A short piece in today’s New York Times speaks to the vulnerability of many workers today, and the price of sticking up for one’s rights. Our primary focus at CEWD is delivering skills-based training. We are also aware that many jobs, especially entry-level positions – in healthcare, in food service, in retail – are physically demanding. Talking to our students about, and creating an environment that acknowledges the context of work and the policies that shape it, is critical to our mission.

Failure to Launch, from the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, speaks to many of the issues we talked about in an earlier post regarding the changing atmosphere of the workforce. This report goes further into studying the effects this shift has on educational and labor market institutions. In six parts, this report analyzes long-term labor trends since the 1980s; more recent trends since 2000, the effects of the recessions that dominated that time, and a look at how both younger and older workers have been effected; specific geographic regions at the top and bottom of unemployment markers; social and cultural stereotypes of those who fare the worst during times of unemployment; policy recommendations to fix the lagging workforce structure; and finally, reasons to be hopeful about these overall shifts.