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The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone's Work
From MIT professor and pre-eminent voice on Good Jobs comes a leadership guide for choosing excellence and providing good jobs that offer a living wage, dignity, and opportunities for growth. From healthcare facilities to call centers, fulfillment centers to factories, and restaurants to retail stores, companies are struggling to find or keep workers, because the jobs they offer are low-paying, stressful, and provide little chance for growth and success. Workers want good jobs, and many leaders want to provide them. But they don't think they can offer higher pay and more motivating work without hurting the bottom line. Most business leaders want to win with customers, but their companies are hobbled by a host of service and operational problems largely driven by high employee turnover—turnover that's partly driven by low pay. It is indeed a vicious cycle, and Zeynep Ton is here to show you the way why good jobs combined with strong operations lead to higher productivity and increased competitiveness for the business. And why, more than ever, in a world with tight labor markets, failing to provide good jobs will catch up with you and threaten your business. As the leading scholar on good jobs and president of the Good Jobs Institute, Ton has helped executives at many companies implement a good jobs system. With expertise drawn from spending time on the front lines with workers and their managers, she knows what's keeping most companies mired in mediocrity and how implementing a good jobs system makes them more competitive, more resilient, and more likely to attract and retain loyal customers and dedicated employees. Practical, prescriptive, and often provocative, The Case for Good Jobs is essential reading for company leaders who want to—who need to—choose excellence.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published June 6, 2023
About the author
Zeynep Ton
3 books34 followersZEYNEP TON has been a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management since 2011. Previously she was on the faculty of the Harvard Business School, where she was given an award for excellence in teaching in 2010.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 22 reviews
June 28, 2023
The premise of the book is noble and even backed up by mountains of research, but the author fails to add any new research of their own. The book also reads more like a casual conversation and part advertisement for the author’s consulting practice and not like a carefully crafted work of non-fiction.
The largest fatal flaw that the author makes is incredibly common among most business authors: choose a conclusion that you think is right and then find anecdotal evidence to support it. Examples of this would be the author concluding that retailers stocking fewer products increases employee engagement and then finding two or three retailers who do this and concluding that the conclusion must be accurate as a result. Or, looking at retailers who implemented one of the author’s policies and crediting all future growth to the adoption of said policy without any variable isolation whatsoever. This is not really academic-level research that would pass muster under any level of scrutiny.
The book reads like a blog post that was stretched and stretched and stretched into a book. The author could have spent some time delving into the psychology behind increases employee engagement, offering data from 1,000+ company surveys (the author instead opted to keep insisting that their work based on their tiny sample size of 24 clients was somehow evidence), etc. There is so much that the author could have done to expand on a topic that has already been covered ad nauseam.
The final issue with the book is that none of it is really actionable. The book is full of surface-level advice and platitudes when actionable advice or a blueprint for next steps would have been more helpful.
The largest fatal flaw that the author makes is incredibly common among most business authors: choose a conclusion that you think is right and then find anecdotal evidence to support it. Examples of this would be the author concluding that retailers stocking fewer products increases employee engagement and then finding two or three retailers who do this and concluding that the conclusion must be accurate as a result. Or, looking at retailers who implemented one of the author’s policies and crediting all future growth to the adoption of said policy without any variable isolation whatsoever. This is not really academic-level research that would pass muster under any level of scrutiny.
The book reads like a blog post that was stretched and stretched and stretched into a book. The author could have spent some time delving into the psychology behind increases employee engagement, offering data from 1,000+ company surveys (the author instead opted to keep insisting that their work based on their tiny sample size of 24 clients was somehow evidence), etc. There is so much that the author could have done to expand on a topic that has already been covered ad nauseam.
The final issue with the book is that none of it is really actionable. The book is full of surface-level advice and platitudes when actionable advice or a blueprint for next steps would have been more helpful.
February 29, 2024
“Liderazgo a veces significa llevar a gente donde ellos quieren ir pero necesitan un fuerte liderazgo para ir allí”.
Good Book. Is a must read if you work in retail industry.
Good Book. Is a must read if you work in retail industry.
January 21, 2024
What uou can do:
1. Focus and simplify
2. Standardize and empower
3. Cross train
4. Operate with slack
Vicious cycle:
1. Your first instinct is to fix people
2. You hire smart managers
Managers are often unaware of how mediocre their system is.
