Many workers were already confronting the challenges of low-wage work as well as risky and unstable working conditions before the pandemic. These workers—disproportionately people of color, young people, and women—often experienced further deterioration in job quality throughout COVID-19. This continuing decline caused many to reconsider their employment options and accelerated the long-term trends underlying what became known as the Great Resignation.

In response, federal, state, and local governments are contemplating how to leverage their procurement processes to incentivize and grow good jobs across the country. In this brief, we describe four models of embedding job quality in government procurement, articulate the questions we need to answer about how these models work, summarize what we know from existing literature, and offer suggestions for how governments and their partners designing their own approaches to job quality in procurement might learn in the process and refine future efforts.