by Michael D. Smith, President & CEO of Eckerd Connects | Read Original LinkedIn Post
Every Labor Day, we recognize the American workers who built this country, strengthened our communities and powered generations of economic progress. This year, I’m also thinking about the people still waiting for a real opportunity to contribute.
The young person who has left school but hasn’t found a job. The worker watching technology transform an industry but unsure where to gain the skills to keep pace. The parent who wants to work but can’t find reliable childcare or transportation. And the employer with jobs to fill but struggling to find people with the right combination of technical and durable skills.
Today, more than 4 million young Americans ages 16 to 24 are neither working nor in school. At the same time, artificial intelligence is reshaping occupations and the skills required to succeed in them. We talk a lot about the future of work. I think we need to ask a harder question:
Who gets to be part of it?
Because America does not just have a skills problem. We have an opportunity problem: too many people still lack a clear, accessible path from education and training to a good job and long-term economic mobility.
A Job Is an Outcome. Mobility Is the Goal.
For nearly 60 years, Eckerd Connects has worked at the intersection of education, workforce and human services. Today, we reach more than 250,000 children, youth, adults and families each year through Job Corps, Workforce Development, and Children and Family Services. Those may look like distinct lines of work, but I see them as parts of the same pathway: a young person develops skills and discovers their potential; a worker gains experience, earns credentials and builds a career; and a family gains the stability that allows the next generation to move forward.
The first job matters. But it cannot be the finish line.
Mobility means being able to get somewhere, stay there, and continue moving forward. It means gaining skills and credentials, increasing wages, building relationships and networks, having greater agency over your career, and ultimately achieving greater stability for yourself and your family.
And that requires us to look beyond the traditional boundaries of workforce development.
You Can’t Train Away a Transportation Problem
We often talk about workforce challenges as though skills are the only thing standing between a person and employment. They’re not.
Training alone is not enough if someone lacks transportation to work, affordable childcare, stable housing, food security, or mental health support. These are not side issues. They often determine whether a person can show up, complete a credential, and keep moving toward a career.
And someone can do everything we ask — complete the training, earn the credential and prepare for employment — only to encounter a policy or systemic barrier that keeps the door closed.
If we are serious about who gets to participate in the future of work, these are workforce issues, too.
Stability is not something that comes after economic mobility. For most people, some measure of stability must come first. That means the future workforce system cannot simply ask, What skills does this person need? It also has to ask, What must be true for this person to succeed?
When I think about economic mobility, I think about my Nana, Josie Mae Ross. She left North Carolina during the Great Migration and built a life in Springfield, Massachusetts. Widowed by the age of 40, she raised six children and several stepchildren while working factory jobs, often double shifts – and still came home and made dinner almost every night.
My mom and I lived with Nana for much of my childhood, so I saw firsthand the informal system that helped hold our family together: hand-me-down clothes, rent parties, aunts making meals and neighbors opening their doors after school when Nana couldn’t be home.
That network created a measure of stability that helped her children – and eventually their children – move forward. But not every family has a network like that. If we want more people to have a real opportunity for economic mobility, we cannot leave those supports to chance. We have to build them into systems designed to help people succeed.
That question changes the conversation because it points to three conditions that must be true.
First, people need a real pathway to work. That means education, training, credentials and employer connections that lead to actual jobs — and that keep pace as technology changes the skills those jobs require. AI is part of that reality, but it should not become another dividing line between people who already have access to opportunity and those still trying to find their way in.
Second, people need the stability to stay on the pathway. Transportation, childcare, housing, food security, mental health support, and trusted relationships are not side issues. They often determine whether someone can show up, complete a credential, keep a job, and continue moving forward.
Third, people need a way to keep advancing. A first job matters, but mobility means wages rise, networks grow, new credentials become possible, and policies open doors instead of closing them. Success should be measured not only by whether someone gets a job, but by whether they are able to stay employed, build stability, and keep moving.
Who Gets to Be Part of the Future?
For six decades, Eckerd Connects has worked alongside people whose potential was often far greater than the opportunities available to them. We see every day that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not — and that programs are strongest when they connect people to skills, stability and advancement at the same time.
But who gets to participate in that future is not predetermined.
It will be determined by the choices we make now: whether we connect education to employment; whether employers help build pathways rather than simply fill openings; whether technology expands access rather than concentrates it; whether we address the barriers that keep people from entering and staying in the workforce; and whether our policies reinforce those pathways or stand in their way.
This Labor Day, as we celebrate America’s workers, we should also recommit ourselves to the Americans who are still trying to become part of that story.
The future of work is already here.
Our job now is to make sure there is a pathway into the future of work — and forward through it — for everyone with the talent and determination to take it.
Who helped open a door for you or your family – and what would it take to make sure those same supports don’t depend on luck or circumstance?
#FutureOfWork #EconomicMobility #WorkforceDevelopment #LaborDay
