Beyond 9 to 5: Facilitating Good Jobs for People with Unpredictable Schedules

Marcy Chong is the director of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) campaign to create state-level sectoral organizing, making it possible for rideshare drivers to collectively bargain and form a union. Marcy is also director of the SEIU’s State Power Program, with the charge of unifying political and organizing work across locals and industries to rewrite the rules for unions for all. State Power focuses on the critical states of Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Marcy has previously worked in SEIU’s public division, health care division, and strategic initiatives department. Marcy began working for SEIU more than 25 years ago in long-term care research. She has worked for Change to Win, CTW Investment Group, and related unions, and she was part of the founding team at Action Network/Action Builder. Marcy holds an MBA from The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a Bachelor of Arts in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from Yale University.  

Minsun Ji (Ph.D.) is a labor-community organizer, activist scholar and popular educator. She has extensive experience in nonprofit management and employee ownership efforts.

Minsun was the graduate program director of the Center for New Directions in Politics and Public Policy in the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado Denver where she created graduate program tracks in the social economy and community-labor organizing to grow leaders of social- economy labor organizing in Colorado. Minsun organized immigrant janitors, immigrant day laborers and domestic workers and she was the founder and the executive director of Denver’s first worker center, El Centro Humanitario para los Trabajadores (The Humanitarian Center for Workers).

She served as a research fellow at the Institute for Cooperative Digital Economy at the New School of Social Science, and a J. Robert Beyster Employee Ownership Fellow at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University.

She was also a Colorado Governor’s Commissioner on Employee Ownership ( 2019-2020) and, currently, she has been actively engaged in building social cooperatives for marginalized communities and driver-owned platform cooperatives in different cities in the US.

Wingham Rowan ran UK government programs that led the world by creating a sophisticated platform for all types of hourly labor under local control of cities or counties. Funding came from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the National Health Service, Cabinet Office and 20 city governments who launched the platform.

The platform was eventually made a cornerstone of an overarching project to modernize Britain’s public assistance within the Department for Work and Pensions, the country’s labor ministry. The focus was extending protections, control, options, meaningful data, and progression to people with complex lives who cannot accommodate regular availability for employment.

Many years before “The Sharing Economy”, he authored two books (one published internationally) and countless articles about the potential of new markets to increase economic activity in communities. At the time he was producing and hosting what became the UK’s longest-running television series about the internet.

He has written multiple policy papers about the “grey zone” between structured work and unemployment. His papers advocating “Full Spectrum Employment Support” – increasing options for irregular workers in the workforce system, not just job seekers – have been published by institutes from the anti-poverty left to the free-market right. His work has been the subject of recent features in The New Yorker, the Financial Times, and Forbes.

Nick Schultz has over 30 years of direct experience in the fields of economic and workforce development. He is a nationally recognized expert and seasoned leader with a proven track record of creating operational efficiency, innovative and responsive program development and leading high-functioning teams. Nick’s unique ability to understand both the big picture and place-centric need has allowed him to continually partner with both private and public investors to fund signature initiatives recognized for their lasting impact on the built environment, business community and for residents.

He has led specific efforts funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Aspen Institute, Bloomberg Philanthropies, James Irvine Foundation, Kauffman Foundation, Wells Fargo, the Walmart Foundation, Forward Cities, Living Cities and the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Defense, Housing & Urban Development and Justice. Nick’s signature achievement is evidenced most directly by the City of Long Beach’s notoriety as “Space Beach.” He authored the Defense Industry Adjustment proposals and managed the projects that saw the workforce transition, supply-chain stabilization/optimization and physical transformation of the former Boeing C-17 facility and surrounding commercial corridors into the western United States’ leading technology commercialization and satellite/rocket manufacturing hub.

Nick holds a master’s degree in diplomacy from Norwich University, is a Marrano Fellow of the Aspen Institute, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government inaugural class of “Leading in a New Age,” past vice-president of both the California Workforce Association, and the United States Conference of Mayor’s Workforce Development Council, and a member of the Linked Learning Alliance Equity Council.