The cost of living in the United States means that just having a job isn’t good enough for many Americans to get by, let alone get ahead. Workforce leaders often have been reluctant to talk about getting people to not just a job, but a job paying a living wage.

As a matter of politics and policy, that’s really no longer an option.

It’s starting to look like it’s time to really talk about one of the things workforce leaders don’t like talking about at all.

After the release of September’s jobs report on Friday, the unemployment rate has been 4.5 percent or lower for five years, the longest run in modern American history. Yet, earlier this year, Gallup reported that a record percentage of Americans surveyed felt their financial situation was getting worse.

It’s not hard to figure out why. September’s jobs report, put together with recent inflation data, shows that rising costs have outpaced wages for much of the year. Nationally, the average gas price is nearly $4.50 per gallon. It’s nearly $4 per gallon in places with lower average wages, little to no public transit, and long distances between the places people need to go.

The situation doesn’t so much highlight a new problem as underline one made far worse by the current economy: a job, alone, isn’t good enough anymore—not unless the wages keep up.

The challenge for us in workforce is that the goalpost marking success in our field is often just employment. A job, with pretty much no official discernment as to living wages, is the general endpoint for workers trained through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, or WIOA, America’s most consistent source of workforce funding. Recent replacement legislation, including text backed by both parties in 2024, didn’t really change that and rejected efforts in a 2022 bill to introduce some bare definitions of job quality to the statute.

The results of what we have now haven’t been great. Prior to the most recent inflationary jump, the Project on Workforce at Harvard found that more than 40 percent of those who complete WIOA training end up in jobs paying $25,000 or less per year. That’s not a living wage anywhere in the United States. Harvard also found WIOA programs often don’t lead completers toward opportunities to climb into roles that do pay better wages.

The situation doesn’t necessarily get better when broaden the conversation to economic development, which some people view as a cousin field to workforce, but I tend to view as workforce in a nicer suit. In my experience with its chief sellers, economic development is sold to the public primarily in terms of new jobs created by spending taxpayer dollars. Historically, states haven’t attached very high expectations to that job creation, so long as the jobs look like they’re coming. In some situations, states have invested tremendous amounts of public resources toward drawing jobs in lucrative-looking fields, only for wages to slip backward over time when adjusted for inflation.

In the current environment, then, it would seem like we should be having a deeper workforce conversation about making sure workforce and economic development projects pay living wages. Thing is, using those tools to nudge better wages, let alone ensure living wages, is still an awkward topic for many leaders in this space.

I’ve done a lot of work on job quality in the last four years. Even during the height of that during the Biden Administration, I heard some leaders insist that wages are an overstated part of job quality and that broader, squishier aspects of work can be better markers of the quality of a job.

Respectfully, nah. For Americans who don’t have means, working is the way they cover the costs of being alive. If you’re steering workers toward jobs you want them to fill, succeeding means accounting for whether they can afford both the pathway into the job and the cost of staying in it once they’re trained.

Too few public workforce and economic dollars that help employers create jobs are conditioned on if workers will earn a living wage. I’ve heard a lot of reasons for that over the years. The main argument for leaving wages alone usually comes back to “Employers will get mad,” or its close corollary, “No one will take the money and the project will fail.”

Constructively, I’ve not seen a major public investment in a workforce training program struggle to find takers for the money. Is every employer thrilled with paying people a certain wage as a condition of public dollars? Of course not, but, respectfully, taking public workforce money isn’t compulsory.

As I’ve written before, one of the major barriers to success for public workforce funding is that we try to stretch limited dollars to serve every industry in all the ways. We need prioritization to get a better return on the investment of limited taxpayer resources. It’s sound policy to direct those resources toward employers that pay workers enough that they might not need future workforce support because they can afford to stick with the job.

I do understand the hesitance in dealing with employers, what with them hiring people for jobs and all. That said, I’ve also spoken to employers (including those deeply suspicious of government and worker groups) who aren’t nearly as reactionary on wages as policymakers think, particularly if the issue is framed thoughtfully around those employers’ resources and needs. At the end of the day, employers pay workers to show up and do the job, and if they don’t pay workers enough, workers struggle to show up. It costs employers a lot when they don’t.

A cousin of the “Employers will get mad at me” argument is that political opponents of this money will burn it to a crisp if it sets expectations for wages. As you might guess, this is a common fear among centrist and left policymakers afraid of Republican blowback.

There certainly are Republicans that will say harsh things about public workforce officials as anonymous, incompetent bureaucrats. But after a couple of decades of dealing with this Pokémon type of Angry Conservative Elected Leader, I assure you that they’re generally going to say those things about workforce officials regardless of what policies they put together.

This argument also belies just how little partisan difference there is on workforce issues. I know ruby-red states that try to use their money and workforce programs to drive employers toward paying better wages. The Republican nominee for governor in Ohio, who is to the right of the direction right on a great many things, calls for “good-paying jobs” in his platform using language I might have used in bulking up the job quality features of Biden grant opportunities in 2023.

The last reason I’ve heard for this—from Democratic and Republican leaders alike—is that public workforce leaders really shouldn’t be setting these kinds of standards. Sometimes the idea is that government officials can’t reliably learn and make decisions on these issues because they take a government salary, not a private one. Other times, it’s a belief that government is inherently bad, and even if everyone is smart and patient and qualified to make informed and responsive decisions, everything will go badly.

Constructively, and somewhat putting aside the genus of Republican leaders who believe this stuff in their electrons, I’ve always been puzzled by government leaders who make the policy argument that government enterprises they lead are going to do a bad job. My experience has been that leading with this attitude tends to inspire worse-quality government services and lazy policy thinking because, well, the expectation is that everything government does will suck.

Is government great at everything? No, even things that are objectively great are bad at some things. (Ice cream is delicious, but a terrible forklift driver.) But government officials can be great at listening, processing, and helping define standards in the areas it regulates—particularly when it comes to spending government resources toward them.

Heck, government may be the only entity that can provide guidance when an industry or field really struggles to push itself forward on a topic. Employers have sought that sort of federal leadership on AI workforce issues well before the latest entreaties from the AI industry to Washington to stop The Terminator. They’ve just not gotten it.

We really, really need to condition more workforce and economic development funding on the payment of living wages—and target more of it toward jobs and employers that meet that standard.

The current economic circumstances of many Americans mean workforce policymakers have to be much less sheepish about the topic. We can’t talk about job quality without making good pay the cornerstone of the conversation.

Just getting folks into a job is no longer good enough—the numbers and the stories are screaming that.