Corporate disability:
1. You can’t hire the right people or train them well - the firefighting loop
2. You can’t empower the employees - the trust loop
3. You can’t match labor supply with demand - the understaffing and loss of focus loop
4. You can’t have strong managers
5. You can’t have high expectations
Inability to differentiate, adapt, ethical cost.
Reason you are afraid to bet on people:
1. You can’t quantify the benefit
2. Investors and the board aren’t interested in good jobs
3. Accounting system disfavor it
4. Implementation risks seems too high
5. You might look naive
Center the journey around customer:
1. It helps clarify your value proposition and makes strategic trade offs easier
2. It encourages systems thinking
3. It helps involve and align people upstream who drive the work
Virtuous cycle:
1. Raising pay
2. Improving schedules
3. Raising expectations
4. Creating clear career path
5. Giving employers enough time to do their jobs
1. Focus and simplify
2. Standardize and empower
3. Cross train
4. Operate with slack
Vicious cycle:
1. Your first instinct is to fix people
2. You hire smart managers
Managers are often unaware of how mediocre their system is.
Corporate disability:
1. You can’t hire the right people or train them well - the firefighting loop
2. You can’t empower the employees - the trust loop
3. You can’t match labor supply with demand - the understaffing and loss of focus loop
4. You can’t have strong managers
5. You can’t have high expectations
Inability to differentiate, adapt, ethical cost.
Reason you are afraid to bet on people:
1. You can’t quantify the benefit
2. Investors and the board aren’t interested in good jobs
3. Accounting system disfavor it
4. Implementation risks seems too high
5. You might look naive
Center the journey around customer:
1. It helps clarify your value proposition and makes strategic trade offs easier
2. It encourages systems thinking
3. It helps involve and align people upstream who drive the work
Virtuous cycle:
1. Raising pay
2. Improving schedules
3. Raising expectations
4. Creating clear career path
5. Giving employers enough time to do their jobs
January 15, 2024
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. There are many business academics out there who make a career out of kissing the butts of C-suite executives and getting high-paying speaking gigs by telling them what they want to hear. I started to feel like that was the direction this book was heading, and then Zeynep Ton surprised the hell out of me. This book is not that at all, and Zeynep has incredible research and arguments that benefit both employers and employees.
This book goes pretty hard on employers explaining why employees need better wages and why employers need to quit looking at industry standards when paying people. Ton also does a phenomenal job explaining why employees need more autonomy to make decisions at their job and should be treated a lot better. She even explains why employers really need to start caring about their turnover rates.
I couldn’t tell if Zeynep was fighting for workers or if she’s just arguing for what the research says works. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because if employers listen to Zeynep, workers will be a lot better off and they can even make the employers some more money.
This book goes pretty hard on employers explaining why employees need better wages and why employers need to quit looking at industry standards when paying people. Ton also does a phenomenal job explaining why employees need more autonomy to make decisions at their job and should be treated a lot better. She even explains why employers really need to start caring about their turnover rates.
I couldn’t tell if Zeynep was fighting for workers or if she’s just arguing for what the research says works. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because if employers listen to Zeynep, workers will be a lot better off and they can even make the employers some more money.
August 5, 2023
We live in a world with declining unionization and businesses that like to hire for the lowest possible wage and with the least possible job security. The result, as most of us have seen in friends and family, or experienced first hand, is under employment, rapid employee turnover and loss of institutional knowledge.
There are collateral effects as well. Rapid low wage job turnover has cost effects on the employers as well as the employees with regard to searching for, hiring and training new employees.
Employees themselves get stuck in an endless loop of low pay dead-end jobs which leads to income and healthcare scarcity with attendant long-term societal and personal issues that can snowball out of control.
Dr. Zeynep Ton's book, The Case for Good Jobs, discusses these issues and uses examples from name brand businesses that have changed their thinking on the issue. By increasing wages and benefits they have greatly reduced turnover, increased institutional knowledge and productivity and given people a brighter future without sacrificing profits to investors.
She points out there is a distinct difference between a market wage for a given skill set and a living wage in the place the business is located. Many businesses today are stuck on the idea they can only afford to pay the market wage. It is shortsighted thinking that is leading to employee burnout and employee disinvestment from the job they are hired to do (she doesn't use this term in the book, but that is the basis of so-called "quiet quitting"). If you're interested, this MIT calculator she mentions in the book can give an idea what a living wage in your location might look like:
https://livingwage.mit.edu/
Even high-wage jobs can be affected. As a former power plant operator, I am seeing the people I worked with for years receiving the fruits of lean staffing, reduced training and slow hiring. They are all burning out. Many have retired or left for hopefully better situations. Many more will do so as soon as their years of investment in the job will afford them the opportunity.
