Description

On Tuesday, May 6, 2025 we held an informational webinar to learn about the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program’s 2025–26 Job Quality Fellowship, focused on fixing work in the South and the application process. This session offered a comprehensive overview of the program’s objectives, the impact of our fellows, and how individuals can be a part of this transformative journey. Attendees had the chance to ask questions and we were joined by EOP’s executive director and  two alumni of the Job Quality Fellowship for this conversation — Neidi Dominguez Zamorano, founding executive director of Organized Power in Numbers, and Bo Delp, executive director of the Texas Climate Jobs Project — who shared their experiences.

The newest cohort of Job Quality Fellows will comprise participants from multiple sectors, such as labor unions, small business development organizations, worker centers, workforce and economic development entities, advocacy organizations, organizations focused on employee ownership, and legal and human rights organizations, among others. These leaders will work collectively to advance practices that can help bring about a Southern economy that works for all. We are excited to announce that nominations are now open for the Fellowship.

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Speakers

Maureen Conway

Vice President, Aspen Institute; Executive Director, Economic Opportunities Program

Neidi Dominguez Zamorano

Founding Executive Director, Organized Power in Numbers

Bo Delp

Executive Director, Texas Climate Jobs Project

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Transcript

Maureen Conway (00:02)

Good afternoon and welcome, everyone. I’m Maureen Conway. I’m a vice president at The Aspen Institute and executive director of the Economic Opportunities Program, and I’m thrilled to welcome you all to this webinar to talk about our Job Quality Fellowship.

We’re excited to see the nominations for this class coming in and we’re looking forward to talking more about it, but let me quickly just start to give you an overview of what we are going to do in this hour that we have. So first, I’m going to give you a little overview of our logistics. Then I’ll go through some of the background of the Job Quality Fellowship. Then I’m thrilled that we’re going to get to chat with two of our job quality Fellows, and I’m not going to call them former because once a Fellow, always a Fellow. So Bo Delp and Neidi will be here with us, and then we will really be wanting to spend a lot of time on Q&A with all of you. The webinar is really meant to give you the information that you need about the fellowship now, so we’re hoping to spend the bulk of time on that. There is a Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, so at any time during the webinar, please do put questions in there and we’ll get to them as we can.

We want to give special thanks to the WK Kellogg Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, Prudential Financial, and the Gates Foundation for their generous support of our Job Quality Fellowship, and thanks to all of you for joining today.

So on the technology, quickly, everyone is muted but we’ll be handling your questions through the Q&A box, so please put your questions there. We also invite you all to please introduce yourselves in the chat, and also, we know a lot of you work in this space, so please feel free to share any comments, information, ideas, resources that you think folks might find interesting there as well. If you have any technical issues, you can chat to us or you can send us an email at eop.program@aspeninstitute.org. The webinar is being recorded and we’ll share the recording on our website after this webinar. Also, close captions are available for this discussion, so if you would like to use those, please click the CC button at the bottom of your screen.

And just to now give you a little update on where we are in the recruitment process. So the nomination process is open. You can nominate yourself or you can nominate somebody else. The deadline for nominations is Sunday, May 18th. You must be nominated to receive an application, so if you’re not sure, if you think somebody else nominated you but you’re not sure, just go ahead and nominate yourself, and that way, you’ll be sure to be in the nomination pool and receive an application. We review the nominations on a rolling basis to determine eligibility, so eligible nominations will receive an application the Monday following when they submitted their nomination, with the first applications being emailed next week on Monday, May 12th. So if you think you should have gotten an application and you didn’t, you can always send us an email and check on that.

The application itself, the full application is due Sunday June 22nd at 11:59 apparently, PM, Eastern Time. We’ll be reviewing applications throughout the summer and the final class of Job Quality fellows will be announced in mid-September.

Okay, so just to give you a little background also on the fellowship itself. So the first class of Job Quality fellows was launched in 2017, and we were really interested in highlighting a diverse set of leaders who were engaged in practical action to improve the quality of jobs. And in the Job Quality Fellowship, we’re focused. I’m going to say less on fixing workers and more on fixing work. So what do I mean by that? What I mean is that the outcome, the kind of outcome we’re looking for people to be working towards, the unit of the analysis is the job. We’re looking to see how the job can be improved?

We know that millions of people are in low quality jobs and struggle with the burdens of low wages, unstable schedules, unsafe working conditions, issues of discrimination and harassment, not having any agency or input into how their workplace operates. There’s a lot of different facets of job quality, but the work of job quality fellows is really about addressing some of those issues and improving the quality of the job, so that regardless of who the job holder is, that job becomes better and more and rewarding and meaningful for the person who is in the job. We recognize that a lot of people focus on work to help people move out of lower quality jobs and into better jobs and that work is important, but just to be clear, that’s not the focus of what the Job Quality Fellowship is working on. So like I said, our interest is really on improving the job and less on improving an outcome for a specific individual or group of individuals.

