The Great Resignation during the COVID-19 pandemic has renewed attention to job quality issues. Throughout the pandemic, many workers lost their jobs at least temporarily and some still have heightened concerns about their health safety and difficult working conditions, especially in traditionally low-paying industries such as retail and leisure and hospitality. Nonetheless, we know little about job quality at US companies. Many businesses may have a limited understanding of their own job quality challenges, which can make it difficult for them to attract and retain frontline workers, particularly in the complicated COVID-19 labor market. Having transparent data on firms’ job quality could also be useful to numerous other stakeholders who want to encourage businesses to do better.

Efforts to shine a light on job quality at individual firms are in early stages but increasing. To better understand them, we interviewed six experts, conducted online research, and profiled nine organizations’ efforts. We identified three basic models of job quality transparency efforts: voluntary self-assessment tools, mandated public reporting or disclosures, and public rankings or ratings. This brief describes each approach to job quality transparency identified, summarizes the approaches’ trade-offs, and discusses how they could inform models for job quality expansion in the future.