DIGGING DEEPER INTO THE 10 BIG IDEAS
Table of Contents
Introduction
The 10 Big Ideas
Digging Deeper
- Measure what matters to workers, capturing a full range of job quality indicators
- Center equity in measurement
- Increase mandatory human capital data disclosure
- Link public and private data to gain new insights into the quality of jobs
- Leverage business data to demonstrate the return on investment from good jobs
- Revise data systems to include and support the non-W2 workforce
- Strengthen workforce system metrics to deliver results for workers and businesses
- Use public and private spending to measure and strengthen equity and good jobs
- Strengthen state and local capacity for data-driven decision-making to advance good jobs
- Invest in strengthening job quality measurement
Understanding the Impact
Appendices
Acknowledgements
#7: Strengthen workforce system metrics to deliver results for workers and businesses.
These actions are intended for…
By measuring and rewarding the right outcomes, the public workforce system can support the hundreds of thousands of people who rely on publicly-funded employment and training programs each year to connect to family-sustaining jobs.
Federal, state, and local agencies can revamp measurement systems to track job quality through new data collection approaches and data linkages, including collecting additional data from employers. These programs use federal funds to subsidize employer training and hiring, and can leverage these resources to incentivize and support the businesses that benefit from this talent pool to share data and provide economy-boosting jobs that attract and retain high-performing workers.
To put this into practice, the U.S Departments of Labor (DOL) and Health and Human Services (HHS), in partnership with state and local government and workforce providers, should:
1. Integrate job quality into workforce program reporting.
Shifting the focus of existing performance metrics to job quality and equity and expanding metrics to include employer data will provide better information about whether the public workforce system is living up to its promise to advance equitable economic mobility. In 2022, the DOL Employment and Training Administration (ETA) budgeted more than $2.8 billion 1 in taxpayer dollars to Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) systems. These systems serve almost 400,000 individuals annually with career or training services 2 designed to build in-demand skills and connect people to careers and economic mobility pathways. Yet WIOA metrics do not provide meaningful insights into the quality of jobs participants are referred to. While programs capture median earnings data, there is no emphasis on living wages and it is difficult to track the trajectory of an individual’s career. Data are rarely reported in a disaggregated manner, obscuring visibility into job quality across populations or barriers such as reading, writing, or math proficiency. Moreover, metrics focus on participants rather than collecting data from employers about jobs.
To understand the quality of jobs available to program participants, DOL ETA can work in partnership with state and local agencies, workforce development nonprofits, and benefiting businesses to:
- Use the current WIOA performance measures 3 data and infrastructure to understand the quality of jobs that participants enter. This could include using median wage data to track the number of enrolled participants at living wage thresholds, 4 capturing wage changes when participants complete on-the-job training and transition into full time employment, and linking credential attainment data to administrative wage datasets to better understand the upward mobility that credentials foster.
- Revise the WIOA Effectiveness in Serving Employer 5 metric, which currently focuses on the services delivered to the business, to capture data on the characteristics of jobs created by the business including information on benefits such as paid leave, as well as schedule predictability and opportunities to advance within either the organization or the field. Data could be collected through an employer survey and incentivized through wage subsidies, prioritized support from the workforce system, and public recognition of high road businesses. As this change is implemented, track costs associated with systematically collecting richer job quality data from employers as part of a federally-funded skills training program.
- Leverage deployment of WIOA rapid response/layoff aversion funds, 6 which are intended to help companies prevent layoffs, to gather additional employer data on job quality and equity. ETA could incorporate guidance encouraging companies to look at workforce equity data as a standard part of the layoff aversion process, including helping companies see potential disparate impact and proactively consider equity as they look at whether they could retrain or cross-train incumbent workers to avoid layoffs.
- Develop and test data dashboards and employment scorecards to track the “efficacy of workforce development programs across the country,” in accordance with DOL’s Enterprise Data Strategy. 7 DOL should work with state and local WIOA programs to pilot linkages of individual-level data held by DOL, states, localities and training providers with annual income data held by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and quarterly earnings data held by HHS, to produce aggregated statistics for employment scorecards. The scorecard should include statistics on earnings and wage data disaggregated by race, gender, and geography; a current pilot of this type using IRS data is underway with two state community college systems as well as Georgetown University. If successful, the same approach could be expanded in the future, including to pilot measurement of non W-2 employment. It could also serve as a model for future federal-state data-linkage activities of the National Secure Data Service.
- DOL could develop and release a standard set of key performance indicators and metrics for assessing and reporting firm-level job quality, for use by state and local workforce agencies, and state and local partners could pilot data collection in a select set of local workforce regions. For example, require businesses receiving Americas Job Center (AJC) wage subsidies or other financial support to provide disclosures on their jobs at the time of placement, as well as the retention and advancement of individuals, disaggregated by race and gender. Consider the use of a tool like Working Metrics or collaboration with payroll companies, to leverage data that most companies are already required to report to public agencies (unemployment insurance earnings data and EEO-1 data) to reduce burden. As part of this pilot, provide targeted funding to cover both the staff time and the revisions to data collection systems required to accommodate expanded employer reporting. Develop technical assistance, informed by the pilot, to support other programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education and Training (SNAP E&T), and refugee employment services in capturing job quality data in tandem with DOL.