Let’s see. Also, I just wanted to say one of the reasons I think I feel very passionately about the work of the Job Quality Fellowship and job quality in general is because I think that all jobs really can be good jobs. It is possible for jobs to be better. We don’t have to have so much poverty wage work. There’s a lot of different ways that jobs can be improved and a whole variety of different actors. So we’ve had businesses that are trying to use better business models to improve the quality of jobs. We have labor leaders who are trying to organize workers and help them have more negotiating power so that they can improve the quality of their jobs. We have people who are in local government, we have people who are in community development finance institutions who are working with their small businesses to try to improve better jobs. We have people who provide technical assistance in economic development or in employee ownership. There’s just a whole wide range of things that can be done to improve the quality of jobs.

I recently wrote a little piece about job quality and how we think about it and the range of actions people can take to try to contribute to better jobs, so we think that there’s a variety of different things that folks can do, and we’re hoping to hear from a whole variety of them in our next fellowship.

As I mentioned, our first two cohorts were really intentionally diverse, really trying to cover that whole waterfront of folks that could play a role in job quality. Our last cohort had a little bit of a more narrow focus, I would say. Our fellows were focused on this intersection of workforce development and worker organizing and advocacy to advance workers’ interest and boost job quality… Regional focus. Our new class of fellows will be made up of job quality practitioners who are taking action to advance job quality in the South. Compared to the rest of the country, the South has high rates of poverty, has not very good health outcomes, shortened lives, and other outcomes of poor job quality.

And one thing I will note about the South though is that the narrative… Kind of digging in and exploring that and thinking about what are the different ways we could organize things. We’re excited to work with a group and co-learn together about how we might do that.

Okay, so what is the South? We know there’s not a single standard. You can use the US census definition or the Council of State Government definition as a guide. We really welcome applicants from anyone who sees themselves as based in and contributing towards an improved job quality experience in the South.

Okay, so fellowship expectations, just a quick note on that. So one thing we ask of fellows is that they commit to being present and fully participating in the fellowship. We recognize everybody is busy and has lots of demands on them, and so we try to be thoughtful about what the demands are that we’re making. We have three meetings. They are live and in person, unless some significant changes in public health require us to do otherwise. They’re scheduled for October 26 through 29th 2025, February 23rd through 25th 2026, and June 8th through 10th 2026. And it’s really important, that in-person time for the fellows I think is just really the heart of the experience and really important to get the full value out of the fellowship, so we really ask people to commit to being fully present for those meetings.

We provide opportunities for fellows to remain actively engaged between those in-person meetings. Throughout the year, fellows will stay in touch with program staff and other fellows. We have virtual meetings with Aspen staff. We may have some readings or additional homework things before each of the meetings, and really, we are trying to provide also opportunities to collaborate and elevate the work of fellows and really bring more attention to the important work that fellows do in their communities, so there’s lots of different ways we might interact around those kinds of issues.

Okay. So now, I am going to move into our conversation. So I will note that Neidi Dominguez, who I mentioned will be joining us, had warned us that she would be running a little late for personal reasons, so I’ll say who she is and then I’ll turn to Bo. So Neidi Dominguez is the founding executive director of Organized Power in Numbers, formerly known as Unemployed Workers United. Neidi is a committed organizer, experienced campaigner and visionary strategist in the immigrant rights and workers’ rights movement. She’s an Aspen Job Quality fellow from the 2022/23 cohort, and so we will be welcoming her when she’s able to join us, but now I’m going to introduce Bo Delp, who I’m so delighted to see here with us today.

Bo is the executive director of Texas Climate Jobs Project, a statewide nonprofit advancing a pro-worker, pro-climate agenda, and dare I say it, a pro-Texas agenda to build the Texas labor movement. And of course was an Aspen Job Quality Fellow also in the 2022/2023 cohort. So thank you so much, Bo, for joining us today, and just to get started, maybe you can just say a little bit about your background and the work you do, and what drew you to applying to the Job Quality Fellowship.

