Economic Opportunities Program Newsletter, April 2021
At the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program, and for our many colleagues and partners, the ongoing and intertwined health, economic, and racial justice crises bring new urgency to our work to improve access to quality jobs, options to participate in business ownership, and the freedom to pursue economic opportunity. Below we share our monthly newsletter with highlights of recent work. As always, we welcome your feedback, thoughts, and partnership in advancing inclusive opportunity and an economy in which we all can thrive. Click here to subscribe.
Race and Gender Wealth Equity and the Role of Employee Share Ownership
Modernizing and Investing in Workforce Development
Modernizing and Investing in Workforce Development is the latest of a series of papers recommending systemic improvements to modernize the United States’ outdated patchwork of workforce policies, all being issued by the Better Employment and Training Strategies (BETS) taskforce. BETS is a coalition of more than 40 leading practitioners and researchers that has come together to develop these recommendations.
This paper, co-authored by CSW President & CEO Larry Good and Earl Buford, the incoming president of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, argues that the U.S. needs to build and sustain an ecosystem that supports lifelong learning and career mobility for all Americans, and makes five major recommendations for accomplishing that.
Building a National Unemployment Insurance System
This paper first makes the case for comprehensive reform of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program in the United States, exploring the many ways in which the program has failed in recent decades to accomplish both its macroeconomic goal of economic stabilization and its microeconomic goal of temporary income restoration for workers laid off through no fault of their own. It then outlines options for reform and recommends a uniform, much more consistent national UI program that would be administered by the Social Security Administration consistently and equitably across all states. The national UI program would be phased in over two years beginning in 2022. This paper also presents a number of recommended complementary reforms, including a JobSeeker Assistance program to cover groups that have traditionally been left out of the regular program, enhanced funding for UI and Employment Service administration and services,better coordina
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently projected record-breaking growth in 2021, but in the same document, it also made an alarming prediction: The U.S. labor market will not fully recover until 2024. High unemployment and labor force dropout rates could persist and spawn a repeat of the “lost decade” and unequal recovery that followed the Great Recession. Workers suffering the greatest economic harm in the current crisis include people of color, low-wage earners in the service sector, women, and individuals with lower education levels
Avoiding another jobless recovery that leaves millions of Americans unemployed must be a top priority for policymakers at every level of government. The federal government must take action to avoid repeating the tragic experiences of the Great Recession era, when millions of people remained jobless for years, defaulted on loans, lost their homes, and fell into poverty. This report offers a set of recommendations for using job-generating in
Erika Beras is a reporter for Marketplace, covering health, education, and how the pandemic has changed the way we live and work.
Prior to joining Marketplace, Beras was a regular contributor to several top public radio shows such as NPR’s “Morning Edition,” PRI’s “The World,” and the Scientific American podcast. She has written for National Geographic, The New Yorker, and other publications.
She has been recognized for her work, receiving grants and fellowships from the Radio Television Digital News Association, the National Association of Science Writers, International Center for Journalists, the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Center for Health Reporting, Third Coast International Audio Festival, and others. She was previously a reporter at WESA in Pittsburgh and a staff writer at the Miami Herald.