Economic Opportunities Program Newsletter, June 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.
Delivering Patient Care and Quality Jobs
Improving job quality not only transforms workers’ lives, but it also benefits businesses’ performance and bottom lines. Highlighted in this brief by Mark Popovich and Yoorie Chang is Sunrise Treatment Center, a leader in the addiction treatment sector that provides stable, sustainable jobs. Founder Dr. Jeffrey Bill, Chief Operatin
Finding, attracting, and retaining top talent is a big challenge for tech startups in Africa.
In the early years of Sokowatch, an e-commerce platform for informal retailers in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda, founder and CEO Daniel Yu wanted to find a way around this. A software developer originally from California, he understood the tech ecosystem in Silicon Valley, where he says talented people frequently leave big companies to work for small startups, with employee stock ownership plans serving as a major draw.
“How do we get people to leave jobs at Safaricom or at other big or multinational companies to work for small startups? It’s gotta be because they see something in it for themselves,” he says.
Race and Gender Wealth Equity and the Role of Employee Share Ownership
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, in an allegedly strong economy, workers at the bottom of the opportunity scale were struggling to support themselves and their families – let alone build wealth. Divisions in wealth between men and women, and between white households and households of color, are particularly striking consequences of structural discrimination and occupational segregation. The pandemic has exacerbated and heightened awareness of these inequities, and there is a mounting sense of urgency to find practical solutions. Broadening opportunities to participate in business ownership can help address this wealth divide and offer working people the opportunity to meaningfully participate in the success of the economy. In addition, employee share ownership can help strengthen job quality and worker agency while contributing to business performance, so that businesses and workers succeed together.
TMCnet News
Advancing the Expansion of the Middle Class, Rutgers University Appoints Research Fellows to Study the Impact of Shares
[December 31, 2020]
Advancing the Expansion of the Middle Class, Rutgers University Appoints Research Fellows to Study the Impact of Shares
The Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing today announced the appointment of 16 research fellows to investigate economic policies that can save jobs, boost middle class wages, close the wealth gap for Black and Latinx workers, and sustain small businesses through the COVID recession. Profit sharing and employee share ownership stakes at work can be an important part of middle-class incomes, said