Employer Power and Employee Skills, Investment Scan: A Federal and Philanthropic Workforce

Policymakers are debating how to build back better from the COVID-19 recession, a conversation in which workforce development and training play a central role. But as Suresh Naidu and Aaron Sojourner argued in Employer Power and Employee Skills: Understanding Workforce Training Programs in the Context of Labor Market Power, training programs that fail to address underlying labor market power dynamics will only perpetuate existing inequalities. To design effective workforce training programs, we have to understand how they operate relative to (and how they might even affect) employers’ labor market power.