Creating an Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-L) for the Department of Labor
To create fresh and powerful new approaches to the complex challenges that America’s workers face, Congress and the Biden-Harris Administration should invest $100 million per year for 5 years to launch an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Labor (ARPA-L). ARPA-L’s mission will be to conduct high-impact R&D programs that create breakthroughs to meet America’s workforce challenges.
The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply exacerbated longstanding problems for America’s workers. Mismatches between workers’ skills and employers’ needs alongside persistent racial and gender inequities have long undercut opportunity. Moreover, work has continued to change due to technology and automation, globalization, and shifting relationships between workers and employers. Even before the COVID-19 crisis, many millions of Americans were not earning enough to support themselves and their families. These Americans are missing out on gainful work, while our economy and our society are missing out on their full contribution.
With current advances in information technology, data science, applied social sciences, and learning science, this moment calls for an ambitious initiative to tackle the longstanding challenges for America’s workers. The Federal Government should launch an ARPA-L to research, develop, and test breakthrough approaches that boost workers’ skills and harness data to open new opportunities. By drawing from the operating model of prior ARPA organizations and adapting it to these challenges, ARPA-L’s programs can make it possible to ameliorate underemployment and unemployment and transform the future of work.
To initiate ARPA-L, Congress should provide a budget of $100 million per year over a five-year period. The Biden-Harris Administration and the Secretary of Labor should appoint a highly qualified director and provide that individual with the support needed to succeed. By creating this independent agency at the Department of Labor (DOL), Congress, the White House, and DOL can create opportunity for the U.S. workforce for decades to come.
The Challenge
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and deepened labor market problems that had already been compounding over decades.
A mismatch between workers’ education, skills, and training and the shifting needs of employers has led to shortages in high-demand occupations. The demand for digital skills has increased. In addition, local and regional economies across the country are experiencing shortages of workers in emerging and evolving trades vital to economic activity — such as clean energy and manufacturing — that increasingly require new technical capacities. And in some cases, a worker has the skill to succeed in a job but doesn’t have the credentials that the company has tied to that position. Without intervention, the skills gap will continue to grow larger within the labor market. For millions of Americans displaced from traditionally high-employment sectors such as light manufacturing and data processing, the need for reskilling and relocation to emerging sectors requires rethinking traditional models and experimenting with new approaches. To break the cycle of long-term unemployment and underemployment, new approaches to skills training, education, and credentialing are needed.
Although existing policies and practices have made progress in addressing inequity, these problems continue to plague the U.S. workforce, precluding many from gainful, meaningful employment. Today, women still earn less than men on average, while Black and Latina women experience even greater disparities. Men without college degrees, and especially men of color, have been disproportionately impacted by decades of shifts in the labor market compared to men with college degrees. Challenges in traditional education reinforce barriers to obtaining well-paying jobs with upward mobility for young people of color and those from low-income backgrounds. Inequities only persist as workers age, adding pressure when rapid upskilling and retraining is needed and leaving displaced workers even further behind. These communities of workers cannot continue to be left behind.
The term “future of work” encapsulates the anticipated disruption to jobs and the workforce from emerging technologies, global economic change, and the changing relationship between employer and worker. In reality, this disruption is already occurring, and U.S. workers in every sector of economy are feeling its effects. To save on labor costs, employers continue to outsource jobs to overseas workers and automate any task that a machine can handle. As computing technology and artificial intelligence proliferate and mature, this disruption will spread to more and more different types of jobs. Non-traditional workers, such as rideshare and delivery drivers, now form a significant percentage of the workforce, but antiquated labor practices and policies do not address the uncertainty of their work lives. As more and more Americans participate in the gig economy, we must change our approach to solving workforce issues and diversify how we craft solutions to solve them.
The COVID-19 pandemic has both illuminated and exacerbated these challenges. Service sector industries such as retail, tourism, restaurants, and hotels have been decimated by the pandemic, and many of these jobs will be slow to return. Other jobs can be done remotely, but many workers lack the digital skills to thrive while working from home. Furthermore, barriers to the digital economy stand tall: across America, too many workers lack reliable broadband or even a personal computer. Already at a disadvantage, underserved communities are falling further behind in their education and career development, undermining their opportunities in the years to come.
So where has all this left us? A failure to address long-standing labor problems has led to job instability and prolonged underemployment and unemployment that can be seen in the labor market today. Efforts to improve worker outcomes have met with only limited success. To address today’s pressing labor issues, the Federal Government must invest in the capacity to create powerful new solutions that can scale to reach the broad population of workers.
