In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, a deeper dive into a new report on how the pandemic changed what lower-wage earners expect from a job, what they are doing to improve their economic mobility, and the impact it is having on the workforce today.

One of the tasks of the U.S. Federal Reserve System is to take the pulse of economic conditions to better understand the economic health of the country. Capturing the full picture of today’s labor market means looking beyond the data and understanding the actual experiences of workers and job seekers.

A new report from the Fed – Worker Voices – does just that, providing insight into how job seekers and workers in lower-wage roles navigated the labor market throughout the COVID 19 pandemic – and what they now expect from a job today.

Two of the authors join me in today's podcast.

Ashley Putnam is director of the Economic Growth & Mobility Project at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Sarah Miller is principal adviser for community and economic development within the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity.

Miller says the work on the report started with a conversation she, Putnam, and several other colleagues had two years, during the COVID pandemic. "As you recall, at this time, the labor market was incredibly tight. There were two job openings to every one job seeker. There was quite a bit of discussion in the media around unemployment benefits, stimulus, and just general incentives for workers to work or to not work. And that was a question that we just wanted to ask, especially of a population that doesn't have a bachelor's degree, that traditionally has been more vulnerable in the economy."

Putnam says they decided to ask lower-wage earners about their experience in the labor market since they are historically hit the first and the hardest in times of economic crisis. "We knew that low-wage workers, workers of color, and workers without a four-year college degree tend to occupy the roles that experienced some of the brunt of the initial pandemic layoffs."

She continues, "And so we were really focused on what we could do to try to talk to those workers directly. We often speak to intermediaries. We look at quantitative data, we understand sort of things from several levels back and we thought, wouldn't it be interesting to ask the workers themselves, what's motivating them? Why are they changing jobs at a high rate? Why are they maybe hesitant to go back to some industries?"

Miller, Putnam, and their colleagues at the other Federal Reserve Banks interviewed more than 175 workers in 33 states in a variety of industries – hospitality, food service, customer service, food production, manufacturing, health care and early childcare. Many were in what we called "frontline" or "essential" jobs, jobs that would have brought the economy to a full stop, if not for these workers filling them.

Worker Voices: Key Conclusions

There were a number of key takeaways from those personal conversations:

Low-wage earners had difficult balance of health and financial concerns.

A tight labor market hasn’t benefited all workers equally.

Workers expressed enhanced expectations of job quality.

Many workers are reinventing themselves through skills development.

We go into great details in the podcast on all of these conclusions, but I do want to highlight some of our conversation around the first one.

While much has been written and spoken about the role of the essential worker, we shouldn't forget and the difficult dilemma many of these employees found themselves in during the height of the pandemic – risking their physical health or risking their financial health.

"What we found is that they were weighing incredibly complex choices," says Miller. "They've described their experiences as traumatic and scary and shared quite a lot around some really profound questions that they were faced wi...