Chike Aguh is a senior fellow at Northeastern University’s Burnes Center for Social Change and a senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute. Most recently, he was appointed by President Joe Biden on day one of his administration to serve as Chief Innovation Officer at the U.S. Department of Labor—the first Black person in the role. Reporting to the deputy secretary, he led efforts to use data, emerging technologies, and innovative practice to advance and protect American workers. These efforts included creating the department’s first enterprise data strategy, serving a pivotal role in the $2 billion modernization of the nation’s unemployment insurance system, piloting the nation’s first workforce scorecard, and serving as the department’s designee to the National Space Council.

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Transcript

Chike Aguh:

AI will not come and take your job. Your job will be taken by a person using AI if you are not. And that’s a very important distinction.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Welcome to The Measure. I’m your host and moderator, Leon Andrews, president and CEO of Equal Measure. Equal Measure partners with foundations, nonprofits, and government organizations to apply new ways of thinking and learning to advance social change. On The Measure, we host conversations about centering racial equity and how to design, implement, evaluate, and communicate efforts to transform inequitable systems. On this episode, we are honored to hear from Chike Aguh. Chike most recently served as the Chief Innovation Officer at the U.S. Department of Labor, where he led efforts to use data, emerging technologies, and innovative practices to advance and protect American workers. Welcome, Chike.

Chike Aguh:

Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Leon, and thank you so much for just hosting this table and this conversation.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Well, let’s get started. I’d like to start with more of a personal question. Much of our focus at Equal Measure is on place-based systems work, which looks at long-term investments to transform inequitable systems in areas such as health, education, economic mobility, especially for our Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color. I think it’s also important to personalize this work. So, as you think about your own life’s journey, how do you think about place, culture, and context?

Chike Aguh:

My family is from a far and out-of-the-way village in Eastern Nigeria that most Nigerians themselves will never go to and never visit. None of my grandparents went past middle school. None—my parents grew up with Peace Corps volunteers in their classrooms. They grew up on streets that were unpaved then and are mostly unpaved now. And now, I am first person in the entire history of my family born in America and also have gotten a service and appointee of an American president. That is amazing but also a very improbable journey for, frankly, a Black man in America who comes from a family of immigrants. I’ve tried through my life, through opportunities I’ve had and blessings that I’ve had, to try and replicate for others the opportunity that I’ve experienced myself. My life showed it’s possible, but by the data and by our own eyes, we know that it’s so improbable, particularly for families that are like mine.

I’ve been lucky to live in lots of places, but our home as a family now, my wife and my two kids, is Prince George’s County, Maryland. For those of you who know it, it’s a very, very magical place. Where, as the jurisdiction has gotten more diverse, particularly with more Black and Brown folks, average education and average income have gone up. That is unusual in America. In fact, I don’t know if there’s another jurisdiction like it. In many ways, when I look at this microcosm of the country where we’ve made our home, where we’ve invested, where I spent a lot of my time when I was not in federal service, I think it begins to show the type of place, where if we get it right, we can have more stories like that that I just told you about my own family.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you sharing the personal story, the side of your journey and those shoulders you stand on, as you acknowledge the blessing of where you are in life.

Chike Aguh:

In many ways, America is a collection of places with a collection of people, and we have to figure how we put all that together. The question is, how do we make every place, if I were to drop you and your family there, giving you an equal chance of success? That’s the task that we have in front of us. We know right now in America that’s not quite the case. But my view is, the only thing standing in between us and that is, frankly, will, effort, imagination, innovation, and just the ability to say that we’re going to try.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Throughout your career, you’ve launched and led and studied organizations and initiatives to innovate and to transform education and workforce efforts across the nation. Can you talk more about the future of work in the United States? What does that look like?

Chike Aguh:

I’ve given talks on this for years, and I will say, in some ways, the talk is very similar before and after the pandemic. In many ways it’s also a little different because of new technological changes. The big challenge that we had before the pandemic—which I would argue the pandemic has only accelerated—is you had a collection of jobs in America that potentially will be obviated by new technologies. You also have jobs that will not obviated by technology but changed by technology. Sam Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI, if you know ChatGPT, DALL·E, so on and so forth. One thing he said is, AI will not come and take your job. Your job will be taken by a person using AI if you are not. That’s a very important distinction. So, you have technology that’s going to change or obviate, by some estimates, two-thirds of American jobs.

