By now, you know who we are. You know what we want to achieve. And you know how committed we are to creating an equitable Bay Area that works for everyone.

Through tools and collaborations like the Equity at Work Council and State of Bay Area Workers, we are seeing a clearer picture of the complex challenges and opportunities we face. And while we have plenty to learn about what it will take to ReWork the Bay, one thing we know for certain is that our success will be determined by the people who do the work, on the ground, every day. Like the intake specialist who welcomes the single mother from Burma who speaks little English into a career center to pursue employment.

Beyond just a greeting, that intake specialist is charged with delicately and skillfully asking the program participant about their life up to that point. What challenges have they faced in getting and keeping a job in the past? How much education have they completed? Have they been incarcerated, or struggled with drugs or alcohol? Do they have children? These questions often lead to hard conversations about trauma and other life challenges, which can in turn cause compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma in workforce providers.

This year, ReWork is excited to partner with public and non-profit organizations across California to explore how our frontline, client-facing workforce development staff at organizations are faring. Do they have the support needed to maintain their mental and physical health as they help others maintain theirs? Are they able to access the kinds of career advancement support they provide their clients? Do they get paid enough and have the benefits needed to support themself and their family? If not, what can organizational leadership, funders and policymakers do differently to make their job a quality, empowered job?

With our new statewide project, Improving Job Quality for Frontline Workforce Providers, your organization can help us advance the field’s understanding of client-facing workforce providers’ needs and identify practical strategies to better address them. Together, we can ensure that frontline workers have the resources, capacities, supports, infrastructure, and relationships they need to truly thrive in their field. Click here to learn more about how your organization can apply to join this important work.

Help us ReWork the Bay.

In Community,

Rob, Kayla, and Brianna

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As 2021 comes in to play, we need to be honest with ourselves. 2020 was a year that challenged, traumatized, and took loved ones. For those left behind, 2020 provided  resilience and scars. It was also the culmination of approximately 40 years of a neo-liberal economic model that has dominated our socio-economic development strategies.

Today, COVID-19 has shined a light on a myriad of unintended consequences of these policies: inequality, social division, low trust in authority, a focus on identity, and much more.

In my work with colleagues, we’ve pursued a strategy we describe as “Mixed Teams and Mixed Leadership.” What this means is valuing the insight and expertise of life experiences and different stories that drive our society, equally with learned, academic and professional expertise. 

Today, we are primarily led and dominated by an educated, professionalized elite made up of mainly technocrats. While this drove value for 40 years, it is now starting to show diminishing returns. I am not arguing against the fact that following a higher degree, professional career, and signing up to be a knowledge worker is a bad thing. Rather I just think we get even more value from knowledge workers when they are lined up with non-knowledge workers. 

Whether it’s the failure to tackle growing inequality, the free-market approach to technology companies that has allowed them to flourish without proper oversight, or the dogmatic drive to push people into higher education rather than recognize their diverse preferences and aptitudes, this technocratic system of development has clearly failed too many.

Mixed teams and mixed leadership means recognizing and valuing people’s lived experience. Studies have shown that those with lived experience act as a necessary conduit between services and communities, allowing them to influence culture and provide a heightened utility. We can harness people’s experience of crime, homelessness, low wage work or poor education to share knowledge, develop research, and produce policies and programs to tackle these issues. This requires people with both lived experience and a strategic orientation, acting systematically, and confidence that allows them to engage with anyone.      

I have tried to deliver mixed teams and mixed leadership in my work . Below are some key parts of the approach coupled with real-life examples.

• Deep thinking, research and planning is key:  Community Researchers at The Social Innovation Partnership (Supported by Impact on Urban Health and Wellcome Trust – the second largest Foundation in the World) used a model that allowed us to tap into the cultural nuances of the local community, providing us with an insider approach to data gathering around COVID-19  experiences. The outcome of this work is richer research delivered by local people, and giving those very people a stake in the production of knowledge in their communities. 
• Building advisory teams and space to engage strategically :  Project Signal uses a data collaborative method that allows stakeholders to address the challenges and needs of the unemployed. This model gives opportunity and space to other organizations like employers and government workforce development boards to contribute data in real-time. The outcome of this work is worker voice and perspective is injected into the work and informs what data Community Development Organisations collect – when you ask workers what they want to see in training programs the answers are powerful, examples include a demand for mentoring / coaching into work and even looking towards the next role, or a request for help to navigate the ‘games’ that some HR functions can play / use to filter out ‘trainees’.

