Economic Initiatives →
Equity & Diversity
There is an urgent and ongoing need for collaborative strategies to create jobs that pay family-supporting wages. And we must ensure that these strategies support any demographic groups suffering inordinate job loss or wage loss, including women and people of color.
Women in the Workforce
There are solutions to help women achieve equality in the workforce. We can enhance women's ability to build equity by ensuring women adequate access to capital and by publicizing the equal credit law so that women can recognize and report discrimination. We can assist low-income working parents through work supportive services, including childcare and transportation assistance. We can protect women's opportunity for employment by enforcing anti-discrimination and affirmative action laws, by supporting apprenticeship training and unionization, and by providing flexible work schedules and part-time work with benefits that recognize the realities of women's lives. We can promote pay equity by requiring government contractors to monitor and eliminate gender-based patterns of inequity, by clarifying equal pay laws to prohibit gender bias in jobs with different duties but equal levels of responsibility, and by honoring women's unpaid work at home and in families.
Further resources
People of Color in the Workforce
Minnesota's economic future will depend on the economic well-being of people of color. Within the next twenty-five years, one in four Minnesotans will be a person of color, according to the Minnesota State Demographic Center. There are proven solutions to help people of color achieve equality in the workforce. JOBS NOW Coalition is a co-releaser of the Organizing Apprenticeship Project's Racial Equity Policy Brief, in collaboration with African Development Center, HIRE Minnesota, ISAIAH, and Metropolitan Economic Development Association.
Further resources
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