Overview

Employer practices such as hiring, scheduling, promotion, supervision, and on-the-job training determine workers’ day-to-day reality and long-term prospects in the labor market. The growing prevalence of independent contractors and contingent workers underscores the continued fissuring of employer-employee relationships.

Working Knowledge

Economic context February 04, 2021
Changemaker Q&A

Repairing Labor Market Institutions to Deliver Opportunity: A Q&A with David Autor

Autor, Ford professor of economics at MIT and WorkRise board member, reflects on raising the minimum wage, fixing unemployment insurance, and other reforms to ensure workers reap rewards from economic growth.

Elisabeth Jacobs

February 04, 2021
Employer practices January 26, 2021
Article

New Protections Needed for Contractors and Temporary Workers as Companies Continue to Outsource Labor

A new report highlights the need for an expansion of rights and protections for independent contractors and temporary workers, a growing share of the US workforce.

Archana Pyati

January 26, 2021
Skills and training December 30, 2020
Article

Evidence from Sector-Focused Training Programs Shows Significant and Persistent Earnings Gains

A new NBER working paper finds sector-focused training programs enabled participants to increase longer-term earnings through jobs with higher hourly wages.

Archana Pyati

December 30, 2020
Employer practices December 11, 2020
Article

New Colorado Paid Family Leave Policy—and a Surging Pandemic—Creates Urgency for a Federal Paid Leave Program

Colorado joins eight states and Washington, DC as jurisdictions with paid family leave. Yet without a federal program, gaps in access to paid leave will persist.

Elisabeth Jacobs

December 11, 2020

Research

Employer practices Last updated on December 04, 2024

Centering Workers and Advancing Business Needs: Nine Case Studies of Partnerships in the Manufacturing Sector

Last updated on December 04, 2024
Employer practices Last updated on December 04, 2024

Advancing Economic Mobility in Manufacturing

In today’s labor market, manufacturers, like many employers, recognize that recruiting and retaining workers often means rethinking diversity considerations and identifying new talent pools.
Last updated on December 04, 2024
Employer practices Report Last updated on October 25, 2024

The Minneapolis Small Business High-Road Labor Standards Intervention Pilot Project

The Minneapolis Small Business High-Road Labor Standards Intervention Pilot Project seeks to provide services that support immigrant, black, indigenous, and people of color owned small businesses so that they can create healthy, just, and equitable jobs through meeting and or exceeding minimum city labor standards.

Grantee Research

Last updated on October 25, 2024
Employer practices Brief Last updated on September 19, 2024

Extreme Heat at Work

This research brief offers the first nationally representative estimates of how outdoor and indoor workers are affected by extreme heat, highlighting that low-wage workers, defined as adults earning less than $15 an hour, face greater risks than higher-wage earners.

Lisa Clemans-Cope, Dulce Gonzalez, Sara McTarnaghan, Michael Karpman

WorkRise Research

Last updated on September 19, 2024
Employer practices Report Last updated on May 21, 2024

IKEA Self-Scheduling Intervention: Baseline Report

Widespread unpredictability in work scheduling leads to decreased job satisfaction, higher turnover rates, economic instability, and compromised worker health. To address these challenges, IKEA partnered with The Shift Project to develop a Self-Scheduling Intervention for its hourly workers to give them greater control over their shifts. They selected intervention and comparison stores to measure its impact on worker and business outcomes, and over four years, held weekly meetings to strategize and analyze data. This report contextualizes self-scheduling research, delves into pre-intervention conditions, introduces new features, outlines the research design, and explores future directions.

Grantee Research

Last updated on May 21, 2024


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