You have another issue, which has, frankly, been an issue since the founding of the Republic. You have workers in this economy who, frankly, have always had less power than those they work for. Those workers are disproportionately people of color, women, immigrants, folks who are poor. When you put those two things together, you have a really big problem, because the folks whose jobs are going to be changed or obviated by technology are the same workers who are on the wrong side of our economic equations too often in America and across the world. But on top of that, that by 2050, those workers are going to be the majority of the American workforce and the majority of the world workforce. The workers that we are going to depend on tomorrow are the workers who have been on the wrong side of the economic equation for time immemorial and whose lives are being changed by technology right now.

That’s the problem that we have. I would argue the pandemic has only accelerated that. Throw on top of that, is put strain on all the supports that we as parents and as families need: childcare, education, schooling. All those supports that make life a little more doable if you work in America have only gotten more tenuous. What I think about is, in some ways, the immense opportunity that we have. The immense opportunity that we have is some of these problems, in terms of the future of work that we’ve been talking about for a long time, are now in front of people’s view. The challenge is going to be we need people to work in those industries. What’s interesting is that the workers who have been on the wrong side of this economic equation are actually the workers who are most likely to fill the gaps in those new industries.

Generally, when I would be in the Biden administration, I would meet with CEOs and folks from companies all the time, from the semiconductor industry, from green tech, from infrastructure. And they’ll say, “We need workers. We can’t find workers.” I would always ask them a question that my wife asks me when I can’t find my keys. She’ll ask me, “What are you looking for, and where have you looked?” And we think about this. It’s forcing a lot of companies to really reevaluate what they’re looking for, the things they thought mattered. For example, does every job require a college degree? Some yes, some no. And where are you looking? If the places and the communities that you were looking before could supply you with all the workers that you need, they wouldn’t have been coming to talk to me. Therefore, they’ll need to go to communities that maybe they have no experience in and find and create economic on-ramps for workers to these jobs of the future—not even the future, the now.

First is what is the work of the future? Some of it is these new industries that we are making investments in. Some of it is stuff that’s coming from the private sector. Like, again, if you look at generative AI, at ChatGPT or DALL·E, there’s a new job called prompt engineer. Prompt engineer is very simply someone who’s really good at typing the right prompt, so ChatGPT gives you what you want. That is a job now and it is a fast-growing job. What is that work of the future?

I’ll say, which comes to the next question, how do we think about making sure that the people in most need are trained for the most in-demand work? How are we, for example, making sure that we’re training people not just on the technical skills but also these higher-level critical skills that we know are critical for leadership and particularly moving along in your career, particularly for in-need populations?

How do we make sure we’re using the most cutting-edge technology? If you look at the retail space, the manufacturing space, looking at using AR and XR technology to do—particularly during the pandemic—remote, contactless training to learn how to take a part of flow regulator and put it back together. How do we make sure we’re using that, particularly for the most underserved populations? At University of Maryland, which is right near where I’m sitting right now, they are using this technology to try and train folks who are returning citizens, who are about to be released, so that when they come out they actually have skills and can get a car, get housing, go through a job interview in ways that they couldn’t have before.

Third question, which is one that we don’t talk enough about: There is an assumption, for those of you who’ve taken economics, that there’s perfect information. There’s a worker who has the right skills. There’s a job out there that could use their skills. They’ll find each other. Boom. That doesn’t happen.

There is huge information asymmetry, and I always use this example from my home county. They had open jobs for years in things like food service, grounds keeping, driving, things that require CDL. These are jobs you can train for in four to 12 weeks, maybe a little longer. Similarly, in my home county, we generally have unemployment two points above the Maryland average. In my county we have a lot of Black and Brown folk who need work. We had a lot of work that needed to be done. But they had jobs open for years because they couldn’t find each other. Some of it because of information, because the majority of jobs are not posted in America. We have always known that. Because even if it is posted, is that person who sits in District Heights, which is right next to Southeast DC, on Indeed to go see the job? Similarly, in my home county, can they get to the job? We don’t have great bus service in our county from places where people need work to where the jobs actually are.

Fourth question: How do we make sure that we have a system of supports to support people? I think what we really need to think about is how do we go from a social safety net to an economic trampoline, a system of supports that catches you and bounces you back into the labor market where you want to be and at least as good a place as you were before?

Last piece—and this is the thing, I worked at the Department of Labor and I’m biased—how do we make sure that when someone gets on the job, they are respected, protected, and dignified? Meaning the right to organize, the right to be free from discrimination or harassment, access to benefits.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

As you think about the once-in-a generation investment that’s been happening with the Biden administration, can you speak to how that investment is aligned with those five areas that you just laid out?