This creates effective tools and services to help individuals acquire new credentials, skills and a higher standard of living. The work is ongoing and the insights from workers are remarkable. Their views will lay the foundation for a “Data Trust” that will be soaked in the insight of workers and hopefully inform what professionals will do.

• Driving Mixed Teams/Mixed Leadership to influence the flow of capital:  JFF Fund is a community-led investment fund that will work with companies to solve business problems in a way that benefits workers and communities equally. JFF partnered with our team at Turning Basin Labs to conduct field research by asking workers themselves to play key roles in a participatory, community-driven research process to develop an investment fund that can support the growth of worker-centric employment models.

This work is ongoing in California. Contact us at @TBasinLabs on Twitter if you would like to partner with us.

• Thinking about sustainability and COOP ownership: Turning Basin Labs itself is a cooperative business that provides ownership to our most prolific workers, including profit share and access to essential benefits. Thanks to startup support from The Irvine Foundation (and further support from Kendeda and Philanthropic Ventures Foundation and others) TBL is focused on shared ownership, inclusion and growth, which we believe is the future of work. A clear example of us offering ownership is our partnership with JVS  where through completing an Earn and Learn Bookkeeping training and 8 weeks placement, workers end up with skills, a pathway to work, and ownership in our agency. 

TBL’s offer to employers is to use a service that hosts workers as W2 employees of TBL while they move from contract to contract. We believe that harnessing the shared ownership model for our workers is the path to re-wiring a fairer economy. Our work is finding that workers can add value to the sustainability and strategy of businesses, as our friends at JFF have written about, and as we explored at this event with former California Labor Secretary Julie Su.

Using models such as the above, it is clear that the idea of diversity in lived experience truly has a plethora of benefits. By recognizing the varying challenges each of us face, we are able to harness an approach that helps people secure a better quality of life through building inclusive frameworks.

Stephen Bediako OBE is the Executive Chair of The Social Innovation Partnership in London, England. He is also the Managing Director and co-founder of Turning Basin Labs and co-founder of the Bay Area based Path Group. Stephen recently received an Order of the British Empire honor in the 2021 Queens New Honours List for services in innovation in charity and social enterprise.

LinkedIn      |     Turning Basins Labs     |     Path Group

In the past five weeks, we have seen unprecedented action in support of the Movement for Black Lives in communities around the country, including many Bay Area cities. In addition to demanding an end to police brutality against black and brown people, community leaders and policymakers are advancing visionary yet practical solutions that re–imagine the systems that perpetuate structural racism in the United States.  

As with all American systems and institutions, we know that the white supremacy and racism that poison our justice system are also active in our education and training systems, contributing to a lack of economic opportunity and mobility for workers of color. 

At ReWork the Bay we wonder, “what could an anti-racist education and training system look like?”  

To begin to answer that question, we acknowledge that education and training systems respond to, and are reflective of, the broader economic system they operate in. Economic policy determines what jobs are created, the quality of those jobs, and in many ways, who gets hired to fill them. In other words, the economic system sets the rules of the game by which education and training systems must play. And in America, those rules weren’t written to lead to equitable outcomes.  

Even before the current economic downturn, when the Bay Area’s capitalist economy was one of the strongest in the world, our region was creating fewer and fewer quality, empowered jobs, and the majority of the good jobs that did exist were unattainable for most black and brown workers. There is ample evidence that shows this trajectory was not a coincidence, but the result of intentional policy choices.  

To re-imagine our workforce system, we need to understand how racism is embedded in, and perpetuated by, our capitalist economy.  

To deepen our learning in this area, we look to leaders of color who are painting a clear-eyed picture of the racist narratives and policies that undergird and embody our capitalist economy, and advancing visionary ideas for how things could be radically different. This month, that included: 

• Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be An Antiracist that unpacks what it means to be “antiracist”, and how racism shows up across all American institutions and systems; 
• The Insight Center’s narrative and policy work on economic liberation grounded in centering blackness; and  
• Liberation in a Generation’s guest-edited edition of the Forge, that unpacks the many ways capitalism is racialized, and casts a vision for a liberation economy, that “provides for people’s basic needs, safety, and security, that adequately compensates people of color for their labor, and that provides a sense of belonging.”  

We hope you will join us in re-imagining a Bay Area economy and workforce system that enables all people to live and thrive with dignity.  

