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.
For workers, the consequences are obvious. People in quality jobs are healthier, happier, and more satisfied with their lives. But it matters just as much for companies. Every “human” statistic has a business consequence. When you’re replacing your entire frontline every few years, you’re wasting resources on recruiting, training, and onboarding. If you have a safety problem, that’s clearly horrible for workers, but you’re also wasting money on workers’ comp and missed days of work. And if safety is poor, product quality usually is too because both are the direct result of weak processes and disengaged colleagues.
This new study puts all these elements together in one clear, data-driven picture. And it shines a light on reality: we’re stuck in a perilous cycle. High turnover discourages investment in people – things like upskilling, cross-training, and career development. Workers sense that and give the bare minimum in return. Leaders start to see employees as “heads” – interchangeable units of labor. Empathy erodes. Companies focus their attention on the next quarter, and workers keep their eyes open for a better offer. Everyone gets trapped in short-termism.
How to break the cycle? Change the way companies operate; empower workers to think and act like owners.
That’s why my work as an investor has increasingly focused on broad-based employee ownership as a tool to both lift up workers and shift corporate cultures. Over the past fifteen years at KKR, we’ve partnered with more than eighty companies to give equity ownership to about 180,000 frontline employees. When done well, it changes everything.
I’ve seen factory workers start tracking quality yields with the intensity of CFOs. Engagement scores rise, quit rates fall, and productivity climbs because people finally feel respected, trusted, and included. They have a stake and a voice. They can see how the business works, and how their effort moves the numbers.
Just last month, we completed our investment in an insurance services company called Integrated Specialty Coverages. Employees who had been there at least three years earned stock worth 100 percent of their annual income – a reward that didn’t replace any of their regular pay. More tenured workers did even better, some earning three years of wages. In addition to significantly enhancing its growth rate and profitability, the company was rewarded with engagement scores reaching the top decile of its peer group and quit rates dropping by more than half.
Sharing equity isn’t a magic wand. Employee ownership only works when paired with education, transparent communication, financial literacy training, and worker voice. It’s also not a replacement for wages or other benefits – and it’s not charity. It’s a tool for cultural alignment and improved performance. And it’s one of the few structural levers we have to shift incentives away from short-termism and toward shared success.
The American Job Quality Study matters because it gives us a data-backed picture of what too many Americans already know from experience: most jobs don’t offer dignity, stability, or a path forward – and we all reap the consequences. Let’s take the lessons from this study and apply them. It’s time to start rethinking how value is shared, so that the people creating it can share in it. I’ve seen what happens when they do. My dad would’ve called that a quality job.
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