The Opportunity
Today, advances in information technology, data science, and the behavioral and social sciences provide new hope for these kinds of hard problems. Further, numerous regional and pilot projects are showing results from new approaches to training, certification, and matching workers to jobs. These are promising signs, but we are not turning the tide of national-scale labor problems. The purpose of an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Labor (ARPA-L) is to weave research advances together with lessons from the real world to create fresh, potent, broadly scalable new approaches for our workers’ challenges.
ARPA-L would be fully responsible for identifying promising opportunities and then designing and executing its programs. These are some examples of the types of high-impact programs it could undertake.
Next-generation Skills Assessment and Training
An ARPA-L would take a creative, experimental approach to closing the skills gaps. For example, ARPA-L programs could:
- Develop and validate diagnostic systems to improve skills assessment and enable workers to better understand how their skillset matches with the needs of employers.
- Demonstrate accelerated skill development that uses information about an individual— e.g., age, initial skill level, and prior experience—to devise an optimized training regimen that best fits them.
- Explore and evaluate new ways to personalize and accelerate the training process by building on advances in learning science and neuroscience.
- Advance and test the effectiveness of emerging innovations like human-computer interaction and mixed reality for training for complex tasks.
- Experiment with and assess alternative certifications and micro-credentialing programs to train and upskill youth and displaced adult workers around the country and connect participants directly to employers.
Such advancements would not only improve the effectiveness of training and skills assessment. They can also dramatically reduce the time and cost for workers to gain new skills and connect to good jobs, directly addressing major barriers to scale.
Information to Illuminate Better Decision Making
Today, all kinds of data about workers and jobs is everywhere: rigorously collected labor statistics, employee ratings of employers on crowdsourced websites, internal company data about employment, the records of community colleges and other service providers, and administrative data such as tax and census records. We have barely begun to use this data tsunami to address workforce challenges. ARPA-L could transform data into clear information that allows workers, employers, training providers, and policymakers to find new pathways and make better decisions.
For example, ARPA-L programs could:
- Experiment with and test data tools personalized for each worker, combining information on local job postings, wages, and training requirements with information about available credentialing and training services—giving workers the most meaningful and actionable information for their career goals in real time.
- Assemble data from public and private sources on regional labor trends and test its effectiveness in enabling employers to make more impactful, targeted, and timely investments in workforce development opportunities in their area.
- Collect and analyze diverse datasets to identify targeted, effective leverage points for innovative labor policy interventions.
- Develop and validate data analysis tools for policymakers to directly assess the progress of pilot workforce policy initiatives, tailor them to different regional and demographic needs, and then scale the initiatives to meet the needs of workers across the country.
Armed with a data-driven and experimental mindset, an ARPA-L would develop prototypes, conduct demonstrations, and rigorously evaluate their effectiveness, resulting in breakthrough methods targeted at solving workforce problems. The agency will perform this work by contracting with companies, universities, nonprofits, and other government organizations to harness and integrate their different capabilities. ARPA-L will also engage with a broad community of actors so that these solutions are ultimately implemented and scaled by a combination of commercialization by the private sector, policies created by federal state and local actors, and new practices adopted by other stakeholders such as employers and community colleges.
Plan of Action
The Biden-Harris Administration should work with Congress to establish ARPA-L as an independent agency in the Department of Labor. To institute ARPA-L, Congress should appropriate an initial investment of $100M per year for the first five fiscal years. ARPA-L’s mission will be to conduct high-impact R&D programs that create breakthroughs to meet America’s workforce challenges. To this end, ARPA-L will adopt and adapt the core elements of the ARPA model.
To succeed in its unique mission, ARPA-L should be led by a Senate-confirmed Director who reports to the Secretary of Labor as well as a career civil servant Deputy Director. Within DOL, ARPA-L would need to be an independent organization. ARPA-L would collaborate with other parts of DOL, as well as federal, state, and local agencies. ARPA-L would draw on their expertise and that of other labor market ecosystem actors to understand workforce issues and current practices. These organizations will often be ideal partners to fully implement and scale successful ARPA-L program results.
Conclusion
An ARPA-L at DOL would conduct solutions-oriented R&D to create fresh, powerful approaches to the pressing workforce problems of today and tomorrow, such as market disruption, unemployment, and worker reskilling/upskilling. With the support of Congress, the White House, and the Department of Labor, this new organization can deliver bold advances that ultimately change what’s possible for America’s workers.
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