The end of good jobs. For now.

Trump, Republicans, and even Democrats have tilted away from workforce programs that lead to good jobs. They shouldn't.

The issue

The federal government no longer is interested in spending its money to help more Americans get good jobs.

Wait, what?

Last fall, President Biden traveled to a union hall in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to sign an executive order called “Investing in America and Investing in Americans,” or as it was quickly nicknamed, “the Good Jobs Executive Order.” As you probably guessed, given that my last job at the U.S. Department of Labor had "good jobs” in the title, I contributed to building out the order.

Because of the venue and the president enjoying being called “Union Joe,” critics quickly pointed out that there was a big bundle of union-friendly policies in the order. But even if you’re the type of person who thinks the word “union” and screams “Bad!”¹ to the ordering kiosk at the Hardee’s,² you probably can see that the order also directed agencies to logically invest federal workforce dollars toward good workforce results. Like the three-step idea approach to workforce investment I wrote about a couple weeks ago, which got a quite a bit of positive bipartisan feedback.

To level set, “good jobs” are those that pay enough for workers to do more than just get by and treat them well enough that they stay and thrive.³ In my experience, the idea of bringing this concept into federal programs caught on strongly in workforce circles in good part because it answers an open question: why the heck are we doing all this?

That blank is left open by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the main avenue by which the federal government invests in getting people who need work to jobs that need filling. As I have written about quite a bit at this stage, WIOA is something of a mess, with nearly half of the graduates of WIOA-supported programs making wages that leave them functionally unemployed. Among other problems, a big flaw in WIOA is that the closest thing it has to an overriding policy rationale is “measure stuff.” Measurement is not a policy solution by itself. It’s a way of grading whether what you’re doing works under a policy. If you don’t have a clear rationale for why you’re doing it, well, measurement probably will tell you that you stink. If you can figure out what it’s telling you, that is.

Another problem is that WIOA also relies upon the illusion of choice—things like what is an “In-demand job”? what supportive services will we offer and why?—that can create a lot of havoc with quality control for the states and localities who administer the law and plenty confusion for the workers supposed to benefit from it. Strangely, for example, workers who come to government as a last resort for finding job, often because they have not been successful in figuring out how to do that on their own, struggle with an open-ended, hard-to-read, voucher-based marketplace of potential services. Good jobs built a plot into the choose-your-adventure story Congress punted to the states and participants when it passed the law. Because if you’re building someone to a good job in a particular field—or trying to get a particular field to offer good jobs—you can start to fill in the remaining puzzle pieces from there.

Good jobs also provided a north star to this work that, well, probably should have always been there. Because it’s honestly kind of wild we weren’t trying to use federal workforce dollars for the explicit goal of getting workers into jobs with good pay, benefits like healthcare and childcare, and safety standards that assure that workers will come home with at least one—or preferably, both—arms at the end of each shift.

But the federal government is finally and truly shifting away from spending toward good jobs. On Friday night, the Trump Administration rescinded⁴ the whole of Good Jobs Executive Order, calling it “harmful.”⁵ This followed the Administration’s quieter steps away from good jobs, including rewiring more than $130 million in DOL grants by removing any mention of “family-sustaining pay”—a previous Trump priority—and requirements that said homeless veterans deserve safe jobs that pay a living wage.

All these changes reminded me of conversations I had when I told people I was leaving the Department of Labor. I was ready to do something else, but there were those—inside and outside of government—who seemed surprised that I didn’t think “good jobs” would be sticking around and that I might want to have a hand in shaping whatever Trumpian form “good jobs” took next.

The question they usually asked aloud: what politician would be willing to say they don’t want federal workforce policy to lead people to good jobs?

The answer, of course, is one of the most powerful congressional voices in workforce development over the last generation, whose viewpoint very much aligns with the changes made in recent weeks by the Trump Administration.

And whose potentially last big piece of handiwork—a pivot away from good jobs thinking—is now being heavily pushed in Congress.

By the opposing party.

Joe Biden’s party, in fact.

Explain yourself.

The leader I’m referring to is Rep. Virginia Foxx, the former chairwoman of the House Education and Workforce/Labor Committee, and co-architect of A Stronger Workforce for America Act, or ASWA, the latest attempt to reauthorize WIOA. She also was a strong supporter of the original WIOA, something you might be surprised to learn given her recent statements on the law. If you want to know Foxx’s influence on these issues, they just hung a portrait of her in the committee room to mark her transition away.

In 2022, when Republicans were out of power, Foxx was ranking member of the House Education and Labor Committee. She did not like a different WIOA reauthorization bill that included “job quality,” or good jobs requirements, for on-the-job training programs. Those requirements allowed reimbursement of up to 90 percent of workers’ wages (an giant increase from the maximums in WIOA), based on state and local government definitions of wages, benefits, and workplace safety. In other words, the 2022 bill provided a good, clear incentive to employers in exchange for their providing good working conditions—stuff that works.

