The Case for Open Work
A new system for economic opportunity
The Not-So-Great Re-Throupling
For most of human history, economic, political, and social power were tied. If you didn’t own property, you didn’t vote, nor were you entitled to any rights, respect, or courtesy in your everyday affairs.
The U.S. was founded on a radical, unproven thesis that despite the economic inequality that many argue is inherent, natural, and healthy in a democratic capitalist society, economic power could and should be detached from political and social power. Just because we have inequality on an economic basis does not mean we need to have or should accept inequality on a political or social basis.
What economists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians have debated is that while the three pillars can be separated on paper, if and when does the gap in one area - usually income and wealth - get too large that it stretches the others beyond their limits and jeopardize the entire system?
Recently, liberals and conservatives alike have been sounding the alarm that the social contract is being broken, and economic, political, and social power are re-linking together.
In 2010, my former economics professor, Dr. William “Sandy” Darity whose renowned can be categorized today as being in and around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), proposed a national program called “baby bonds” where every American would receive a publicly-funded trust fund to help close the wealth gap.
Fast forward to 2025, President Trump and many business leaders, many of whom critics of DEI initiatives, created “Trump Accounts” that, at a high level, rhyme with Dr. Darity’s “baby bonds”.
In November 2024, the country re-elects Donald Trump. 12 months later, the city of New York elects Zohran Mamdani.
Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, the masses seem to agree that the brokenness of the system, as it relates to economic opportunity, is to the detriment of all of us.
Dr. Raj Chetty, the foremost expert on economic mobility in the U.S., has published numerous research findings showing that the “American Dream” has been slipping away for quite some time now, at least since the dawn of the 21st century.
Pete Stavros, Partner & Co-Head of Global Private Equity at KKR, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, has pioneered an employee ownership movement so that frontline workers of portfolio companies share in the upside of successful investments, and it is becoming standard practice across the entire industry that is infamous for layoffs.
Aaron Shapiro, Founder & CEO at Carver Edison, is pursuing a similar goal with public companies by leveraging Cashless Participation® so rank and file employees can purchase company stock through ESPPs without cutting into their take home pay.
Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder & CEO of Robinhood, believes retail and non-accredited investors deserve exposure to the best private companies, including the more recent ones leading in AI, so the gains don’t only accrue to wealthy and well connected individuals and institutions.
Even with these insights and efforts, the truth that is hard to accept is that we can’t promise economic mobility to every hardworking person in this country. Multiple generations of working class Americans have known that this core tenet of the American Dream is just that: a dream.
If we can’t promise economic mobility, this essay proposes a system by which we can offer something else that matters just as much, if not more: economic dignity.
It is possible for the sweat equity someone puts in at work to be converted into an asset owned and leveraged by workers for their own benefit, not just exploited by their employers. It is possible for someone’s hard work to be seen, acknowledged, and most importantly, owned by them for their own advancement.
Today, I’m calling this new system Open Work.
Open Work Defined
Imagine if one of the banks with which you have a loan refused to report your payments to an external credit bureau to help you boost your credit score. Instead, they kept that data to itself so other banks couldn’t have insight into your history to offer you any competing products.
Imagine if another one of the banks that holds the primary account you use for day-to-day expenses prevented you from sharing your transaction history with a fintech platform that helps with budgeting, saving, and investing for the future.
Imagine if a sports team never allowed the players on their team to know or access their own individual performance stats out of fear that they would use those stats to get recruited by another team, or worse, leverage those stats into a better offer from their current team.
All three of these scenarios were once the status quo, but today, they are obviously unfair, and borderline, if not outright, illegal. And most importantly, it is just bad business practice.
Yet, the majority of people in America (and the world) who work in the physical labor economy, are forced to make a living in a system just like this where they don’t know or have access to data on their work performance at their current job, let alone being able to leverage it in pursuit of their next job.
What if someone who works in the physical labor economy could use their performance data to vouch for their work ethic, dependability, and consistency to get another job in the physical labor economy, potentially advancing their career?
What if in the same way every purchase and payment flows to a credit score that the individual owns and is free to use and share however, whenever, wherever, and with whomever they want, every shift clocked and task completed at work could help them build another type of “credit” that helps them earn more income and work their way into the middle class?
What could that do for economic opportunity, mobility, and the “American Dream”? What could that do for employee engagement, output, profitability, and competitiveness of American companies? What impact could that have on our democracy and politics?
I am proposing the creation of a new type of technology company that builds data platforms by which workers can turn their hard work into an asset they can leverage for future work opportunities.
Open Work combines the concepts of…
“reporting” from platforms like Transunion, The Work Number, and Checkr/Truework
“open data” from a platform like Plaid, and
“worker fairness” from platforms like Ownership Workers, Carver Edison, and EarnIn
Here’s how it works:
Employers “report” work performance data for their employees to Open Work databanks, similar to how lenders report to credit bureaus
The databanks receive, store, and present this data for and on behalf of employees
With the consent of employees, just like credit or background checks, future employers can “pull” or “run” their history from databanks as part of their hiring process
Open Work has tenets that are similar to other core systems in our economy like credit scores, employment verification, background checks, and even GPAs and standardized test scores for students and professional license holders in the knowledge economy. It also takes inspiration from more innovative open data models that benefit both companies and their customers and employees, including the following:
Duolingo users have a fluency score in the app, which directly aligns with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), as well as the Duolingo English Test (DET) that serve as an alternative to the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFLS), the exam people use to go to school and get jobs at English speaking institutions. This allows people to use the same score produced while enjoying a free, gamified learning app to access life-changing professional opportunities.
