Good Jobs Strategy and the Youth Unemployment Crisis

Zeynep Ton

In confronting the youth unemployment crisis, we talk a lot about what workforce development programs can do, about how the young people were betrayed by the education system that released them into the world without a diploma or the skills for the world of work, about the frazzled policy infrastructure and the lack of public will.

What we don’t talk about as much is what employers can do to make a difference to reduce the youth unemployment crisis and the impact it is having on the entire generation of young people who are barely “Connecting by 25.” Opportunity Nation has its Employer Toolkit emphasizing first-order changes such as Learn and Earn programs and Work Ready Skills. What about second-order changes that might fundamentally change how businesses operate so that they earn profits, expand markets, and create a culture that nurtures its employees in the short- and long-run? I hadn’t thought about this at all until I read the article A Ready-To-Assemble Business Plan in The New York Times magazine.
Author Adam Davidson describes the work of Zeynep Ton at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in finding evidence that “even the most coldhearted, money-hungry capitalists ought to realize that increasing their work force, and paying them and treating them better, will often yield happier customers, more engaged workers and — surprisingly — larger corporate profits.... Ton argues that workers are not merely a cost; they can be a source of profit — a major one. A better-paid, better-trained worker, she argues, will be more eager to help customers; they’ll also be more eager to help their store sell to them.”

I read that and I also hear greater retention for young people as they may be more motivated to keep the job if it pays enough to support them and their families. This persistence, developing the muscle to keep going when customers are abusive or the supervisor is a bully, is important to success in life. I also hear training, building up knowledge on products and industries, expanding knowledge of potential career paths. Finally, for young people who may have been separated from families, tossed aside by their schools or tossed into jail by the police, being valued by your company, by your customers and through an income could create a new virtuous cycle.

It also got me to thinking: Could employers continue to generate their expected profits and hire more people? Evidence shows this can indeed be true: The study Retail Store Execution: An Empirical Study, by Marshall Fisher of Wharton and his colleagues, found that hiring more people in retail stores can actually increase customer satisfaction and sales by ensuring adequate, knowledgeable staff to answer customers’ questions.

So if we start thinking of employees as assets, how might this change other business practices? Might we start to see more investments in training frontline staff for other positions in the company? Might we start to see human resource policies that personalize their training to employees to ensure growth in skills and employee satisfaction? And most importantly, how might youth-serving programs build relationships with corporations with the Good Jobs Strategy to fully implement a second-order change so effectively that opening the door to youth is just part of doing business?

Now I’m thinking: What if we held a meeting with some corporate networks to hear from researchers and businesses about the Good Jobs Strategy? What if we began to create social pressure to only shop at companies that follow the Good Jobs Strategy? What if we built it into socially responsible investment criteria? What if corporate social responsibility leaders started to ask the question, “Are there ways to improve our jobs to also strengthen our corporate strength?”