But here is how Rep. Foxx described it at a hearing:

This is another Washington-knows-best⁶ policy that will end up hurting job creators and workers. Mandating ‘job quality’ measures for on-the-job learning programs will give federal bureaucrats, not workers, the power to judge worthwhile employment.

One, I, Nick Beadle, was that bureaucrat who made decisions on job quality. I’ll circle back to that experience later in this piece.

Two, just to avoid any thinking this was isolated to one particular part of one particular bill that hasn’t been relevant in three years, here is what Foxx said last fall in a statement about the Good Jobs Executive Order.

This Executive Order is filled to the brim with rancid policies that serve to better the bottom line of unions and nothing more.

I’m sure there is some sort of semantic debate to have about the meaning of “filled to the brim,” but as I find myself writing quite a lot these days, it says something that Foxx’s statement didn’t un-batch things like living wages and arm-preserving safety policies from those she was describing as “rancid.” It also says something that she was willing to put her name to a statement that could be interpreted as such.⁷

ASWA, then, better aligns with her workforce views. It takes out good jobs as a target and, in my opinion, removes any workable target but for “measure this stuff.” To me, it seems more likely to recreate counterproductive prerogatives like “move bodies and paper” and “get workers to job no matter what it pays.”

So of course, Democrats have spent the past few weeks stumping for ASWA. As I understand it, there are many slopes and curves in this political calculus: no one wants to touch anything that reminds people of Joe Biden, ASWA really was built by both parties, DOGE Head/Emotional Twitter Purchaser Elon Musk mucked with the lame-duck spending bill that would have carried ASWA to this finish line by posting through it, forming a nice, tall patch of awkward billionaire grass from which one could possibly produce sweet, warm political hay.

But what I gather is the biggest reason? Democrats (and some Republicans) worry that, without WIOA reauthorization, the Trump Administration and House leadership will gut federal workforce programs as part of a ten-year plan to cut $330 billion from education and workforce spending.

Put another way: some workforce system is better than no workforce system at all.

I thought that myself until recently. I’ll circle back in a second to explain why I don’t anymore.

So?

If federal workforce spending is widely supported across the political spectrum, perhaps we should focus on directing it toward good jobs, a concept that patched a lot of holes in how we do workforce development in the United States.

What can do we about it?

Let’s start with the one my friends in the workforce system won’t agree with.

It’s probably time to back away from ASWA.

ASWA is an improvement, but it perpetuates the problems of WIOA. And not to go all “fruit of the poisonous” tree, but ASWA was crafted and supported by someone who called “rancid” the kind of policies that get people who need help into good careers—something I know motivates a lot of the people who do this work. If you’re a Democrat, I also don’t see the point of continuing to push this bill when you could distinguish yourself from Trump and his workforce changes and cuts with a clear idea that makes a lot of sense to workers and employers.

That said, I definitely understand why people with a stake in the workforce system will continue to push this bill. Their rationale is solid: an administration probably won’t hold up money it approved itself, would it?

But politics don’t work like that anymore. After two months of freezes and all the other Trump efforts to Burn Everything—which hit red states hard and even run contrary to Administration priorities—what makes you think that this Administration won’t get a whim to mess with money that it signed off on?

Or that you can trust congressional leadership who just rescinded or cut workforce spending at a time when layoffs are rising?

Whoever makes themselves the party of good jobs, and makes them stick, likely will reap some good political payoff.

As I said earlier, I was that federal bureaucrat whom Rep. Foxx worried about. As part of the job, I made an effort to talk to workers about whether DOL’s idea of a good job was the same agreed with what they “judge[d] worthwhile employment,” to use her language.

Turns out, the answer was an emphatic, “Yeah, brother.”

One of these workers was Brandon Johnson,⁸ a cement pourer in West Tennessee who helped in the construction of an electric car battery factory buoyed by federal incentives. I think of his story a lot because, a hilarious number of years ago, I was an investigative reporter in West Tennessee. There, I told stories about how half-considered publicly funded jobs projects with no guardrails tended not to help out workers in a region on an economic downslide.⁹

That was not Brandon’s experience because his program was thought-through at the start to get him into quality training that led to a safe job with good pay.¹⁰

“I’m actually financially stable so I can think about my next step and what I want to do in my life instead of just trying to get by or keep my head above water,” he told me.

Other workers had stories like Brandon’s, too. But I also heard plenty of stories that highlighted how WIOA’s lack of focus made it harder for smart workforce organizations to reach people who need their help. One woman asked me if DOL had programs for men, too. Another man, an apprentice in the Midwest, was the happiest, most grateful form of pissed I had ever experienced. He got his job simply because he sat down in the wrong room at a community center. He told me federal leaders had to do better because other people might not get as lucky as he did.

There also was a sense that even if the federal government helped them find good jobs now, those jobs would go away because good jobs weren’t really meant for people like them. Even Brandon, who I think has great prospects, talked a lot about making sure he was prepared for when construction finished.