Bo Delp (12:51)

Definitely, and thank you so much for having me, and hello to all of you. Really excited to be here to talk about this fellowship. It was an incredible experience for me personally, but it was also very productive and beneficial for our organization, and I am excited to dig into some of that. But just by way of background, I’ve been in the Texas Labor movement for about a decade now. Many years ago, I started out at an organization called the Workers’ Defense Project. Some of you may be familiar with it. It is a worker’s center that is committed to organizing undocumented immigrant construction workers in Texas, and have also been in the labor movement at UNITE HERE, the hospitality workers union, working for Local 23. For those of you familiar with UNITE HERE, Local 23 goes from Texas and stretches across the South and includes New Orleans, Biloxi, where the casinos are, as well as Atlanta, up through Virginia, and it represents food service workers and hotel workers.

And since 2021, I was the founding staff member for Texas Climate Jobs Project, which as Maureen mentioned, is a nonprofit that’s committed to advancing a pro-worker and pro-climate agenda, and we work very closely with labor unions across Texas. That’s pretty diverse. It’s the building trades, but it’s also SEIU Texas, it’s the teachers union, the steel workers, the power plant operators, who used to really fight around climate change and job quality, and what are we going to do about all these new industries that are emerging? But I think because of their intentionality, we have been able to come together to really think about how we raise standards in some of these industries. And we’ve been very honored to get to work with Neidi on one project in particular that I hope we get to talk a little bit more about. So I’ve been in Texas, working in Texas and to some extent the South for the last decade, and just very excited to be here with y’all today.

I saw The Aspen Institute Job Quality Fellowship came across my inbox and I was encouraged to apply. Let me tell you why I decided to do that. I decided to do that because there’s a lot of conversations in my work even here in Texas, but I know across the country in philanthropy, around what it means to have a good job. And it turns out that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and it depends on what industry you’re in. When I was at the Workers’ Defense Project all those years ago, undocumented immigrants didn’t have access to registered apprenticeships, and so having a union in the traditional apprenticeship route is not really an option for many, like half of the Texas construction industry. And so we had to have these conversations about what does it mean to have a good job if you don’t have a union in the construction industry?

Here, we had people whose wages were so low, they were sleeping at the airport and were being discriminated against. And of course, Texas Climate Jobs Project, we have found that Texas is on the one hand this huge emitter of carbon emissions. It’s also this incredible leader in renewable energy, but it’s also leading in low quality jobs in things like solar and wind and the supply chain jobs that have been emerging because of the Inflation Reduction Act. It was incredible to get so many people into one room talking about what it means to have a good job and job quality, and I think it’s really important because of this variety of perspectives.

And I would say that Maureen mentioned earlier this intentionality around people being present, and I really would just echo that. It is incredible to get so many leaders in a room together who put their phones away and turn their laptops off for a little while and really dig into these questions. And I will say for myself, as the person who leads Texas Climate Jobs Project, it really helped evolve my own understanding of what it means to have a good job and to learn from other leaders in other parts of the country that were experimenting with new models of raising job quality, and just getting those very concrete examples from people who are trying new things in order to raise the floor for people. So it was a great experience for me personally, it was a great experience for us as an organization, and I couldn’t recommend it enough.

Maureen Conway (18:03)

Yeah, thank you so much, Bo, and welcome, Neidi. I shared your background with folks before you joined. Thank you so much for joining us today. So I see a couple of things. One, that I apparently froze a little bit before, so I think I’m going to ask if people wouldn’t mind, just if there was something important that I actually said and they missed, if maybe some of my colleagues could let me know specifically what it is people might need me to repeat, that would be great. But Neidi, we are just beginning our conversation, and really, I thank you again for being here and I hope that… I just wanted to start with just asking you to say a little bit about the organization that you lead, but also what drew you to applying to the Job Quality Fellowship?

Neidi Dominguez (19:05)

Yeah. Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? It froze for a little bit. Okay. Yeah. I’ll share just a little bit about Organized Power in Numbers. We originally were named Unemployed Workers United and we launched during the pandemic on Labor Day of 2020, and our original plan was to talk to unemployed people online and support them through applying through unemployment benefits but fight for more in that moment. So many of us were feeling just the whole floor being shaken out of our feet and there was so much need in our communities, and from the beginning, we decided to focus on the Sunbelt, the Southeast and the Southwest, for many reasons. But one of them was just the deep disinvestment for many generations, from government, philanthropy, where we also know and acknowledge so much of the progress in this country has actually come from those regions and the long history of organizing there. And so we really wanted to figure out a way to move as much as we could resources into that region for the work.