All of this is not a good trend and is, even now, especially in a tight labor market, having deleterious effects on businesses that persist in this notion.
This half hour podcast with Zeynep Ton may be of interest to some readers:
https://youtu.be/zPyDX_WA564
There are collateral effects as well. Rapid low wage job turnover has cost effects on the employers as well as the employees with regard to searching for, hiring and training new employees.
Employees themselves get stuck in an endless loop of low pay dead-end jobs which leads to income and healthcare scarcity with attendant long-term societal and personal issues that can snowball out of control.
Dr. Zeynep Ton's book, The Case for Good Jobs, discusses these issues and uses examples from name brand businesses that have changed their thinking on the issue. By increasing wages and benefits they have greatly reduced turnover, increased institutional knowledge and productivity and given people a brighter future without sacrificing profits to investors.
She points out there is a distinct difference between a market wage for a given skill set and a living wage in the place the business is located. Many businesses today are stuck on the idea they can only afford to pay the market wage. It is shortsighted thinking that is leading to employee burnout and employee disinvestment from the job they are hired to do (she doesn't use this term in the book, but that is the basis of so-called "quiet quitting"). If you're interested, this MIT calculator she mentions in the book can give an idea what a living wage in your location might look like:
https://livingwage.mit.edu/
Even high-wage jobs can be affected. As a former power plant operator, I am seeing the people I worked with for years receiving the fruits of lean staffing, reduced training and slow hiring. They are all burning out. Many have retired or left for hopefully better situations. Many more will do so as soon as their years of investment in the job will afford them the opportunity.
All of this is not a good trend and is, even now, especially in a tight labor market, having deleterious effects on businesses that persist in this notion.
This half hour podcast with Zeynep Ton may be of interest to some readers:
https://youtu.be/zPyDX_WA564
September 24, 2023
This was on the FT’s summer reading list, and I really enjoyed it. Ton lays out the case for paying workers more, and investing in them more, *as a means of improving customer service and thereby profitability* rather than the typical altruistic justifications. She has several in-depth case studies of all different kinds of businesses (convenience stores, call centers, grocery stores, etc.) to illustrate how increasing worker pay can elevate profitability as long as it’s done smartly and in conjunction with other investments in worker productivity.
The book is focused on blue-collar workers and the service industry, but honestly I think the lessons are relevant in a variety of white-collar jobs. You get what you pay for, and often cost cutting comes at the expense of long-term profitability.
My only quibble is that she sometimes drifts into “she it’s also the right thing to do” arguments that I think undermine the strength of her purely business-focused case. This book isn’t rocket science but has lessons for any business leader.
The book is focused on blue-collar workers and the service industry, but honestly I think the lessons are relevant in a variety of white-collar jobs. You get what you pay for, and often cost cutting comes at the expense of long-term profitability.
My only quibble is that she sometimes drifts into “she it’s also the right thing to do” arguments that I think undermine the strength of her purely business-focused case. This book isn’t rocket science but has lessons for any business leader.
November 4, 2023
Exceeded expectations. I expected a book that said "raising wages lowers turnover, so do it!" but it's actually economically and organizationally aware and proposes changing many aspects of lower-wage, front line jobs in a way that results in positive results for the company.
It's not clear if the strategies outlined in the book would be effective in case all companies offered good jobs but we're a long way from that situation, especially in the U.S. There is evidence given, e.g. at NUMMI experience in California and call centers for Quest diagnostics, that these strategies are broadly applicable, not merely changing composition of the work force, which I found very powerful and persuasive.
It's not clear if the strategies outlined in the book would be effective in case all companies offered good jobs but we're a long way from that situation, especially in the U.S. There is evidence given, e.g. at NUMMI experience in California and call centers for Quest diagnostics, that these strategies are broadly applicable, not merely changing composition of the work force, which I found very powerful and persuasive.
