My dad spent 40 years operating heavy machinery on construction sites around Chicago. He was proud of his work and of his union card, but I wouldn’t call what he had a quality job. No one listened to him. He didn’t feel respected. He could never get ahead financially. Around the dinner table, he’d tell stories about fighting over wages or whether the lunch hour was paid or unpaid. What stayed with me wasn’t just the frustration; it was how obviously bad that dynamic was for everyone involved. I remember wondering why work had to feel like a fight.
Decades later, I see those same tensions playing out across the U.S. economy. The new American Job Quality Study, conducted by Gallup and developed by Jobs for the Future, The Families & Workers Fund, and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, aims to measure what makes a job “good.” It looks at five things: financial security, safety and respect, opportunities to grow, a voice in decisions, and a manageable schedule. By that definition, only around 40 percent of American workers have quality jobs.
As an investor, I evaluate hundreds of companies every year, and this data squares with what we see on the ground. Many companies don’t even measure employee engagement or quit rates. And what isn’t measured certainly isn’t managed. We routinely see companies that have such high turnover that they rehire their entire frontline every few years. Inevitably, the impact of all this churn spills into other areas like safety, given that less experienced workers are far more likely to get hurt. In one particularly ironic case, a safety equipment manufacturer had injury rates that were triple the OSHA benchmark.