Almost five years into it, we have evolved in many different ways where we really have evolved to be what we call ourselves a public utility for the movement infrastructure in our region. We have built ourselves to be able to support projects like Bo’s at the Texas Climate Jobs Project. There’s about 60 plus organizations and local unions that now provide technical support or access to technology and data to do organizing in their campaigns. And the whole time, it was always really focused on the question around what are good jobs? I think that’s so essential. And so for us, coming from working with unemployed folks to now supporting campaigns and projects like the Texas Climate Jobs Project and others where we’re trying to figure out how do we create more good union jobs in our region? How do we create more training opportunities for local people that have been mostly left out of a lot of these industries and sectors? And especially in this moment where there’s so much growth in our region.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s happening in that region, that it’s happening in Texas and North Carolina and Arizona. The corporations are coming to that region because they are states that are mostly deregularized, not a lot of rules for them or demands, and where our wages are still depressed in comparison to other parts of the country. And so we know what’s at stake. We know that if we don’t organize, if we don’t do these things, many corporations, many companies will come, but the question really is, is it going to do anything for us and our communities, unless we make it do so? So that’s what we do.

And applying to The Good Jobs Quality Aspen Fellowship, honestly, when I first saw it come through my email, like Bo and other people reaching out and saying, “Have you looked at this? You should consider it.” At first, I really felt like a fish out of the water for even thinking about it because I had never thought about our work from the lens of workforce development only. Of course, that was always part of the question and part of the many things that we had to consider, but I never thought of myself as someone that could bring something to the table or some sort of expert on it. And so I felt like it was a stretch for me to even try, but I went for it.

And being part of the process, Bo and I knew each other from before but we had never had intentional space, in a room without our phones, without our computers, to sit and talk through just so many different aspects of our work. And it was really being in the fellowship, at least this is my side of the story, Bo can tell you his, I really do feel like it was the fellowship that made that space that then made it so that we can connect in this different way than we had before, and then figure it out that actually, we could help each other. That we were in the same region, we were trying to answer the same questions, and that we had some things that could be helpful to the great work that Texas Climate Jobs Project was already doing.

And so we’ve been really lucky honestly to be able to help out and support and make it be real. I am very proud of the work that we have accomplished, that collectively we have accomplished in Texas. So I encourage folks that are in the webinar, if you’re sitting there like, “I don’t know, I don’t think of myself as an expert on workforce development,” that you are in your own way and that we need more of you and our voices in this region, because it’s the region where so much growth is happening, but it’s not looking like a benefit to our communities and we need it to be.

Maureen Conway (24:47)

Yeah, thank you Neidi. So a couple of things. Apparently I froze when I was talking about the economic development model in the South and why it is a challenge, but I think Neidi, you articulated it beautifully, that the challenge is businesses that come in and they think of labor as a cost and trying to get low cost labor, as well as cheap environmental resources and no regulations on that side too. And that that’s just been a… And I understand, I’ve spoken to lots of folks that do economic development in the South, and it seems like it’s always what I feel like is really a false trade-off.

It’s like either we take crummy jobs or we get no jobs at all, and I feel like that’s not how we should be thinking about it. We can think good jobs are possible, good jobs can be good business, because all of the costs of people who have unstable lives who are sleeping in the airport, if you’re sleeping in the airport and then showing up to work the next day, you’re tired. You’re not going to bring your best effort and you’re certainly not going to be motivated to bring your best effort. So there’s lots of reasons that giving people a dignified good job can be also good for business, and we can think about different structures and different ways to make that work.

And that’s what we are hoping to do, and to have a different way of thinking about this rather than getting stuck in this kind of false trade-off, of either we can have a successful business or we can have good jobs, but somehow we can’t have both. That just to me is not right. And honestly, if you give us good jobs, I feel like that should be our leading indicator of a successful economy, not business profits, but anyway.

And you alluded, Neidi, I think a little bit to the partnership that you and Bo have, and one of the questions I saw also come up in the chat here was to describe a little bit about the curriculum of the fellowship and what happens. And so I can say a few words about that, that we do a variety of things. We bring in guest speakers, and I’m going to mix up other fellowships and your fellowship, so I’m not going to say too much about that. But we do a mix of things. We might give you readings and then have some group discussions around them. We might do some practical problem solving around specific issues that one of the fellows might present or things like that. We might do some work together on imagining a shared statement around jobs or a shared policy idea that we want to think about advancing or things like that.

So there’s a mix of reading and thinking together, some bringing in external resources and people, and some workshoppy problem solving kind of things I guess I would say. But I feel as I described that, that doesn’t really describe the experience of the fellowship and why it’s meaningful. So I’m wondering, Neidi and Bo, and either of you can jump in first, how would you say what stands out to you in terms of the structure of the fellowship experience and what was valuable about it?

