Field Notes: The Good Jobs Score

You can’t get out of poverty without a source of income, typically in the form of a wage-earning job. But a bad job can keep someone in poverty as easily as no job at all.

To shed more light on this disparity, Zeynep Ton, a professor at MIT, has worked with her students to create a scoring methodology examining how well companies follow her Good Jobs Strategy (on which we shared her TED talk). She writes on the report’s website:

Even in highly competitive industries, like low-cost retail, there are companies that choose a Good Jobs Strategy. They design and manage their operations in a way that creates value for their customers and investors while offering good jobs to their employees. The Good Jobs Strategy is a sustainable strategy in which everyone —customers, employees, and investors— wins.

The list takes three main measures into account: high customer satisfaction (based on data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Consumer Reports, and  Yelp.com), high employee satisfaction (based on data from Glassdoor.com and Indeed.com), and high productivity(based on data reported in 10-K filings with the E.C.). Scores are relative within each industry. Currently, the site publishes the Good  Jobs Score for US Food Retailers, which you can check out here.

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This post was prepared by Katherine Blum.