- Support workforce boards to track and report local labor market information on job quality and equity, including occupational segregation 8 by local area, at least quarterly to assist boards in partnering with local businesses to close gaps. For example, DOL could house standard equity labor market reporting 9 templates, offer guidance and training, and encourage or require states and local boards to build capacity to analyze data and engage partners in dialogue as part of their required WIOA State Plans. 10 This would also enable DOL to compare labor market areas based on the quality of job opportunities, not just the quantity. Providing local areas with support to cover staff time would help to ensure that they invest in the skills and technologies needed to incorporate new job quality and equity analysis into their processes.
2. Standardize job quality performance reporting across social service programs.
Many people—and disproportionately people of color, immigrants, and adults in very low income jobs—receive public job training and employment services from systems outside of the WIOA-funded public workforce system. These include adults accessing services under HHS programs such as Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) employment services, Welfare-to-Work participants enrolled in TANF and SNAP, and Community Service Block Grant (CSBG) funded programs.
While the numbers served are significant, these individuals are left out of conversations that are increasingly common in the public workforce system about quality jobs and the pathways into them. A total of 1 million families, 11 composed of 2.6 million recipients, received TANF- or MOE-funded assistance in November 2020. Additionally, SNAP recipients sharply increased in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, to nearly 40 million. 12 Seventy percent of the 21 million SNAP or Medicaid recipients work full time. 13 Census data 14 showed that 79% of SNAP family recipients had at least one working adult, and about 33% had two or more working adults.
While many individuals may receive services from multiple programs either simultaneously, or throughout their lifetime, the lack of a core set of aligned job quality metrics not only inhibits an understanding of the individual’s job experience but can contribute to existing disincentives for sharing information or braiding funds in creative ways to better serve participants. For example, legacy data systems and differences in where programs are housed and their eligibility requirements exacerbate silos.
To address these issues, federal agencies should take the following actions:
- DOL, HHS, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should partner to adopt a core set of job quality metrics across WIOA and non-WIOA programs, potentially drawing on the common good jobs principles 15 put forward by DOL and the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC). A first step could be an interagency working group that examines existing guidance and recommends pilots, and this could in turn inform eventual changes in statute. A shared set of metrics would provide more data and insights on the quality of jobs that participants across human services programs enter and could help to incentivize co-enrollment to ensure that eligible individuals are accessing the full range of services to help them achieve economic stability; encourage data sharing and system integrations to reduce friction around data; and facilitate the braiding of funding by advancing a set of shared outcomes. For example, WIOA participants are often co-enrolled in SNAP to address food insecurity. Aligning a core set of SNAP and WIOA job quality metrics could encourage providers to more actively share participant data to ensure that employment needs are being met.
- HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) should pilot a revised ORR-6 performance report for refugee support services in a select number of states, and HHS should explore a pilot of supplemental reporting on TANF or SNAP to include metrics beyond work participation rate. HHS will benefit from understanding more about the quality of these vulnerable workers’ jobs, enabling development of a more responsive set of service offerings. Provision of supplemental funding to support the staff time required for collection of job quality data as well as necessary revisions to data systems will be a critical part of this pilot. This would support providers and strengthen program effectiveness by providing greater insights into participant job quality needs through more comprehensive records, while reducing the burden and trauma associated with asking participants to engage separately with multiple agencies and retell their stories.
Endnotes
- Caroline Treschitta and Katie Spiker, National Skills Coalition. WIOA is on the move in the House (May 18, 2022).
- Office of Management and Budget. WIOA Adult Performance Report: PY 2020 (December 16, 2021).
- Employment and Training Administration, United States Department of Labor. WIOA Performance Indicators and Measures.
- Amy K. Glasmeier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Living Wage Calculator.
- United States Department of Labor. WIOA Effectiveness in Serving Employers Data Elements: Employer Penetration Rate & Repeat Business Customers.
- United States Department of Labor. Rapid Response Services.
- United States Department of Labor. Enterprise Data Strategy (2022).
- Marina Zhavoronkova, Mathew Brady, and Rose Khattar, Center for American Progress. Occupational Segregation in America (March 29, 2022).
- Workforce Information Advisory Council, United States Department of Labor. The Importance of Workforce and Labor Market Information.
- Employment and Training Administration, United States Department of Labor. WIOA State Plans.
- Gene Falk and Patrick A. Landers, Congressional Research Service. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Block Grant: Responses to Frequently Asked Questions (March 31, 2022).
- Food and Nutrition Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Yearly trends in SNAP participants, unemployment, and poverty.
- United States Government Accountability Office. Federal Social Safety Net Programs: Millions of Full-Time Workers Rely on Federal Health Care and Food Assistance Programs (October 2020).
- Tracy A. Loveless, U.S. Census Bureau. About a Third of Families Who Received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Benefits Had Two or More People Working (July 21, 2020).
- Department of Commerce and Department of Labor. Good Jobs Principles.