Bo Delp (28:40)

Yeah, I think there are some very specific things that stand out to me. I think to your point Maureen, and I think maybe we can talk a little bit about this, I think just the partnerships that emerged from being able to share with each other about some of the projects we were working on and noticing overlap, and the readings were really critical conversation starters. We would have readings around job quality and what that meant and how to think about what it means to have a good job, and it was very generative in terms of all of a sudden, we were talking about our work specifically, and then we noticed overlap, and from there, I think real partnerships emerged. And so from a very practical perspective, not being high up in the clouds about it, but from a very practical perspective, we went from the theory of a good job to how are we trying to manifest that in our work and how can we work together?

So I think that is really what stands out to me the most, is just how these conversations with people in different parts of the country led to ongoing collaboration, I think was really, really beneficial.

Neidi Dominguez (30:02)

Yeah, I would only add to that, I felt like you all were very open and flexible to also meet the moment from our own reactions to the setup and curriculum. I remember clearly, I’m not sure if it was the first gathering or the second where we were broken into groups and then one of the groups came out like, “We really need to talk about the standards, and if it’s not a union, what’s in the middle of it?” Because in the room, we had people like Bo and I who come from organizing, but you had people that only come from training or business owners themselves.

And for me, it was the first time in a room where I was in the room with a company CEO or someone that does the HR for a large company and now we’re having these conversations, and I really felt you all were open and flexible. That when you felt there was real agitation and something happening in the room, you’re like, “Okay, let’s just pivot to that. Clearly that’s the conversation we should be having,” and I really appreciated that. I think that sometimes, that could actually kill off the synergy happening in the room, and you all really were great at feeling that and listening to us.

Maureen Conway (31:26)

Yeah, thank you Neidi. Yeah, I think that that is the generative tension that we want to lean into when we find those places where you have that. I feel like that’s where you can really also start to deepen understanding of how different actors come to a particular issue, so I appreciate you bringing that up. Maybe you both could tell everybody a little bit about the partnership. You knew each other before but you cooked up this work together during the fellowship, so maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you were able to do together and the role you think the fellowship played in helping you envision that and move that forward.

Bo Delp (32:20)

Yeah, I’ll start, but Neidi, definitely fill in the blanks. I remember a very specific conversation that Neidi and I had on the way to dinner with the other fellows. I think we were in DC, I don’t recall that that was where that one was, and we were on our way to dinner. We were just talking about each other’s work in a casual way. So at the Texas Climate Jobs Project, we were trying to figure out how to capture what we intuitively knew about some of these clean energy industries. We had been hearing from workers, they weren’t getting treated right. People often get paid by the piece, like per solar panel that you install, so you work as fast as you can, and by definition, there’s no shade on a solar project. People are overheating, they’re getting sick, having to go to the hospital.

Texas is the only state that doesn’t require workers’ compensation insurance coverage, so if you do go to the hospital, you’re often on your own, paying out of pocket for your medical bills. So we had all this kind of anecdotal, intuitive data, but we wanted to have an academic report that really started to detail this and we knew we wanted to go out into the field and survey people about working conditions. But then Neidi was walking me through what they do as an organization. The word you used earlier was the public utility for movement organizations, and Neidi started talking about all the ways that being Unemployed Workers United could be helpful in helping us get that off the ground. And so we are just so lucky that that conversation happened because we wouldn’t have known otherwise. I don’t know what I would’ve known.

And so we were able to collect over a thousand surveys from non-union solar, wind and clean energy supply chain workers across the state, at some really remote places where solar and wind sites are, but also more urban manufacturing facilities, solar panels, talking to workers about their conditions. And Neidi’s team was so helpful in helping us capture that data and store that data and interpret that data. We worked really closely with Cornell University and put that report out, and it’s been really important in terms of shifting the conversation. I think a lot of people in Texas often assumed that a green job was a good job or a better job than… And it turns out that’s just not true. And in fact, some of these working conditions are really just worse than some of the more traditional energy jobs, and that’s not a good thing.

And so the last piece to this is that Harris County under the Inflation Reduction Act where Houston is won $250 million to implement their portion of what’s called a Solar For All Grant with the Environmental Protection Agency, and across the state, cities and counties are installing community solar and putting solar on public buildings and on county owned land. And we got the strongest labor standards in the country on that Solar For All award, and one of the reasons why we were able to do that is because we were able to help decision makers understand, to educate them that there’s a real crisis that workers are experiencing in the solar fields and in the wind fields that has to be addressed.

