Rework America Alliance

The Rework America Alliance is an unprecedented nationwide collaboration to enable unemployed and low wage workers to emerge from this crisis stronger. The Alliance aims to help millions of workers, regardless of formal education, move into good jobs in the digital economy by accelerating the development of an effective system of worker training aligned to jobs that employers will need to fill. The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented health and economic crisis, impacting tens of millions of people and devastating families across our country. This crisis is affecting some much more deeply than others -- in particular, people of color, women, those working low-wage jobs and those without a bachelor’s degree -- as the outcome of long standing racial, ethnic, gender and class bias. Against an uncertain future, we must immediately ensure that unemployed workers have government financial support for food, housing, and other vital needs -- but we must do more. We must also act to address the longer-term challenges from our changing economy and create opportunity for workers as the economy recovers, and as even more of the good, in-demand jobs will require new digital skills. The Alliance will focus on enabling unemployed and low wage workers to move to better jobs in this digital economy by providing a wholesale backbone for all types of organizations supporting workers. The Alliance will create products and services that enable these organizations to understand the good jobs that will be most in-demand and connect adults to effective rapid and affordable training and career coaching to prepare them for these jobs. We will work with employers to hire and advance workers who may not have the degrees or experience that would traditionally be required, and to enable the creation of more good jobs. Together, the Rework America Alliance aims to achieve impact at the scale and speed this crisis requires to help workers transition to good in-demand jobs in the digital economy. The Alliance is helping worker-facing organizations connect displaced workers to good jobs and employers to build a more diverse workforce by providing access to career guidance and talent management resources. Read about the formation of the Alliance in the Open Letter from Markle CEO and President Zoë Baird. You can also learn more about our progress including local partnerships, and new resources developed by the Rework America Alliance. In June 2021, the Rework America Alliance, a Markle initiative, studied the job histories of 29 million people across more than 800 occupations to look at how to realize the potential of the more than 5.8M workers from low-wage roles currently unemployed and without a college degree. From this, the Alliance has identified actionable steps that can be taken to help these workers to return to work in better roles. These findings are detailed in “Unlocking Experience-Based Job Progressions for Millions of Workers” authored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Markle, McKinsey & Company, and the National Urban League with input from many of our partners in the Rework America Alliance.