March 6, 2024
It is a testament on why great companies continue to remain great with the good jobs system. The message is simple:
1) Pay up to the point where workers have a decent living
2) Create slack (not to encourage laziness but giving them room to breath)
3) Create a career, not job
Costco is the center of good job system and why it still works until today. Worker is likely to be the most important resources every companies have but didn't pay enough attention. Of course, AI might render some works obsolete but the concept should applies to most companies. Highly recommended for anyone who is looking on how to reduce employee turnover, absenteeism and increase loyalty and better services. (with real life example from Costco, Sam club, Mercadona, Quicktrip, etc)
1) Pay up to the point where workers have a decent living
2) Create slack (not to encourage laziness but giving them room to breath)
3) Create a career, not job
Costco is the center of good job system and why it still works until today. Worker is likely to be the most important resources every companies have but didn't pay enough attention. Of course, AI might render some works obsolete but the concept should applies to most companies. Highly recommended for anyone who is looking on how to reduce employee turnover, absenteeism and increase loyalty and better services. (with real life example from Costco, Sam club, Mercadona, Quicktrip, etc)
July 2, 2023
This is a book with some unusual approach towards salary discussion a corporate sector. It reveals some ideas that are not absolutely new however they do lead towards thinking about your employees, their peace of mind at work, their basics covering and their dignity directly connected to the paycheck they get at work. You may not find a magic solution or framework that directs you to how you can increase the base pay without scrutinizing your margin however the ideas on how to motivate the cash flow that can help with this (focusing on customers and employees who serve customers, creating value for customers and taking care of your employees).
June 21, 2023
This book is a must-read for anyone in a management role. I found many useful and applicable operational strategies in The Case For Good Jobs that are relevant across sectors, not only for managing in a retail environment. It also raised my awareness and appreciation for companies and leaders who do not think of workers as a cost but treat them with dignity, respect and as an asset for success. There is much to be learned from this easily readable and interesting book, and I applaud Zeynep Ton’s goal to improve millions of jobs. I am confident they will succeed.
May 30, 2024
Good book about a different approach to being an employer. Written by a business professor, and highlights several companies that succeed by empowering their employees and trusting them. Very grounded in good research and examples, makes a very compelling argument. I expected standard left wing slant and talking points, but the book was very objectively written and lays out a legitimate alternative approach to being an employer.
June 25, 2023
Phenomenal business book for those leaders who are looking to transform their businesses into a place that all people want to work. Zeynep does a great job inspiring and showing you the way to get out of the vicious cycle of high turnover and begin the virtuous cycle of low turnover, operational excellence, and Happy Employees. Highly recommend.
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July 21, 2023'It's “really about old-school principles of good management”, but to execs raised on the idea of cutting costs and keeping staff on low pay it sound as far-fetched as alchemy or perpetual motion.' From my FT review https://www.ft.com/content/92630a20-f...
September 7, 2023
Good Book, The book mentions common sense topics, partly aligned with the my leadership style. But, it may not be useful in all scenarios.. some times the leadership needs to take responsibility to correct the course and should be hard nosed on certain decisions. Overall, good concepts.
March 21, 2024
I thought this book was insightful. It focuses mostly on lower-level jobs and justifies via examples why paying people a living wage makes sense for a business. I believe this is true for other higher-paying jobs as well. Some of the non-financial ideas are universally valuable.
January 20, 2025
3.5. Some good concepts overall. Focuses heavily on retail. Selfishly I was looking for something more about front line healthcare workers.
December 27, 2025
I liked the first book better. I was rewarded for finishing this by hearing a Barred Owl calling out the bedroom window while finishing it.
March 20, 2026
Most useful book for service businesses. By far. Essential for anyone running one. Ton demonstrates such expertise in this field. Highly recommend!
September 4, 2023
This book collected a lot of concepts that I have learned during my profesional carreer and I have put them on practice, but most important I could learn how its seems as a good working system
January 22, 2024
Un libro que ayuda a reflexionar sobre otra forma de hacer empresa y con diversos guiños a un Management más humanista y social.
May 7, 2024
“If your mental model is that people are just another input to production, it is easy to conclude that paying anything more than market rate for them is unreasonable, like spending five dollars on something you can get for a buck at Dollar Store”. But people are more than inputs, and can add real value. This is the heart of this book’s argument, and feels incredibly relevant for today. Zeynep Ton gives real examples of companies fighting to provide people good jobs in a current business environment that rewards cost cutting and reducing human work to mindlessness. She believes that there is a better way, and provides a whole book of tools to help with that
Displaying 1 - 21 of 22 reviews