APPENDIX 2: IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS ON SELECT TOPICS
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
For a handful of the more than 30 written recommendations developed during the Job Quality Measurement Initiative QMD, participants offered a high level of technical detail to guide implementation by government partners such as the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and Health and Human Services (HHS). Additional technical details for select recommendations are included below, to build on the recommendations outlined in the section titled “Digging Deeper into the 10 Big Ideas” (SDC to add LINK). If you would like to see the full list of recommendations developed by JQMI members, please contact the Families and Workers Fund.
RECOMMENDATION
#1 Revise data systems to include and support the non-W2 workforce.
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TACTIC |
Refine existing survey modules to collect targeted job quality data. |
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JQMI AUTHORS |
Susan Lambert, University of Chicago, Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice Daniel Alpert, Cornell Law School, Senior Fellow in Financial Macroeconomics and Adjunct Professor; Westwood Capital, LLC, Managing Partner |
Details on Technical Implementation | Susan Lambert
Federal statistical surveys can be enhanced to capture a wider range of job quality measures such as work schedules and worker voice. Questions on work hour stability, predictability, and control have gone through cognitive testing by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and NORC at the University of Chicago, so developing these items for inclusion in the CPS and other surveys may be more streamlined than developing entirely new questions.
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EXAMPLE QUESTIONS |
Work hour fluctuations (NLSY97)
Advance notice (predictability) (GSS 2016; and similar one in NLSY97)
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The Current Population Survey (CPS), as well as other surveys, are currently using questions that seem outdated and do not collect any data on schedule predictability (such as advance notice) which is of both policy and public interest.
Details on Technical Implementation | Daniel Alpert
In order to gain a better understanding of the percentage of full-time employment—as well as associated wages—in the economy, federal agencies could deploy a series of regular, monthly calculations using existing data, and the presentation of the results in easily-consumed tabular formats. Specifically:
- The BLS can calculate a simple supplemental Household Survey data point by including in the output the percentage of respondents reporting that they have been employed full-time in jobs offering regular hours of less than 35/week. This would clarify the portion of workers who report themselves as being at work full-time but whose full-time work results in, arguably, a form of underemployment. On the Establishment Survey side, another simple data point can report “FTE Equivalent Jobs” by simply dividing aggregate hours of work reported across all jobs in each subsector, by the total number of jobs in each sub sector. This number can then be translated into a series of ratios used to compare one subsector to another by calculating FTE Equivalent Jobs as a percentage of all jobs in each sub sector for further comparison. Movement in these ratios over time would prove a useful analytical tool both over short- and long-term horizons, and all of these calculations can be immediately introduced and back-generated as a series (to at least 1990).
- Regarding incremental jobs added or lost in any period, the BLS should report the average hours and wages for such jobs based on the sub sectors to which they are coded. It is possible that these data may have to be reported with a one-month delay given analysis limitations. The resulting output can be assembled into an earnings index offering an inter-periodic look at the quality of job creation (or destruction) from the standpoint of their impact on both workers and aggregate demand throughout the economy. This would also give a window into possible slack in the labor markets even when other data indicates tightness, or vice versa.
RECOMMENDATION
#4: Link public and private data to gain new insights into the quality of jobs.
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TACTIC |
Aggregate job quality to family level measures so that earnings, benefits, schedules and working conditions of multiple workers are considered. |
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JQMI AUTHORS |
Pamela Joshi, Brandeis University Institute on Children, Youth and Families, Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist |
Details on Technical Implementation | Family-level estimates
Federal agencies could use existing surveys (such as BLS and the Census Bureau report that uses the annual CPS/ASEC data) to generate family-level estimates by:
- Including family-level job quality in the BLS annual Employment of Families publication.
- Adding estimates of living/family-sustaining earnings to the Census Bureau’s Income and Poverty publication; an additional table based on Table A-7 can present family-level earnings and an additional table based on Table A-07 can be
estimated for family earnings compared to poverty thresholds. - Adding the proportion of families with low earnings to the BLS’ A Profile of the Working Poor (based on Table 8 wage and salary workers with low earnings), as well as estimates of working families’ access to employer-provided health insurance and pensions.
- Estimating the earnings and access to employer-provided benefits (health insurance and pensions) for working families, disaggregated for subgroups and included in the appropriate publication, given BLS’ annual reports on employment and earnings for women and immigrants by race and ethnicity.
- Commissioning and/or developing a report on job quality for workers and working families using existing measures across multiple federal data sets. The BLS and the Census Bureau could commission this publication which can set the stage for
monitoring existing measures and suggest new measures to fill in gaps. - Routinely disaggregating data by family and work composition (family composition, number of earners, e.g., Table POV-07) and presence of children to account for equity and the heterogeneity of families. All job quality estimates should also be disaggregated by race/ethnicity and/or nativity.
Details on Technical Implementation | Employer-provided benefits
Short-term strategy:
- A quick way to collect missing information about access to employer-provided paid leave (family, medical, and sick) is to add three existing questions from other government surveys to the Pulse Survey. Given the policy discussions about the decline in women’s labor force participation during and post-pandemic recovery, especially among mothers with children 0-5 and 6-12, and the discussions about how to build childcare infrastructure (through employer tax credits, child care subsidies, etc.), this information is crucial for a data-driven debate about the role of the public and private sector investments in work supports.
Long-term strategies:
- Existing employer-provided benefit questions and other measures of job quality, work-related stress and tasks, can be added to the SIPP because all household members over 15 are interviewed, meaning there is less concern over proxy measurement of job quality.
- Employer-provided benefit questions can be added to the main CPS/ASEC (March survey) and/or add a job quality supplement, similar to the work schedules supplement last fielded in 2004. A combination of survey questions from existing government surveys (past or present) can be used and new questions that need to be field-tested.
- Since family-level weights need to be developed for the CPS supplements, the initial results can be released for workers, and then a second data release can follow focused on working families.
- Existing measures of employer-provided benefits such as sick days, vacation time, paid leave and childcare included in other federal surveys (or newly developed) can be field tested to understand whether proxy measurement is reliable. These measures could be field tested in the SIPP panel.
- New job quality measures could be developed as part of the new NLS26 cohort. The NLS is currently soliciting special interest modules in 2022 that will be tested in 2023.
- Given the focus on employment as a social determinant of health in the HealthyPeople 2030 goals, better employment and job quality measures should be added to government-sponsored health surveys. For example, the NHIS could field a subset of CPS/ASEC employment and earnings questions and include additional employer-provided benefits beyond the currently available sick leave and health insurance questions. Similar to the CPS, respondents should be asked about household members’ employment and access to benefits.