered nearby.

And perhaps, most concerning from other data analyzed was that regional workforce training was misaligned with the region's projected employment needs.

The workforce providers were training for jobs that the data revealed would not even be needed by employers in the Metro Atlanta region.

And conversely, insufficient training was being offered across the region for occupations that we knew would be in high demand by our region employers.

So, given this context, leaders rolled up their sleeves and they got to work.

The first thing they did was they built a portal, they analyzed data and they produced an initial strategic plan.

And by the end of that year, in December, 2014, they launched MAX, M-A-X, which stands for Metro Atlanta Exchange for Workforce Solutions.

Now, at the time the initiative was launched, the concept of connecting workforce development to employers and economic developers, it was entirely aspirational.

Providers needed help promoting awareness of their services, decisions about new training programs were not made using data, or really, robust information from industry and employers.

There were gaping holes in the available research, holes that had to be filled with additional studies, and there were access issues that limited their ability to connect services with customers.

So MAX began as a workforce development network with somewhat modest objectives.

They wanted to build connections among workers, employers, and economic development enterprises, they also wanted to raise awareness of their new portal, and they wanted to develop a consistent and aligned research agenda to better address questions about the regional workforce system.

And they wanted to convene stakeholders to develop strategies for mitigating issues, access issues.

So for the next two years, MAX convened periodic meetings of workforce development stakeholders, et cetera.

And they launched a data council to help them collect and organize and synthesize various data into a more comprehensive picture of the region.

They also expanded the portal.

So throughout this evolution, MAX has had undertaken deliberate efforts to maintain an inclusive and informed and an engaged ecosystem.

And let me just take a moment to pause here to say that even if a provider may not have had a lot of capacity, they didn't ignore providers, so they were insured to meet people where they were.

So okay, I just wanna emphasize that.

Local workforce boards were part of this, academic institutions were also brought into this sets of discussions, state and federal agencies.

And through this cooperative approach, they developed a bespoke organizational framework that's working for Atlanta.

It serves as a backbone organization to help facilitate collective work and strategic partnerships.

It provides networking, professional development outreach, and curated services, and it provides workshops to build knowledge and skills for the providers.

So let me just also take a moment to say that, because I know we have a number of workforce providers, one of the things that we found in this whole MAX thing was how do workforce development providers get their training?

And how do we access that?

We've been strengthening that structure with all sorts of workshops and training sessions that have really invigorated, but it also has provided pathways and networks that others may not have known that they have.

So I'm incredibly excited about the work of MAX.

As I mentioned, I know that you have similar work that's going on in Cleveland, so I just encourage you to learn more and just take from that example as perhaps one of many around the country that you might be able to borrow from.

So I wanna also just mention that, beyond the coordination of the boards, here's a very interesting aspect that I wanna just point out for you.

Georgia has retained more federal dollars because of MAX.

So now we have an organizational structure in place in order to support that.

So there's also opportunities to have more focused innovation and pilots.

When I was in the Vesy presentation earlier today, I heard about innovation, I heard a lot about innovation and what that mean means, and I know that was part of the award, but the ability to be able to do that and make that happen, I think, is critical.

So, I know it's time for me to wrap up, so I'll do so.

I know we've covered a lot of material today and there's a significant amount that we didn't cover because of time constraints, but I certainly encourage you to continue, take a look at our website and learn more about that.

I just wanna end by reiterating those words that were spoken by Dr. King, here in Cleveland more than 50 years ago.

Our power laws in our ability to unite around concrete programs.

So thank you for this opportunity.

(audience clapping) - Thank you so much, Todd Greene.

We are about to begin the audience Q&A.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programming here at the City Club.

Today we are hearing from Todd Greene, institute fellow, and the executive director of WorkRise, a research-to-action network on jobs, workers and mobility, hosted by the Urban Institute.

We welcome questions from everyone: City Club members, guests, students, and those joining via our livestream at cityclub.org, or our radio broadcast at 89.7 Idea Stream Public Media.

If you'd like to tweet a question for our speaker, please tweet it at @thecityclub.

You can also text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794, and City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

May we have our first question, please?

- [Announcer] Question here from our virtual audience.

So it says, "Many analysts are suggesting we are about to enter or already have entered an economic recession.

What can the public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors do to support workers as they weather any upcoming recession so it is not 2008, 2009 all over again?"

- Yeah.

So, great question.

And just know that, from my many years of working at the Fed, I wanna say that these viewpoints that I'm going to share are my own, and they don't reflect anyone else's here.

So, I'll just say that, first of all, we don't have time to play, that's just something that is said in my community, so we've gotta look for ways to make our existing efforts more effective, and we've gotta use our resources more widely.