The reason for their thinking was pretty plain: they saw nothing that indicated that the people in power gave a damn about working people like them.

They viewed the federal system as disorganized and inaccessible, doubting it was designed to help people like them. And while they were happy to be in a moment where they had a good job, it probably was fleeting because everything often feels fleeting for working people.

So if you’re a political party worried about who takes the working class in the next few election cycles, well, there’s your lane.¹¹

Card subject to change.

LATER THIS WEEK (PROBABLY): I’m closely monitoring DOGE’s $30 million in cuts to DOL grants, announced last week by Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. I expect I will have a quick (for me) piece unpacking them. Did they cut things that are Republican and Trump priorities? Yup.

FRIDAY: Updated grants listings, plus (absent something else breaking) a potential bellwether of the Trump II vision of workforce development.

Roll Tide and see you soon.

1. Putting a pin in this: after a Labor Secretary confirmation battle that seemed more concerned with “Should we sound the alarm because this person breathed the same air as a union member?” than “Is this person actually a good and competent pick for this job?”, I’m researching a piece on blind anti-union politics and what it has cost companies and taxpayers in both dollars and lost opportunities.

2. Some of you may be wondering if this is a sly but wholly unnecessary Andy Puzder joke in a very long and very late newsletter.

It is!

3. Just to assuage some of you who prefer thoroughness in your definition of “good jobs”: “treat them well” is a broad enough concept to encompass things like “gives them a fair shake to prove they have the skills to do the job” and “values worker feedback” and “doesn’t waste millions on a multi-level scheme to keep one specific protected group of people from ever getting a job in the company.” Employers who treat workers well tend to share those characteristics, in my experience.

4. To answer a question I anticipate I have lived in Washington for the better part of two decades and been around politics longer than that: no, I’m not writing any of this because they killed something I worked hard to bring to life. I didn’t expect this order to survive if Trump was re-elected. It don’t hurt if those nerve endings died a long time ago, son.

5. As more than a few people have noted to me, the timing suggests that the Administration was waiting to rescind these union-friendly policies until after confirmation of its blessed by Sean O’Brien who some congressional Republicans and D.C. press think is every union in the United States balled up in one person despite ample evidence to the contrary union-friendly Labor Secretary pick, Lori Chavez-DeRemer.

6. States and localities made this determination under the original version of the bill and the one that exited the House.

7. Sigh. Given that she’s practically a co-star of JOBS THAT WORK at this point, I reckon it’s time to have The Virginia Conversation down here in the footnotes. I’ll start it by saying this: tI’ll start by saying this: there are people I respect immensely, including some dear friends, who have long insisted that Virginia Foxx is an extraordinarily kind leader with her head and heart in the right place on these issues. I’ll also say that even Foxx Watchers were surprised by strength and acidity of these quotes when I shared them ahead of this piece.

I wasn’t surprised at all. I handled incoming congressional questions and letters from Foxx and her team for the better part of a decade, including an intensive oversight request for a novel (and ultimately successful) program that I’m fairly certain came before the program had a single applicant. How she talks and thinks about these programs is very often like this quote: shortsighted on the things that matter, weirdly framed, and usually more than a little mean in ways that don’t match the context. Like any other member, she has cycled through staff, but the tone and approach have remained the same. At this point, I think it’s fair to look at the common denominator and treat the policies derived from it as highly flawed. Regardless of politics or party.

Always happy to have a conversation with folks I talk about in this space and write a follow up. Email nick@jobsthat.work.

8. I originally talked to Brandon for a blog post on dol.gov that the Trump Administration pulled down in the first few days after the inauguration.

9. In 2009 in Lexington, a town an hour east of where Brandon lives, I reported on a factory supported by public incentive dollars where workers had been told to race out of work to try to cash their checks ahead of their co-workers—before the money ran out. When the facility opened in March 2009, Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen, who was at the opening, called the facility a sign of “stability” amid the Great Recession.

The lesson here? Hurling dollars into the wind without having an organizing principle for the “making it work” part is a bipartisan affliction—one that desperately needs addressing in the next phase of publicly supported workforce development.

Also, never say your workers are your family, because holy crap I forgot about this quote from a worker on the owner until I looked up the piece to make sure I had the details right:

“He keeps saying that we’re all a big family. Mine doesn’t give me bogus checks.”

10. Some of my helpful right-leaning readers may ruefully point out the plant construction had a Project Labor Agreement, a project-specific bargaining agreement that sets wages and terms of a project. These can be controversial among the anti-union crowd, but I see them as a wildly useful workforce tool for the reason I write about above a host of bipartisan ideas I’ve written in this space. Specifically, if you plan a project with clear strategies for moving people and resources from point A to point B, it tends to, you know, work. By definition, PLAs require that depth of upfront thinking.

11. I can hear you ask the question: “Why didn’t these workers see these workforce programs as a positive grade on Joe Biden or Kamala Harris?” One, I was in a nonpartisan role and tried to steer workers away from election talk. Two, that’s a whole other newsletter.