And as many of you know who do this kind of work, you can bring worker after worker and they can share their stories and that can be so powerful, and for some decision makers, for some politicians, sometimes it’s really important for them to have a report from Cornell University that says it’s not just this one person. 70% of solar workers that were interviewed don’t have health insurance. And so I think that was a transformative moment in our ability to do that, and that work is ongoing, but we’re really proud of that and that partnership really emerged from the Job Quality Fellowship and I’m really grateful to Aspen institute and to Neidi for all of y’all’s support on that.

Neidi Dominguez (37:05)

I don’t really have anything to add. That’s literally what happened. I think maybe the one part would be we also grew through this project with the Texas Climate Jobs Project. We had tested some things around data gathering and geofencing to find workers that were specifically connected to an industry or were workers in that industry, but this one was a challenge, because of the way that I was decentralized, because it was locations that were very rural. I remember somewhere in the middle of the project, we were like, “Okay, we need to figure out how to get to those workers,” because we were exhausting our more digital based way of finding them. And I took my data director out to the fields of Texas so that we drove into them so we could get a sense of what it looked like? So that we could get more creative like, “Well, maybe we should be geofencing the gas stations near there or the restaurants near.”

It was truly a partnership in both ways where I feel like our team learned so much about how we use technology and digital tools and data in a way to actually work on the ground for actual worker organizing, to advance these agendas? So we learned a lot, a ton out of that, and we’re very happy that we got to the thousand and that report has been leveraged in so many different ways, and we’re still working together. So two years into it, we’re still working together, we’re still thinking about what’s next. Even under this new political terrain that we find ourselves in, Bo and I are thinking through with our other partners, how do we meet the moment and not back down from the things that we have won, especially in our region?

Maureen Conway (39:04)

Yeah, thank you, Neidi. I’m just listening to you talk about that and thinking about how everybody was so excited to learn about geofencing and just the different ways you think about getting data and everything and how much the group learned from you guys. And I was also thinking about that with you, Neidi, saying, “I didn’t feel like an expert,” and I was thinking, “Oh, everybody learned so much from you.” So we really appreciated you sharing your experience with the group.

We have this question, and I just wanted to try to address it but I’m probably also going to ask you if you have thoughts as well. To what extent is the purpose of the fellowship to shift the broader state systems in which jobs are located, particularly in states that have historically prioritized employer power over worker economic security, and how much of the work is centered on changing employer level practices versus transforming the state systems themselves? In other words, where’s the center of gravity for improving job quality through this fellowship?

And I feel like the answer is yes, because I think that we are thinking about a variety of different systems that influence the quality of jobs. So employer practices influence it, employer cultures and mindsets are big guides for employer practices. Those can influence state systems, like state policies as we too often see in so many states can be ignored with little penalty, so only getting a policy change sometimes isn’t enough to actually get what you need. Only getting employers who want to do the right thing sometimes means they’re swimming against the tide in a political system or a policy framework that’s not really supportive of that.

And then where is there a chance to move something forward? The ground shifts around a lot and sometimes the thing that you thought was going to work is not the most promising thing. As things shift, there’s a different way in, and I feel like the fellows bring a lot of creativity to thinking through those problems and problem solving together around where’s the opportunity? Where’s the center of gravity now? What’s promising? But also thinking about who I am and what are my strengths, and how do I match my strengths with your strengths? And maybe together, we get something done. So I feel like I just gave a big non-answer to this question, and I’m wondering, Bo or Neidi, if you would like to help elaborate on my non-answer about how we think about shifting systems to improve job quality?

Neidi Dominguez (42:07)

I think it’s both, and things that we haven’t even thought about probably. And I feel like especially in this moment where there’s a lot of almost weaponizing our own government against ourselves right now, and I think that we’re going to have to get creative, so I think it’s both. Whenever we can, we think about private agreements with specific employers, and sometimes that’s literally a collective bargaining agreement and then that’s where I feel like worker organizing and union organizing are key to this question as well. Sometimes, it’s pushing for municipal governments to adopt better policies, where in our region, even though it is very red and very anti many of the things that we want to do collectively, but do we have local county commission, a local city council where we can advance passing project labor agreements or passing community benefit agreements? Or not calling it project labor agreements, calling it something else, because that’s preempted in our state, but advancing that agenda, and I think we have to do all of it.

So I never felt like the fellowship had a predetermined choice around what strategy was the right one. It really did feel like it was whatever made sense for us on the ground. I think what’s really exciting about this fellowship, or I wish I could be a fly on the wall, maybe I’ll come visit at some point, is that it’s so focused in this region, where when we were in the fellowship, we had people from different parts of the country. And so Bo and I got to really feel a lot of synergy because we were facing the same problems in our region, but we learned a lot from our peers from other places and got creative ideas. It may look different for us in the Southwest, but there were still good inspirational ideas too. So I think it’s really exciting to be all together just thinking about the region though. I think I’m excited about what could come out of that as well.