So we are in a unique moment now, right?

There's a relative worker shortage and maybe workers have a little bit of an upper hand, so how do we take this moment to make some of these alignments that I just talked about where employers can make changes about how they're valuing their workers in terms of a lot of these projects that these aspects that I talked about, about job design and how they're thinking about promotion, and advancement, but how do we make that durable, so that when we do enter a recession, we're able to do that.

And then maybe the second part, and this is just gonna be very obvious to the people in this room, and that is, we've got to learn about, there's still gonna be jobs out there, in terms of whatever the recession brings us, but that means we've gotta be able to be much more nimble to ensure that we are staying on top of what's happening in our labor market so that we are able to provide our job seekers with the immediate types of opportunities in using those technologies that will help us to ensure that we are connecting those workers to those employers.

- Good afternoon.

Do you think that a lot of workers have unreasonably high expectations about what a job entails?

And if so, do you think that that's why perhaps so many workers like to do things now, like Lyft and so on?

In other words, become self-employed, and why the gig economy has expanded so much.

Thank you.

- Great question around why workers or, you know, maybe a different way, and you didn't say this, I hear this from employers all the time, workers feel so entitled, or whatever.

Well, the economy has changed and people have changed.

And so I think that the successful companies, the successful employers are not going to be asking that question, they're gonna be asking the question of how can they support their workers, because it's a different paradigm now.

And so I think, yeah, I think we've gotta shift that thinking.

I have a niece and nephew, and trust me, their ideas about work and what a good job is is very different.

A good job to me was, oh, I get paid every two weeks and I get health benefits.

It looks a little bit different now and we can't put that genie back in the bottle, so we just gotta accept the reality and adapt.

- I was wondering if Rise has done any research, funded any research into the hospitality industry because we know that they have not necessarily been seen as good jobs, but yet, in a lot of urban areas, they make up a significant sector of the employment sector, for instance, in Greater Cleveland, it's the number three sector here so.

Do you have any thoughts, comments on what we can do to make those look like less transitional jobs and kind of move toward good jobs?

- So I love that question.

And one of the reasons I love it is that it gives me an opportunity to speak about a concept that we call "job design."

So here, in this case, if there is a housekeeper who is working at a hotel, let's just say, maybe there's a way that the hotel management can restructure that particular job and the task to say, maybe that person is a housekeeper for four days of the week, and on day five, he or she works at the front desk, gaining skills, feeling valued and validated and all of those other things, and setting one self up for a higher level skill.

And maybe the person who works at the front desk does that for four days a week, and maybe on day five, they shadow the night auditor, and so on and so forth.

So we need to not just say that these jobs are dead-end jobs and that they're not valued or worthwhile, but there are opportunities for us to think about how we maybe restructure the nature of work.

Yeah, that might require a little bit more work on the employer, but I'll tell you, turnover is higher that requires more work for employers.

Thank you for that question.

- Todd, welcome to Cleveland, it's good to see you here again.

Wanted to ask you, given your work at WorkRise and also your role as chairman of the International Economic Development Council, and for the audience that's largest economic development practitioner organization in the world, one of the challenges in this dialogue is, especially for a city like Cleveland and many other cities across the country, is getting people to the jobs that are currently being created, for example, outside of the core of the city.

And as we all know, the public transportation system was set up in a different era, and it's very difficult at times to be an inner city resident and get to a suburban location in a way that makes sense from a timing perspective and a family obligations as things like that.

My question is, what research have you done on that through WorkRise?

And are there any communities that are doing it better than others, in terms of some of the benchmarking that you're seeing?

- Joe, thank you for that.

So at WorkRise, we have a whole category of research that we undertake, and it's called social determinants of work.

So we're looking at issues like childcare, housing, transportation, all of those issues that really impact work that we don't necessarily call "workforce development."

Transportation, huge.

And I'd say that a couple of things are happening in that space.

One is, employers are just getting real, and some are saying, "Maybe there's some opportunities for me to assist my workers with."

Back in the day, many people in this audience may not remember this, but van pools.

Who remembers those van pools?

So, some of those types of opportunities, which we're now calling innovations, but we're bringing some of them back.

I'm also very hopeful that with infrastructure spending, that some communities will also be focused on connecting transit nodes.

One thing, Joe, that I wanna say, and this isn't directly answering your question, but hey, I wanna answer the question, I wanna talk about too, and that is, maybe we should be redesigning where work is so that we can have work where people live.

Now, I'm talking with Joe, we spend a lot of time recruiting companies and helping companies to grow, and I always tell economic developers, stop pressing the easy button.

