Job Quality in 2021: Implications from the Gallup Great Jobs Survey

NFG’s Funders for a Just Economy, Economic Opportunity Funders, and Workforce Matters invite you to a webinar sharing the latest data and implications from Gallup’s Great Jobs survey, an in-depth survey of nearly 8,000 adults shedding light on the impact of COVID on the labor force, and in particular job quality. The survey was supported by Omidyar Network, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Lumina Foundation. You can learn more from their report: How COVID-19 Affected the Quality of Work.

The Biden-Harris administration has used strong and welcome language to make the case for creating high quality jobs. However, we know that understanding job quality is challenging, and our current data limitations lead to dangerous blind spots: such as over-indexing on the unemployment rate and job creation instead of job quality, or assuming wages are a sufficient proxy to understand the full range of ways in which jobs are falling short. Gallup’s survey provides a job quality index which centers the voice of workers in both setting the definition of job quality across 11 dimensions, and rating jobs across those dimensions to assess overall job quality.

Using a job quality lens puts the pandemic impacts into a new light, for example showing that COVID-related layoffs had significant negative impacts on workers, and most workers who were re-employed after the layoff generally found themselves in lower quality jobs.

At the webinar, we will share the findings from the first two rounds of the survey, including what matters most to workers, the current state of job quality in America, and notable impacts on the job market from the pandemic. You will also be able to learn more about the dataset the Gallup Great Jobs survey provides, which is based on the most robust methodology available and provides a sufficiently large sample size to allow for cuts by race, gender, income group, region, and more. We hope the survey and its data can be a tool for you and your grantees - the full data is publicly available on the Gallup website.

Speakers:

• Tracy Williams, Omidyar Network
• Caira Woods, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Courtney Brown, Lumina Foundation
• Jonathan Rothwell, Gallup