Chike Aguh:

A lot of times when we talk about the need for radical economic inclusion, when we talk about … It’s important to talk about this, of course, as an issue of moral and spiritual assuagement. It is right to do this. It is also not just the right thing to do, but it’s the smart thing to do. When we have a more inclusive economy, everyone benefits. And I use a simple sports analogy. You cannot win a game if a huge portion of your team would just sit on the sidelines. That is true in sports, it is true in the economy. What we need to do is, as we think about getting to 2050 and beyond, getting huge parts of our citizenry off the economic sidelines and into the places where we need the most. So, that’s why it is the right thing to do. We will sleep better as a country, and we will also, frankly, be richer as a country when we do that.

When I think about the business people that I talk to on a regular basis, they intuitively understand this because they literally have jobs sitting open right now that cost them money every day that those jobs are not filled. I think about from my old department, the Good Jobs Initiative, which is led by a great former colleague of mine, Katelyn Walker Mooney, which is basically working with all of our federal partners to think about, let’s not just put money out there. Let’s make sure that as we are putting money out there on the street, as we like to say in the government, to build these things, that we’re not just building things but building communities and building good jobs along the way.

I’ll use one small example. If you think about the Department of Commerce, who’s making a lot of investments in semiconductor fabrication and as well as broadband. They have, for semiconductor fabrication, begun to mandate that if you’re going to use federal money to build a huge semiconductor fabrication plant … And I just want to be clear. A semiconductor fabrication plant costs as much to build as a nuclear power plant. It is the size of a city block. Thousands of people it takes to build it, thousands of people it takes to run it. They have said if you’re going to use federal money, the people’s money, to build that, you are going to have childcare. Why? Because we know that lack of childcare is a huge barrier to half of our population being women to entering the workforce. Doubly true if they’re women of color. Doubly true if they’re women from an immigrant background or from a poor community.

I expect you will see more things like that that are still being worked out now. I think the other thing to understand about these investments is that they’re not going to be made over a year. These are investments that are going to be made between now and the end of the decade.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Part of it, as I listen to you answer the question that I sit with is, from a space from Equal Measure, is trying to measure impact and then measuring impact over time. As we hear about the investments and the intentionality of thinking about equity in those investments, you see that the seeds are being planted. Then the question will be, when will we be able to see the impact as a result of the seeds being planted? Within that context, I wonder about how we are measuring that impact as we understand the data. Many researchers have shown that we have a long way to go in closing the racial wealth gap.

As just one example, Federal Reserve found that white families had a median wealth of about $188,000 a year in 2019 compared to $24,000 for Black families in that same year. While there are so many factors we could talk about, and we have been talking about several as we talk about the systems and how systems are designed, I’m curious to hear what your thoughts on what role do you think stable employment with high pay and benefits play or can play in building wealth or maybe even closing the gap?

Chike Aguh:

I would go and think back to the great fortunes created in America over the last 400 years. There, at some point, was someone who got stable employment, who had enough bandwidth to think through a way to become really wealthy. I just finished a book, Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond, where he talks about what poverty is like. And he said, think about if you ever had a family member who was sick or got injured all of a sudden. You had to go to the hospital and you were frantic: “Oh, my God. What’s happening? Please tell me what’s going on.” Think about that feeling of just discombobulation. He said, that’s someone in poverty every day. That person is just trying to figure out how they’re going to make it to that next moment. Doesn’t have that mental bandwidth to think through, “How am I going to make a great fortune. Build not just income but wealth.”

That’s why the focus on good jobs and quality jobs is so important. The worst of all worlds is to be working really hard but not be in a quality job, where you’re not being paid enough, where you’re not being given access to benefits, where you don’t have the right to organize if you so choose, where you have no career ladder. We know that by research, what I’ve heard someone call the economic escape velocity from poverty, really is getting close to 60, $75,000 for a family of four. That’s how we begin to think through the jobs that allow you to get out of poverty. One, stabilize yourself, create that opportunity for your family. And then think about wealth or for your children to think about wealth.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

I love that, Chike. I want to push a little bit. As we talk about racism in the system, we know that there’s history, why the wealth gap existed. That there were policies that were put in place that benefited white and disadvantaged Black families, from World War II G.I.—from the G.I. Bill and federal loans that were given out. I wonder how you sit with that as you name how critical, obviously, stable employment with high wages and benefits are, and how much it plays in building wealth. But still being able to see us transform the system or transform where we’re seeing the gap that has that history that we know that’s been tied to intentional policies.

Chike Aguh:

If you were to snap your fingers tomorrow and say that every able-bodied adult had a stable job that had a career path with a living wage for them and their families, where they were in the economic escape velocity, that would be transformative. You would be cataclysmic in the best way possible for so many communities.

