Shaping the Future of Work: What Future Worker, Business, Government, and Education Leaders Need To Do For All To Prosper

Shaping the Future of Work lays out a comprehensive strategy for changing the course the American economy and employment system have been on for the past 30 years. The goal is to create more productive businesses that also provide good jobs and careers and by doing so build a more inclusive economy and broadly shared prosperity. This will require workers to acquire new sources of bargaining power and for business, labor, government, and educators to work together to meet the challenges and opportunities facing the next generation workforce.

The book reviews what worked well for average workers, families, and the economy during the era of the post-World War II Social Contract, why that contract broke down, and how, working together, we can build a new social contract suitable to today s economy and workforce. The ideas presented here come from direct engagement with next generation workers who participated in a MIT online course devoted to the future of work and from the author s 40 years of research and active involvement with business, government, and labor leaders over how to foster innovations in workplace practices and policies.

Thomas A. Kochan, is the George M. Bunker Professor of Work and Employment Relations at MIT's Sloan School of Management and Co-Director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research.

In 2015 he was honored by the Aspen Institute with a Faculty Pioneer Lifetime Achievement Award for his research and teaching on business practices that contribute to an economy that works for all. From 2009 to 2011 he served as Chair of the MIT Faculty. He came to MIT in 1980. From 1988 to 1991 he served as Head of the Behavioral and Policy Sciences Area in the Sloan School. Prof. Kochan came to MIT from Cornell University where he was on the faculty of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations from 1973 to 1980. In 1973, he received his Ph.D. in Industrial Relations from the University of Wisconsin.

Since then he has served as a third-party mediator, fact finder, and arbitrator and as a consultant to a variety of government and private sector organizations and labor-management groups. He was a consultant for one year to the Secretary of Labor in the Department of Labor s Office of Policy Evaluation and Research.