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About the Book
There’s no denying that service businesses like retail and fast-food chains have been engines of job growth. But, these industries typically offer bad jobs—low wages, scant benefits, and erratic work schedules. And not just low wages, but poverty-level wages. Nearly one in four working adults in America cannot support a family.
Why such bad jobs? Many companies—especially those offering low prices—believe it’s the only way to keep costs low and profits high. Even advocates for higher wages believe they will come at a cost—either higher prices for customers or lower profits for companies.
In MIT Sloan professor Zeynep Ton’s game-changing book, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs & Boost Profits (Amazon Publishing/New Harvest; January 14, 2014; 25.00 hardcover/9.99 digital list price), she proves that it is possible to offer good jobs to workers, low prices and excellent service to customers, and great returns to shareholders all at the same time. What makes good jobs not only possible but very profitable—even in low-cost service businesses—is a set of counterintuitive choices that transforms the company’s investment in workers into high performance. What are these choices? Offer less, combine standardization with empowerment, cross-train, and operate with slack. It’s a combination that lowers operating costs, increases worker productivity, and, as The Good Jobs Strategy shows over and over, puts workers—yes, even cashiers and stockroom workers—at the center of a company’s success.
Featured speaker
Zeynep Ton
Author of The Good Jobs Strategy
Adjunct Associate Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
Moderater
Maureen Conway
Executive Director, Economic Opportunities Program
Director, Workforce Strategies Initiative, The Aspen Institute
This event is part of the Working in America series, an ongoing discussion series hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program that highlights an array of critical issues affecting low- and moderate-income workers in the United States and ideas for improving and expanding economic opportunities for working people. For more information, visit as.pn/workinginamerica.
Join the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #talkgoodjobs.