Bo Delp (44:34)

I’ll just add that I agree with all that, and I think, yeah, look, the Job Quality Fellowship was a really great balance with some of the readings and stuff being purposefully provocative to generate conversation but also not having an end goal in mind. It was really to generate this conversation among people who are all in this trying to figure it out. I think, Maureen, to your answer, for us in Texas anyway, for many of us, it’s a simple equation. You build people’s power to build political power to build economic power. Someone once told me that policy, public policy is power frozen in time. And so when we think about overtime and the weekends and the 40-hour work week, these are all things that are enshrined in legislation when the labor movement nationally had this huge resurgence in union density.

In Texas, we often say, “Well, what’s the difference between Texas and California?” And part of that answer is a really big strong labor movement. If you look at California in the eighties, it produced Ronald Reagan, but over time, the labor movement had a key role to play in transforming the politics of California. But labor relations in this country are employer-based, and so you have an employer-based labor relations system that we have to engage employers on around job quality. But when you think about the labor movement, and I mean that very broadly, not just unions, you have to engage around policy. Policy is this kind of power frozen in time, so it’s both.

And I’m just very, very excited that the focus is on the South. I know for those of you that do work in the South, how many national convenings and conversations have you been a part of where it’s like, “We could do this and we could do that,” and it’s like, “Okay, I’m going back home to where they banned books, so I’m going to need something a little different here.” But I think it’s really, really incredible what The Aspen Institute is doing in focusing on the South, because in so many of those spaces, it’s the elephant in the room. Because we all know that in the South, the power dynamics are so different and we have so much that we’re up against, and so to have a space for people coming from the South and thinking about the South to get to talk I think is really cool and exciting.

Maureen Conway (47:09)

Thank you. It had been one of my questions to ask you, so what did you think when we said we were going to focus on the South? So I really appreciate you saying that. Thank you. Thank you, Neidi. There was a question here about the final product of the fellowship, like a report or white paper or policy recommendations. And I do want to emphasize, and I think Neidi, you alluded to this, we really try to respond to the energy of the group, and is there something that they want to do together like that? So our first Job Quality Fellows issued a statement of purpose that really was their articulation of how they think about what job quality means and why it’s important.

After we did two cohorts, there was interest among the alumni and we actually were able to do a little bit of work with them to do a policy document around what job quality means. From our fellows, a number of them had… Basically, the experience of our fellows deeply informed when we first launched our job quality tools library, trying to tap the wisdom of the fellows for their tips and tricks of what do we do in our organizations specifically to try to implement our work and our strategies, and trying to think about what a job quality practice looks like in different kinds of organizations. So that wasn’t a product of the fellows per se, but it was really motivated by listening to the fellows and by talking with them and by thinking about their experience and what might make it easier for others to follow in their footsteps.

So different classes might do different things, and they might do things as a small group or they might do things as the whole class. But we do try to be responsive for something like that to the energy of the group because I feel like there’s no point in me assigning you to all try to write a paper together if it’s not a paper you’re interested in writing, so I guess that’s how I would answer that.

But Bo or Neidi, I don’t know if there was something that you thought as a group we should have maybe tried to facilitate more or something that you would hope that a group focused on the South would think about as a product, or just in general, what you hope for out of this group focusing on the South?

Neidi Dominguez (50:13)

If I’m remembering correctly, and I may not so please tell me, Bo or Maureen, I feel like the decision to do the white paper I think was a little bit agitated by the organizers in the room. Because I’m just going to be really transparent here, I think if I remember correctly, we really wanted to put what we had discussed and the agreements that we had come to in some shape or form because we did have people that work with big employers in the room. And I think I’ll speak for myself, I felt like it felt important that we left something behind where it was being affirmed by a diverse group of voices that otherwise wouldn’t have actually been able to put their name on a document together. Because honestly, most of the time, we probably would have found ourselves in an antagonistic relationship across the table from each other.

And it was a very unique space, to be in a space to maybe disagree on some things, but on the things that we did agree, to leave it somewhere as the report that Bo made, as a tool that we can keep using for the future. So I don’t know if I really have any ideas of what this group will feel inspired or be moved to do. I imagine just because of the dynamics that we face as organizers, as practitioners, as people that want to just do this work in our region, we’re constantly being given tools that are not useful to us, like Bo said, so I imagine that some of you will feel the fire in your belly of leaving something behind for others, and it may not be a document. Maybe it ends up being a panel or a webinar or a video or something else, but I just know our people in our region and I know we’re always ready to give and extend our support, so I’m sure something will happen, but I don’t have any idea what that should look like yet.

