Four Experts on Why So Many Jobs Are Bad

Their new report classifies only 40 percent of U.S. workers as having "quality" jobs

Source: The American Job Quality Study (cover image)

A new study based on a survey of more than 18,000 American workers concludes that only 40 percent of the U.S. workforce has “quality” jobs, which the authors define as jobs that meet five criteria:

• “Fair pay, stable employment and benefits that meet basic needs and reduce financial stress.”

• “A safe, respectful environment free from discrimination or harassment.”

• “A clear path to build skills, gain experience and advance in one’s career.”

• “Influence over decisions that shape one’s job, such as pay, working conditions and implementation of technology.”

• “A stable, predictable schedule, a manageable workload, and meaningful control over when and how work gets done.”

It’s Monday morning. How does your job score on those five criteria? (Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have asked. Go get another coffee.)

I can imagine someone else looking at the same survey data and concluding that the percentage of people with quality jobs is actually 20 percent, or 60 percent, or some other share.

But rather than quibble over numbers, I want to think about why a lot of jobs are bad given that, according to the authors, it’s in employers’ best interest to make jobs good. Here’s an excerpt on that point:

Job quality is strongly associated with job satisfaction and worker well-being — outcomes consistently linked in prior research to lower turnover, higher productivity and stronger business performance. In short, quality jobs may not only be tied to better lives for employees but also to stronger outcomes for businesses.

On a conference call ahead of the release of the American Job Quality Study, I asked four women whose organizations were involved in it why employers aren’t making jobs better if in fact it would lead to “stronger outcomes.”

Employers need to be convinced that there’s a good return on investment from making jobs better, Maria Flynn, the chief executive of Jobs for the Future, told me. She praised Bank of America, for one, for raising the pay of its lowest-paid workers.

Crummy jobs for workers are “baked into the business model” of many companies, and employers don’t realize how much better things could be if they uplifted workers, said Rachel Korberg, the executive director of the Families and Workers Fund. Like Flynn, though, she said things are changing. She said her organization is “working with thousands of small and midsized businesses that are really interested in this.”

Stephanie Marken, a senior partner at Gallup, which conducted the survey, said some improvements are fairly cheap and easy, such as providing workers with more predictable schedules and shutting down bullying. She said gaining the support of high-level management for change is essential.

Molly Blankenship, a director at Jobs for the Future, said “there are lots of calls on business to do more but not always guidance on how.” That creates an opening for organizations such as hers to provide that guidance, based partly on the findings in the new report.

The four comments all boil down to the same thing, which is consciousness-raising.

Then again, it could be that employers have thought about this and concluded that actually, no, making jobs better would not be good for them. But that possibility is too depressing to contemplate.

• Correction (Oct 20, 2025): This post originally stated that the five job criteria are not numerically well defined. They are numerically well defined, it’s just that people can disagree about what the thresholds should be.