Where do workers climb with fewer rungs on the ladder?

Welcome to this edition of JOBS THAT WORK, a policy and business newsletter about how everything is workforce, and how we can make everything better.

Employers are likely to use AI to justify shedding jobs that have been key pathways for workers to climb the economic ladder to better and more stable lives. That has big costs for employers as much as it does workers, and it requires different thinking in how policymakers design workforce programs and respond to AI-blamed job loss.

Something that’s always driven me nuts about some of America’s publicly funded workforce programs is that the law and underfunding drives them to aim too low in terms of outcomes.

Based on who qualifies for help under the law, federal workforce programs tend to serve the people American education systems and other pieces of society have strongly suggested Go Do Something Else without offering a clear way to the labor market. Putting whatever shine is needed on that person to get a job that helps them get ahead of the cost of living can take money and time. Congress strongly favors moving bodies and paper as quickly and cheaply as possible through federal workforce programs, which tends to foreclose effective long-term solutions.

In other words, it costs too much to get real results. Where workers who complete many of these programs tend to land is in the general vicinity of a job that might help them get ahead—one day. Very often public workforce programs deliver their graduates to the type of jobs that are entry-level for people who had more resources growing up or just took to typical schooling better. Or the programs deposit them in a job a couple rungs below those jobs because, well, it’s available right now.

Most times, providers don’t have much of an idea of how that worker will get from the place they leave them to being able to comfortably afford an increasingly expensive life. Some workforce providers and even some policymakers insist it’s the best they can do with the tools they have. Some workers need stability first, they say. Better-paying employers, they say, need proof that a person will “work out” for reasons that my lawyer brain can find hard to separate from the worker’s class or race or sex.

The problem is that those jobs really can’t keep being the “best” place to leave those workers. Not anymore. As documented quite well in research published last week by Opportunity@Work and Brookings, many of the kind of jobs public workforce programs aim their workers at are starting to go away.

And they’re also going away for the people who have been “safe” hires for them for generations. Entry-level job postings have declined 35 percent since 2023, and new college graduates are having a tough time getting hired. Employers are blaming AI, even if the jobs aren’t eventually filled by AI.

In other words, not only are we losing the typical weigh stations we place workers who need more help getting into jobs that help them get ahead, we’re likely going to have an entirely new class of people who can’t reach the ladder to get into jobs that pay well and treat them well enough to build a stable life. That has a cost to employers as well as workers, and we need to rethink the shape and aim of publicly funded workforce programs, as well as how involved policymakers and elected leaders are willing to become on AI-related job loss.