Putting Skill to Work: How to Create Good Jobs in Uncertain Times (The MIT Press)

An argument for reimagining skill in a way that can extend economic opportunity to workers at the bottom of the labor market.

America has a jobs problem—not enough well-paying jobs to go around and not enough clear pathways leading to them. Skill development is critical for addressing this employment crisis, but there are many unresolved questions about who has skill, how it is attained, and whose responsibility it is to build skills over time. In this book, Nichola Lowe tells the stories of pioneering workforce intermediaries—nonprofits, unions, community colleges—that harness this ambiguity around skill to extend economic opportunity to workers at the bottom of the labor market.