Summary of The Good Jobs Solution

Tens of millions of employees in the service sector, including those in retail, are locked in low-
paying, pointless jobs that don't take advantage of their skills. According to conventional belief,
these undesirable professions are an inevitable cost of receiving low-priced service. They are
not, as more and more organisations are coming to the conclusion. In "The Case for Good
Jobs," the first of two articles that serve as the series' linchpin, MIT professor Zeynep Ton
explores the economic, competitive, and ethical factors driving businesses to seek out an
alternative strategy that provides frontline staff with a living wage, adequate training,
predictable schedules, and career opportunities. This strategy also calls for the entire
organisation to work together to ensure that these staff members are highly productive and
provide excellent products and services. Ton examines how businesses, such as the Spanish
grocery chain Mercadona and the American pet retail brand Mud Bay, are implementing what
she dubs the Good Jobs Strategy, or GJS, in chapter two, "How to Build a Business on Good
Jobs." "Clocking In" offers a first-person account of working the front lines in a service
organisation from the perspective of a researcher who got a retail job to learn what obstacles
staff face when providing exceptional customer care. In "Cleaning Up Bad Jobs" and "The
Right Thing to Do," CEOs Greg Foran of Walmart U.S. and Dan Teran of Managed by Q,
respectively, outline how and why their organisations are adopting the GJS. "The GJS Can
Take Lessons from TPS" demonstrates what we can learn from the Toyota Production System,
another transformational approach. The significance of the GJS for society at large is further
documented in "It's Time to Make More Jobs Good Jobs." The "Getting Started on Good
Positions" whiteboard session in this Big Idea also introduces Ton's Good Jobs Scorecard, a
tool for evaluating jobs in your organisation and starting a GJS implementation.