Policy Spotlight: “Low-Skill” Workers Aren’t a Problem to Be Fixed
Annie Lowrey’s recent thought provoking piece in the Atlantic asks who are we if our policy language demeans “low-skill” jobs and workers?
“We are ourselves, I suppose, which is to say that the low-skill label is a social construct that at least in part reflects the structural racism and sexism endemic in our economy.”
She suggests that the most gutting problem with “low-skill jobs” held by “low-skill workers” is that they are often “difficult, physically and emotionally taxing jobs that, in fact, require employees to develop extraordinary skills, if not ones you learn at medical school or MIT.”
Another problem she raises is that well-intentioned retraining and upskilling initiatives from federal, state, and local stakeholders, for decades, have placed the responsibility on workers to fix themselves, in order to improve their own job prospects and the overall economy: “they make individual what is clearly a governmental and societal problem…all jobs could be good jobs. But only policy makers and business leaders have the skills to make that happen, not workers.”
Our system of jobs and benefits is broken, our workers are not: “Only high income, full-time employees receiving workplace benefits stand a reasonable shot at financial security in our current system of private work and public benefit arrangements.”
For an exploration of how the current system is broken, and what policy makers, businesses, and organizations should do about it, see the Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program’s recent report, The Complete Financial Lives of Workers: A Holistic Exploration of Work and Public and Workplace Benefit Arrangements, to which we contributed data.
