Inclusive Economy Talks: Amanda Cage
The Inclusive Economy Lab’s Carmelo Barbaro sits down with Amanda Cage, President and CEO of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, to talk about the disparate impacts of COVID, why building back needs to look different from the last recession, and how to hold employers accountable for their inclusion and equity promises.
Carmelo Barbaro: I want to start by asking you the big question guiding our work: What would a more inclusive economy look like, given your work at the National Fund for Workforce Solutions?
Amanda Cage: We don’t have a good example of what an inclusive economy looks like — we haven’t had one in the history of the United States.
We see some of the issues that we have in Chicago in lots of other cities. We have problems in Cleveland where workers of color can’t get to their jobs because of inadequate public transportation. We see the criminalization of poverty in Baltimore through constant fining and feeing of people in a way that gets in the way of their job prospects. We see in Syracuse people of color not able to connect to information technology jobs or the building trades. These problems are widespread.
An inclusive economy would look like an economy where your zip code doesn’t define your destiny. We have that in Chicago — the social determinants of health, which we saw even more in the current crisis and the social determinants of work. We shouldn’t be able to tell from your zip code what your educational attainment is, what your wealth level is and how you are able to pass that wealth down to people in your family, whether or not you’re able to buy a home and, more importantly, how that home appreciates over time, and whether or not there’s a grocery store in your neighborhood. Any researcher can predict that just based on knowing somebody’s race.
CB: We did work last year where we saw that, in Chicago, workers in industries that made them either economically or medically vulnerable as a result of the pandemic were very concentrated in specific parts of the city, and that had implications on how the disease spread and whether or not small businesses could survive the pandemic in communities where their customers were suffering economically. Can you elaborate on how you’ve seen the pandemic affect Black, Latinx, and white workers differently?
AC: I remember driving down the highway in Chicago and there’d be a sign that said, “COVID Sees No Color,” and I was like, “Those signs are wrong!” We know that Black and Latinx workers were more likely to work in jobs that exposed them and their families to COVID. And once they were exposed, they were more likely to be hospitalized or die. Health and safety were very different for workers of color. Professionals, overwhelmingly white, were able to stay home and stay safe, and that continues as we have conversations about what the workplace looks like in the future. There are more and more conversations about convenience for white workers, how they can work from home and balance their family and work life. We’re not having the same conversations for the folks that we clapped for on the front lines. We are not seeing the conditions change for those folks.
“An inclusive economy would look like an economy where your zip code doesn’t define your destiny.”—Amanda Cage
The industries that Black and Latinx workers were concentrated in were most affected by COVID. They were those frontline jobs that closed down, and we know that folks didn’t have the resources to weather that storm. The Federal Reserve has this seminal study that says most folks don’t have $400 to deal with an unexpected expense. More distressing, we saw that the interventions that the government deployed — and there was great response from the government about how to assist and help people through this disruption — also had an unequal effect on communities of color. In particular, Black, Latinx, and immigrant businesses didn’t get the same kind of pandemic relief through the CARES Act that other small businesses got. It had everything to do with folks’ connection to their banks and what their banking history looked like.
In a city like Chicago, where we have households with mixed immigration status, we know that people who were undocumented, along with anybody who shared a tax return with someone who was undocumented, didn’t get the stimulus payments that other folks got. Now that got remedied somewhat the second time around, but that’s a long time for folks not to get the resources that other folks had access to.
CB: In the early stages of the pandemic, the Lab did an analysis where we tried to understand in what zip codes test positivity rates were highest, because that was an indication that there probably there wasn’t enough testing and, consequently, probably not enough treatment. Communities with large percentages of uninsured residents were more likely to have high positivity rates. Many people still don’t have access to health insurance through their employers. As we think about life post-COVID and what an equitable recovery would look like, how do we address concerns about job quality or access to health insurance, and what else should we be thinking about?