The above mural is a product of the collaborative efforts of youth artists, practicing artists, and community members in the spirit of the movement for black and brown life. It is based on the photograph of Louis Michael, taken by SB Maney on May 29th, 2020 in downtown Oakland during the first of many mass protests of the murder of George Floyd.

Artists, Collaborators, and Contributors: L.C. Howard, Louis Michael, Aireon Tauarres Joy Johnson, Sarahbeth Maney, John Christie, Sam Kober, Gina Martinez, Jessica Gallegos, Kylie Jolyn, Anaya Dennis, Malia Johnson, Prota Mayo Rodriguez, Emiliano Zapata, James Miller, Josue Cruz, Suledy Mones-Higuera, Nicole Green, Juan Guillermo Matia Pablo, and Edwin Alonzo Ortiz Meja, Rayshawn the Artist, Destany Michael, JuVinci the Creator, Julius Underwood.

This blog post is part of the Changing Nature of Work project. See here for report, accompanying framework, and an appendix.

In the face of COVID-19, understanding the future of work through a worker-centered lens has taken on a new urgency. 

Before the pandemic, the future of work was already top of mind in California. In the “gig” economy, companies such as Uber, Lyft, Doordash and others sought to redefine employment relationships to exempt their workers from minimum labor laws. In advanced manufacturing and logistics, robotics and workplace surveillance technologies sped up job processes, but often made work more precarious or dangerous as workers were forced to work faster while their every movement is monitored. Responding to these emerging issues, in 2019 Governor Newsom convened the California Future of Work Commission, appointing leaders from education, labor, business, and other sectors to develop recommendations on how to proactively move the state’s workforce into the future, envisioning a new social compact that better met the needs of workers. 

That same year, ReWork the Bay, together with Jobs with Justice – San Francisco and Working Partnerships USA, launched our Changing Nature of Work (CNoW) project. As organizations that represent and amplify the voices of working people, we offer a different framework for understanding how work is changing — and it’s not just about technology.  The shifting dynamics we see today are the culmination of decades’ worth of more fundamental changes to our economy and our democracy: the growing power disparity between workers and firms; institutionalized racism and gender oppression; climate change, and demographic shifts. Technology is not a driver of change, but a tool that facilitates it.

By assessing the ways work is changing in the Bay Area and scanning the landscape of local and regional responses to those changes, the CNoW project sought to build a framework to help stakeholders make sense of the barrage of information and speculation about the “future of work” and to assess potential on-the-ground responses. This is important in a moment where new technology permits long-standing inequities to show themselves in stark, new ways.

Take the example of home grocery delivery, an industry that has exploded during the pandemic. While providing the same service, Safeway and Instacart have each taken very different approaches to their rapidly growing workforce. In early April, Instacart reported that customer demand had surged by 300%. Throughout this boom, the corporation has failed to provide the shoppers in its contingent workforce with personal protective equipment, hazard pay, or paid sick time. Workers had to go on strike – twice — before Instacart would agree even to provide workers with hand sanitizer and gloves. Instacart refuses to pay a living wage (let alone hazard pay) to its workers, who make less than $10 a delivery. This is far from adequate compensation for individuals assuming extraordinary risk while providing an essential service. 

But explosive growth need not come at the expense of working people. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Safeway and its store and delivery workers, represented in Northern California by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, agreed to enhanced health and safety protections, flexible scheduling for parents, and additional paid sick leave. Nor do high-road practices impede a company’s growth: in late March, Safeway announced 2,000 immediate openings for in-store and delivery workers in Northern California alone. 

Having a long-standing institutional channel in place for advocacy, protection, and self-representation, which their employer is contractually bound to bargain with, has made an immediate difference for Safeway workers. As the coronavirus has shown us in particularly stark terms, the more workers have channels to voice concerns and advocate for improvement, the better off we all are. 

The Greek root for the word crisis means decision. This pandemic is a time for decisions around how work will be different after the crisis. Times of disruption offer us an opportunity to remake structures that have failed us. Strong worker voice means shared prosperity. If we are to move forward to a better society, rather than replicating past mistakes, workers need to be front and center in shaping the future. 

Read the full report here.

Working Partnerships USA (WPUSA) is a community organization bringing together the power of grassroots organizing and public policy innovation to drive the movement for a just economy.

Jobs with Justice San Francisco is a long-term, strategic alliance of labor, community, faith-based, and student organizations working together to build a strong, progressive movement for economic and social justice locally and nationally.