Participatory Research With Older Workers in a Pandemic: Innovations and Lessons Learned

In the spring of 2020, and as the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic became increasingly dire, in-person studies halted throughout the world. This included our planned study to examine the role of the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP)—the sole federal workforce training program for low-income older adults—in influencing participant financial, physical, and mental well-being. While our original plans were to hold a series of in-person workshops with SCSEP participants and case managers using a form of participatory research called community-based system dynamics (CBSD), we paused the launch of our study to determine the safest path forward. This presentation will describe how we responded as well as innovations and implications for future research with harder to reach populations. First, we met with the Massachusetts state SCSEP director to assess the feasibility of moving our sessions online with this particular population. After determining that virtual and telephone sessions would both be needed to increase accessibility, we identified virtual whiteboard software rigorous enough to utilize CBSD-specific activities, user-friendly enough for populations less familiar with virtual environments, and with security features that would be approved by our university, as well as discussed what types of activities to conduct on the telephone for such a visual research method. Our CBSD study was one of the first to utilize virtual and telephone formats in the history of this method, and our results indicate that it is possible—and sometimes beneficial—to move in-person participatory methods to these environments to increase inclusion and efficiency.

Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce: Executive Order 13583 and Demographic Trends

President Obama’s 2011 Executive Order 13583 was expected to serve as a catalyst for a coordinated government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce. This order reinforced the government’s commitment to equal employment opportunity by “using the talents of all segments of society,” achieved by recruiting, hiring, promoting, and retaining a more diverse workforce. The order mandated the creation of a government-wide diversity and inclusion strategic plan as well as agency-specific plans. This study uses institutional theory as a lens to examine agency response to EO 13583 to articulate diversity and inclusion rationales, practices, and correlating workforce demographic trends. We examine how three federal agencies articulated diversity and inclusion practices and activities in the plans. We explore demographic workforce trends prior to, during, and after adoption of the agency diversity and inclusion plans. Together, these analyses offer evidence of varied approaches to diversity and inclusion as well as uneven progress in pursuing the letter and spirit of the order. Specifically, the articulation of agency-specific diversity goals following Executive Order 13583 does not consistently translate to enhanced workforce diversity.

Workforce Entry Including Career and Technical Education and Training

This article reviews the basic patterns of employment and school enrollment for new labor market entrants in the period leading up to the Great Recession and in the decade thereafter. We find a persistent shift into four-year colleges that began during the Great Recession. At the same time, fewer youth are neither working nor enrolled in school. We see little change in occupational training programs during our study period, in program or in participation rates; in particular, rates of training provided via federal workforce development programs remain low among workforce entrants. The research literature on these programs has advanced but without large effects on policy or practice.

Reviving Rationality

Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health explains how Donald Trump destabilized the decades-long bipartisan consensus that federal agencies must base their decisions on evidence, expertise, and analysis. Administrative agencies are charged by law with protecting values like stable financial markets and clean air. Their decisions often have profound consequences, affecting everything from the safety of workplaces to access to the dream of home ownership. Under the Trump administration, agencies have been hampered in their ability to advance these missions by the conflicting ideological whims of a changing cast of political appointees and overwhelming pressure from well-connected interest groups. Inconvenient evidence has been ignored, experts have been sidelined, and analysis has been used to obscure facts rather than inform the public. The results are grim: incoherent policy, social division, defeats in court, a demoralized federal workforce, and a loss of faith in government’s ability to respond to pressing problems. This experiment in abandoning the norms of good governance has been a disaster. Reviving Rationality explains how and why our government has abandoned rationality in recent years, and why it is so important for future administrations to restore rigorous and even-handed cost-benefit analysis if we are to return to a policymaking approach that effectively tackles the most pressing problems of our era.

Ideology, Unionization, and Personnel Politics in the Federal Budget Process

This article studies how administrations seek to shape the federal workforce through the budget process. I develop a theory of personnel politics in which presidents balance ideological and interest group demands in distributing human resources across the federal government. I argue administrations advantage organizations with which they are ideologically aligned and that agencies with higher levels of union penetration see increased budgeted personnel levels, particularly during Democratic presidencies. Using an original dataset of budgeted personnel levels from fiscal years (FY) 1983–2016 and a series of regression analyses, I find strong support for these hypotheses. I also examine the sensitivity of presidential strategy to congressional preferences, agency professionalization, and leadership politicization, providing insights into how this control strategy interacts with the broader environment. Overall, these results have implications for understanding the political dynamics of human capital and capacity in the federal bureaucracy, the administrative presidency, and the politics of performance in federal agencies.

Racial Pay Parity in the Public Sector: The Overlooked Role of Employee Mobilization

Rising economic inequality has aggravated long-standing labor market disparities, with one exception: government employment. This article considers the puzzle of black-white wage parity in the American public sector. African Americans are more likely to work in the public than in the private sector, and their wages are higher there. The article builds on prior work emphasizing institutional factors conditioning this outcome to argue that employee mobilization can motor it. As public sector unions gained political influence postwar, their large constituencies of black, blue-collar workers, drawing on both militant and nonviolent tactics of the urbanizing civil rights movement, advocated for improved working conditions. Archival sources confirm this pattern at the federal level. The employment and activism of African Americans in low-skilled federal jobs pivoted union attention to blue-collar issues and directly contributed to the enactment of a transparent, universal wage schedule for the blue-collar federal workforce (the Federal Wage System). The result was greater pay parity for African Americans, as well as for other disadvantaged groups.

Gender and Educational Variations in the Earnings Premiums of Occupational Credentials

Occupational credentials such as professional licenses and certifications are known to generate significant earnings premiums. Based on this, the federal workforce development policy focuses on industry-recognized occupational credentials for less-educated adults to help them obtain family-supporting jobs without having to invest in a postsecondary degree. This study used data from the 2016–2019 Current Population Survey (CPS) outgoing rotation group samples to examine differences in the earnings premiums associated with occupational credentials by gender and education. Our analyses revealed that the earnings premium of job-required credential holding was greater for women than men. For women, estimates of the earnings premiums do not vary much by education level, while for men, those without a Bachelor's degree tend to have high premiums than those without.

Association of Employee Engagement Factors and Turnover Intention Among the 2015 U.S. Federal Government Workforce

Employee turnover is a major challenge facing the federal workforce, which has lost more employees to voluntary turnover than any other form of turnover. This study determined the associations between engagement, demographic factors, and voluntary turnover intention by analyzing 2015 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey data. The findings indicate that employees with higher engagement levels are less likely to report an intention to leave their jobs than those with lower engagement levels. All engagement factors—perceptions of supervisors, leaders, and intrinsic work experience—are independently associated with turnover intention. Demographics also influenced turnover intention; being younger, male, and in a supervisory role and having a higher education level and shorter tenure were more likely to indicate turnover intention. Increasing employee engagement can have a positive effect on retaining a productive federal workforce. To retain an effective federal workforce, human capital management practices are needed to optimize factors that reduce turnover intention.