AC: A common refrain at the National Fund is that we’ve built our economy on low-quality jobs. Those of us who were around last time we had a recession and had to think about what recovery looked like, we had this mentality that any job was a good job so we could get people back to work. We created the conditions that we had for COVID, which is a lot of people who had very precarious employment.
It’s critical that when we talk about job creation, we talk about quality jobs from the get-go, help define what those quality jobs are, and make it clear that everybody can have quality jobs — it’s not only particular industries or kinds of employers. There are many different elements that make a job desirable for folks, and we’re seeing that play out now as employers are trying to grab workers where they can, and what kinds of accommodations they’re making to be able to recruit. You can design a good job, and there are core elements to that like a living wage, stable hours and scheduling, fairness and inclusion — things that we should expect from all employers.
But in addition to that, there should be opportunity, employers thinking about career advancement, how to support their workers, and how to help them grow. A big piece of that is worker voice — understanding what workers want and need to do their jobs. A lot of employers woke up to the conditions of their workers during COVID. They didn’t really have a deep understanding of what the rest of their workers’ lives looked like, and I think they’re more sensitive to that in this moment.
“You can’t say ‘Black Lives Matter’ and then not care about second-chance hiring — that’s actually a contradiction.”—Amanda Cage
CB: If fairness and inclusion should be table stakes for a job and an employer, what can employers do to promote that in their workplace, or what do they need to examine?
AC: We all got the double whammy of COVID and the racial reckoning, and that hit employers hard. We saw all this proclamation around Black Lives Matter. It created opportunity for employers and businesses to be introspective and look at their policies and practices and how they operate. We should all hold those companies who make proclamations accountable for what they say they’re going to do, but they really need to be thinking about how they recruit folks, how they promote people, how they scan their policies and practices for activities that have unintended consequences with racial dynamics to them. They have to be thinking about board diversity and second-chance hiring — you can’t say “Black Lives Matter” and then not care about second-chance hiring — that’s actually a contradiction.
CB: What will be necessary to ensure that those verbal commitments translate into real benefits for people?
AC: There’s a real resurgence of accountability in terms of public practice and public policy — folks who are fighting for the opportunity to raise the floor and create some conditions that, collectively as a public, we hold employers responsible for. We need to do it as consumers and think about how we engage in using our purchasing power. But the really important piece is looking at the data. If you want to understand how companies are doing around their diversity commitments, you kind of have to see the data and ask folks not just to make the proclamation but to be clear about how they’re going to demonstrate progress, what those measurements are, and hold them accountable for the things they claim they would like to do.
CB: What else can we as researchers do in building a more inclusive economy? What topics do you think we should be working on, or what kind of partnerships should we prioritize?
AC: In the chaos of COVID, understanding what was happening in the moment was critical. The other piece I think is really important to what’s been happening in social policy and social practice is understanding how we got here. I’m amazed at how often I am in the room with prominent economists who say things like, “I had no idea how much redlining had to do with the ability of Black families to build intergenerational wealth,” or, “I had no idea that there were large swaths of workers who were left out of labor protections because of who made up those workforces” — that we have different standards for the hospitality and child care industries because Black and Latina workers did that work.
You need to understand our history to understand how we got here, and there’s research we can do to understand those effects, mostly so we don’t make the same mistakes again. Discrimination is an incredibly important factor in the labor market. We’re just scratching the surface in terms of how it limits people’s opportunities — both individuals who are discriminated against and employers who cannot access the kind of talent that we know they need. We’re making big decisions right now about how we’re going to engage in public policy, what things we’re going to invest in, and we need to make sure we’re not replicating the racial discrimination of the past.
Inclusive Economy Talks is an event series that puts the Inclusive Economy Lab in conversation with community members about what an inclusive economy looks like, and how we get there. The opinions expressed in this interview are those of Amanda Cage and not necessarily of the Inclusive Economy Lab. This interview has been transcribed, condensed, and edited from its original format for length and clarity. Some questions were submitted by event attendees.
