This report presents the recommendations of the Working Families Task Force that sought to identify ways to strengthen the protections in place for Chicago’s workers. The task force examined three issues: paid sick leave, schedule predictability for shift workers, and paid family and medical leave. After 6 months of research, community engagement, and deliberation, the task force is proposing a framework for expanding access to sick leave and family and medical leave while recommending further research and discussion on schedule predictability before any legislative action is taken. The…
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Journal Article In this article, we test how out-of-home placement affects men's labor market attachment, and in so doing we provide a novel parallel to existing research on how fatherhood affects men, which focuses almost exclusively on a child's arrival. Using population panel data from Denmark that include all first time fathers whose children were placed in out-of-home care from 1995 to 2005, we find that having a child placed in care is associated with up to a 4 percentage point increase in welfare dependency. Having a child placed in out-of-home care appear to aggravate conditions that likely…
Other
Individuals require many skills to be college and career ready, including academic knowledge, technical expertise, and a set of general, cross-cutting abilities called employability skills.Employability skills are general skills that are necessary for success in the labor market at all employment levels and in all sectors. These skills have a number of names--soft skills, workforce readiness skills, career readiness skills--but they all speak to the same set of core skills that employers want.The Employability Skills Framework is a one-stop resource for information and tools to inform the…
Brief
Promising occupations for at-risk youth provide sufficient compensation and could put them on a path to becoming independent adults. To identify promising occupations, this brief examined four key features: 1) median earnings level, 2) education and training pre-requisites, 3) projected growth in labor-market demand, and 4) potential for individual advancement. Based on these criteria, opportunities in two fields are highlighted -- health care and construction. A number of work-based learning and career pathway programs are also discussed, including ACF's Health Profession Opportunity Grants…