So, if you think that just because you have a technology company, that doesn't mean that they need to live, that they need to locate in a particular part of Cleveland.

It may mean maybe they could go and they could operate in a part of Cleveland, I don't know, in most communities it's the south side, but I don't know what it is here in Cleveland.

(Todd chuckles) (audience chattering) Okay.

So maybe we should be thinking differently about where work is.

- Hi, thank you so much for joining us.

My name's Michelle Scott Taylor.

I'm with College Now, Greater Cleveland.

Yay, we won.

We're very excited.

(chuckles) And the project that we put forward was really this idea of helping to change a community conversation and the culture of how we talk to young people and adults about careers and how to get to the careers.

So we're in the business of helping young people and adults navigate college and career, and what are those educational pathways.

And you mentioned that employers, and I'm gonna say adults in general, probably needs training as well.

So do you have some ideas about topics that you think providers, adults, people who help job seekers and young people figure it out?

What are some training topics that you think might be needed?

Job design was one I heard, and I thought that was great.

How can we work with the community to help think about how can you redesign jobs for the workers that are coming through?

Do you have other ideas about topics that we should be training our community on as we help young people and job seekers and adults figure it out?

- Actually, I do.

(audience chuckles) Surprise, surprise.

So one that I'll mention to you, and one aspect that wasn't shared was for a while, I ran, what was called the Atlanta University Center Consortium, which is the umbrella organization of the four historically, not hysterically, historically black colleges and universities in Atlanta.

So, Morehouse and Spelman and Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse School of Medicine, and the career services function reported in to me.

So one of the aspects that was just very interesting to me, and I think could be instructive here in this context is, particularly in this economy is why don't we provide students with more information about the employer?

And when I say information, I don't mean just like, "This is the starting wage, and this is the benefit that you're gonna get," but, what is this company's track record for promoting people.

What does it look like, what are these companies' practices around discrimination?

What does it look like to actually to work in that company so that we're providing more.

Look, students have choices now, they don't have to just go work anywhere.

And so, it would be great if we could fix this asymmetry around information so that there are more opportunities to inform people so that we're not sending people to places that are ultimately not gonna be successful.

(audience clapping) - Good afternoon.

Thank you for being here.

I'd like to hear your comments about emerging trends in building worker power and how they integrate with traditional labor movement.

- Yeah.

So, worker power.

Worker power, and I'll just match this with worker power and worker voice.

We've seen labor unions kind of not have the prominence, but our research does tell us that labor unions work, people need to advocate for themselves.

I worked at the Fed for many years and at Urban Institute, these are heavy research places, but now I'm gonna share with you a bit of research that isn't, it's not a randomized controlled trial or it's not any of that, but it's my Uber driver test.

So when I get into my Uber, and I travel a lot, at airports or whatever, one of the things that I ask is, "Tell me about your story.

How'd you get here?

What's happening?"

So one thing that is consistent, I would say, with a lot of, you know, a lot of people have different reasons about what happened, but, it's things like, "I needed time off because my child got sick for a week and my employer wouldn't gimme me a leave."

Or either, "I worked at that warehouse job and I did a great job.

I learned how to do the forklift, I did all of that.

I just didn't like how they talked to me."

So when we talk about these types of issues, I also wanna just mention that maybe this, it looks like I'm closing here, so this is great.

(audience laughing) And there's more work, I encourage you to take a look at what we're doing around this worker power, worker voice, I didn't get a chance to talk about it.

But what I'll end with, and this is a perfect time to say it, is dignity and respect.

That's what people want, it's not a mystery.

So, thank you for your time here, I've enjoyed being with you.

(audience clapping) - Thank you, Todd Greene, for joining us today at the City Club of Cleveland.

Today's forum is in partnership with the City Club Workforce Development Series with the Deaconess Foundation as part of their second annual Deborah Vesy System Change Champion Award, which was presented to the College Now of Greater Cleveland earlier this morning.

We would also like to welcome guests at tables hosted by the Deaconess Foundation, Magnet, OhioGuidestone, and R4 Workforce.

Thank you all for being here today.

Next Friday, we'll hear from Jazmin Long, president and CEO of Birthing Beautiful Communities, as part of our "Local Heroes" series, and to mark Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month.

That form is sold out, you can join us virtually or at cityclub.org, or at Idea Stream Public Media.

That brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to Todd Greene, and thank you members and friends of the City Club.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, and this forum is now adjourned.

(bell dings) (audience clapping) - [Announcer] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

- [Announcer] Production and distribution of City Club Forums on Idea Stream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.