Aspen is a place for leaders to lift their sights above the possessions which possess them. To confront their own nature as human beings, to regain control over their own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting, and hence more self-fulfilling.
Raise the Floor and Build Ladders: Workforce Strategies Supporting Mobility and Stability, originally published by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program and PHI in April 2014, argues for rebalancing workforce development strategies to improve the lives of low-wage workers. The brief aims to encourage interventions that not only build ladders, or help low-wage workers climb out of poor-quality jobs into better jobs. Such interventions should also raise the floor, or help make workers’ current jobs better. Raise the Floor and Build Ladders calls for the workforce development field to explore and support workforce interventions that encourage career mobility and help ensure basic economic stability.
The Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program advances strategies, policies, and ideas to help low- and moderate-income people thrive in a changing economy.
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States invest in work-connected learning through dozens of distinct funding streams, grant programs, and agency initiatives, often developed independently over time by different administrations and agencies pursuing different goals.
“Social contract” has quickly become one of the most-used, least-defined phrases in the AI policy conversation. This first event in a two-part series will trace the origin and history of the American social contract, examining how work became the anchor of economic security, mobility, and civic identity in the United States.
For decades, economists and policymakers have debated how to help workers get better jobs. But what if the more fundamental problem is that employers have systematically redesigned work itself to make a third of the workforce expendable? In his forthcoming book, “Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment,” MIT Sloan Professor Emeritus Paul Osterman examines this idea and what it would take to reverse it.
To create a future-ready workforce system, we must move beyond outdated credentials and analog processes to one that is skills-first, transparent, data-driven, and aligned with the evolving needs of workers, educators, and employers.