Bo Delp (52:33)

I feel the same way. Yeah, I wouldn’t want to prejudge it because I think one of the cool things is when everybody gets together, it can go in all kinds of different directions. And what I would say is if you do decide to participate and do, the advice I would give is just be open to what it could be and what could come out of it. Because I went into that having no idea that I was going to leave with this big organizational partnership with Organized Powers in Numbers. It’s been really cool, so yeah.

Maureen Conway (53:10)

Great. Thank you both. So we’re coming up to time and I’m just going to encourage you if there’s any more questions. I see one more question is how is progress measured, and during what time frames, quarters, years, et cetera? How is success defined by the program?

And I will admit that that is a somewhat difficult question for me, and you could probably tell by how I described the change process. So I think there are certain things that we do in terms of thinking about who’s participating. How successful are we in curating a group that represents diverse perspectives in the way that’s appropriate to this situation? Ways we engage people, ways we bring in resources, and then things like partnerships that come out and things like that. So there are some basic things, as one does, that you track for that you’re accountable to your funders and others.

But I think the way I think about the success of this group is more in the ways that the fellows connect with each other, that they find common purpose and that they have this opportunity, which I do think is really rare for so many of us in busy professional lives, to sit back, reflect, and have some time to have some aha moments about what’s working, what’s not in their work, and their true passion of why they came into this work and what they want to accomplish in the world. And to really then be able to think about not having just had this nice aha moment in this meeting, but how do I now operationalize that?

And it has been I think for me and for my colleagues, and it’s so rewarding to see so many fellows have that experience and really go forward and really make important changes in the world. So that’s how I think about success, but Neidi or Bo, I don’t know if you want to add anything about that.

Great. Well, I am not seeing any notes from my colleagues that I’ve missed any sessions, and we only have a couple of minutes left. So let me just quickly before we close, I just want to ask you, Bo or Neidi, if you have any final words of advice or final thoughts or anything you’re trying to plug? If you have any final comments that you want to share before we close?

Neidi Dominguez (56:12)

Yeah. For those of you that are considering doing it or have already applied and want to be connected, I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’m in your region, so if you want to reach out, please feel free. Yeah, just let’s keep growing this network of us in our region that are thinking about all of this together, so just good luck with everything and reach out. However we can help, we’re more than happy.

Maureen Conway (56:42)

Thank you.

Bo Delp (56:44)

I definitely echo that, and just to echo something else that Neidi said earlier. Many of us, particularly in the South, we’re stretched thin. There’s so much to do and so little time and resources to do it. I know it can be challenging to think, what would it actually look like to go participate in this? Maybe you’re thinking there’s a lot of organizing to do, and there is, but your perspective in the South, organizing workers, organizing communities around job quality is really needed and really, really important. And I think people need to understand what it’s like to do this work in the South, and you are the person to provide that perspective. And so if you’re not sure if you’re the right fit or if there’s just so much going on, I would really encourage you to apply because it’s been very beneficial. It ended up being just an incredible value add to our work as an organization, so it was really great and glad I did it, and I hope you do too.

Maureen Conway (57:55)

Great. Thank you both so much. Thank you everybody for joining us today. If you have any additional questions or things you think of later that you didn’t get answered, you can always send us a note at EOP.program@AspenInstitute.org. I know I frequently think of things later or things that I didn’t really feel like sticking in a chat in front of everybody because maybe it’s not a very clever question or something, so don’t be shy, please reach out if you have any questions. We’re really glad that you could join us, and don’t forget to get your nomination in before May 14th and applications are due June 22nd. Thank you so much, Neidi and Bo, for being here. Really, it’s such a pleasure to be in conversation with you. Thanks, everybody.

Bo Delp (58:43)

Thanks, Maureen.

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About the Job Quality Fellowship

The Job Quality Fellowship brings together leaders from differing lines of work, in communities across the country, who are working to expand the availability of better quality jobs. While the economy has expanded, too few workers share in the benefits. Low-wage work is far too pervasive, and the time is now to address this challenge directly. We can no longer afford to have hard working people excluded from the abundance of our economy and marginalized by our society. We need to focus in this moment on the opportunities we have to improve the quality of jobs, and the lives and livelihoods of millions of individuals and families.

About the Economic Opportunities Program

The Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program hosts a variety of discussions to advance strategies, policies, and ideas to help low- and moderate-income people thrive in a changing economy. To learn about upcoming events and webinars, join our mailing list and follow us on social media.