Then let’s go a step further. And this is why, from our prior conversation, this conversation are linked. Imagine if they had those jobs in the industries of the future. That is transformative. In some ways, at times people are looking for the economic equivalent of cold fusion. No, no, no, no, no. In some ways, what’s most transformative is if you make available what’s been available to some folks available to everybody. About a year ago, I got to visit a big blue chip technology company at their very legendary research lab in the Northeast. Amazing company. They are creating technologies that will create trillions of dollars of wealth and change the way that we live, I think done right in the best ways.

But I also remember is what I didn’t see. I did not see a single person of African descent in eight hours in the entire facility. And I walked around the entire facility. I don’t see that as folks being bad or evil or anything like that, but that is, frankly, the result of hundreds of years. Also, it shows us what we need to do to change that around. Similarly, in the same instance, that company and many companies like it will come to someone like me when I was in my federal role and say, “We can’t find the workers we need to grow the company the way that we want to.” I would argue these two problems solve each other. We historically have communities who need and want to work, and we now have work that needs to be done. Let’s put these two things together. Again, we change communities, we transform communities. And we also, I think, become a much more economically competitive country. Because I’m an economic competitor, I’m looking to win.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

What would you say are some of the shared challenges and opportunities you’ve seen in moving this future of work?

Chike Aguh:

It’s a great question. I’ll start off with a quote that one of my old bosses used. But I remember being in a meeting with him once, and this question came up and he said, when people ask why you bring in all these people from outside the education space, he would say, “Well, if all the tools to fix education were in the education toolbox, the damn thing would’ve been fixed already.” I would expand that to, if any one sector or organization could fix all these problems, it would’ve been fixed already. The reason why it’s hard to fix is that you need all these types of organizations working together in a level of coordination that is really hard. As someone who’s worked in government, in every sector, it is really hard and is very rare. I actually generally only find it very much centered on places and communities.

What government’s really good at is deploying resources at scale. It’s actually really good at it and using those to change behavior. What it’s not good at is nuance. The government is a very blunt hammer. It has to be blunt because we’re trying to apply it to 330 million Americans. Also, it doesn’t turn quickly. So, that’s the challenge. In some ways, when government works best is when government can get behind a thing that is proven to work and then dump resources into it or change people’s behaviors towards that thing. This is where the social sector can be really helpful.

The social sector, in some ways, can be the leading edge—the venture capital of social change, to show these things, to show these opportunities that actually work and can change lives. It’s why I always push, whether it be foundations and nonprofits, be as creative, innovative as you can. We can’t afford as a society for you to be conservative. Because government, in some ways, has to be because there are voters and there are taxpayers and so on and so forth. They need you to show the way. It’s when you bring all these things together, and again, I’ve seen it really happen powerfully in place, that you begin to get magic and lives begin to be changed. But those are all the limitations that I see. And also the powerful ways, where if it comes together, they can really transform communities, people, and lives.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

There’s so much work. In the way you just framed it, there’s still so much work still to be done, so it could feel overwhelming as we think about the work of that coordination that you just named. I’d like to end with this question: What gives you hope?

Chike Aguh:

I gain hope from amazing leaders that I have met in every sector—from business to government, to people working on the ground in communities and social sector organizations who are making change happen, a life at a time, a family at a time, a community at a time.

Most importantly, I get hope from an idea—which is, and it’s an adaptation from Amanda Gorman’s poem that she read at Joe Biden’s inauguration—and I’m adapting this. But there are some people who believe America is perfect. There are some people who believe that America is irredeemably flawed. I choose to take her formulation, which is that it’s neither: America is unfinished. If you believe it’s unfinished, the people who are going to finish it are people who are on part of this conversation right now. It’s going to be finished by my children and their choices their, their descendants and their decisions. I have an unshakable belief in the agency and the power of human beings to change things for the better because I’ve seen it in my own life. I’m an acute reader of history. I think we have examples over and over and over. I think the big thing for us is simply not to forget those facts and to live our lives accordingly.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Thank you so much for joining us, Chike.

Chike Aguh:

Thank you so much for having me.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

I’d like to leave you with a quote inspired by my conversation today. It is from Stacey Abrams: “We will all, at some point, encounter hurdles to gain access and entry, moving up and conquering self-doubt. But on the other side is the capacity to own opportunity and tell our own story.”

You can learn more about Equal Measure by visiting our website, equalmeasure.org. And be sure to rate, comment, and subscribe to The Measure Podcast.