Gig platforms like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, GrubHub, and Instacart not only track performance data that informs their algorithm, but they also give 24/7 live access to that data to their workers directly in the app, and it feeds into their rewards/incentives system so they know where they stand and how to boost their standing
Car insurance companies already use driving records to inform premiums, but the more innovative among them also leverage live driving data that tracks metrics like phone usage and harsh braking to offer discounts to safer drivers who demonstrate they deserve it
The possibilities of what can be built on top of this data infrastructure is vast. Base use cases would allow employers to identify, recruit, hire, manage, promote, and retain employees, lenders and landlords to improve their underwriting and application processes while also making them accessible to more people, and research institutions to study labor markets and economic trends.
Here are three more case studies of what Open Work could look like in action:
Open Work in Prisons
Of all the domains where this model for economic opportunity can move the needle for working class Americans, our criminal justice system is the one where it’s needed the most.
Along with pursuing an education and focusing on their physical, mental, and spiritual health, work is often a fundamental part of the prison, parole, and probation experience.
Prison labor at scale has been an essential part of the U.S. economy for a long time. I spent my summers in college in the Deep South where I studied the history and modern day impacts of mass incarceration. In 2017, I contributed to a policy analysis for Louisiana in which the ripple effects of the carceral system were at the center of the state’s economy, politics, and culture.
Fast forward to today, 80 million people live with a record in the U.S. 1 in 3 adults has an arrest record and face unemployment rates up to 10x higher than the national average.
While some of them regain the right to vote, virtually none of them ever regain the right to apply for a job without their criminal background being the only testament to their character that’s publicly available, concrete in specificity, and omnipresent everywhere they go.
What if another part of their history followed them in the same way, but rather than hurting their chances of getting a job, it helped them?
By allowing people serving time to have their job and behavioral performance tracked and shared with future employers, Open Work lets their data, not just their record, speak for their character, something that is more accurately captured over an extended, more recent period of time rather than being labeled indefinitely and exclusively by one mistake in one moment in their more distant past.
Employment is a primary driver of recidivism, and Open Work is one of the lowest hanging fruit solutions to keeping people out of prison and out of poverty.
Open Work in Schools
My first job out of college was teaching 6th grade math at a Title I school. Among the many uphill battles I faced to ensure my students received an excellent education, the first and most important hurdle to overcome was attendance.
Attendance not only correlates with everything we want every student to have and experience in the classroom and beyond, but it’s also the key metric by which schools and districts receive their funding on a per pupil basis. Especially at the high school level, getting students to come to and stay in school is all some administrators focus on.
What if a strong attendance record (ex. the percentage of days and class periods without unexcused tardies or absences) could help graduates (particularly those who can’t rely on college-ready GPAs, ACT scores, or letters of recommendation) secure a steady source of income?
Financial stability can be the true difference in whether those same students eventually get to pursue and excel in college, and with Open Work, every day of high school lets them show their consistency and dependability, essential characteristics that every employer wishes they could better screen for and have more of from their young workers.
Healthy incentives where all students get something concrete out of coming to school would have positive ripple effects on students, schools, employers, and the entire city.
Open Work in Robotics
In the 20th century, deindustrialization left unemployment, poverty, and desertedness in its wake, especially in the Heartland. In the 21st century, physical AI is expected to further destabilize work and life for people in the physical labor economy.
The widespread adoption of ships, trains, cars, trucks, and planes transformed the global economy, but because they can also do tremendous physical and financial harm in the wrong hands, we require a license to control them, keep records on those license holders, and determine eligibility and assess risk (ex. insurance premiums) based on their performance history.
While many robots will be nearly or fully autonomous, still creating jobs for those who build and service them, others will still need to be remotely “driven” by a human who can live and work anywhere in the world. Rather than doing the back-breaking and injury-prone work in factories, work for humans will look more like a video game where they can see and control the actions of a robot that does the actual work on-site.
If, like their machine-driven predecessors, every robotics company were to embrace Open Work, we could track and share data on human pilots of robots, focusing on how well they optimize for minimal crashes and collisions and maximum uptime and output.
Even with a driver’s license, a car insurance underwriter needs to know your driving history before they can offer you a quote. Why wouldn’t we want the same history available for the people controlling the most powerful machines in history?
Cracking the Collective Action Problem
There are some challenges to overcome and risks to manage in order for Open Work to become standard business practice.
Some of them are technical and product challenges that require enterprise-grade infrastructure, security, and design to make sure data is both secure and open, and that its processes capture both accountability and fairness for employees and employers of all types and sizes.
Some of them are more complex, like the alignment of political interests across several stakeholders that would need to take place for implementation in environments like prisons and schools.
One of the biggest challenges is the collective action problem that economists, policymakers, executives, and union leaders would need to tackle together. Despite knowing that more openness leads to stronger, healthier, more competitive markets, employers might resist adopting Open Work if they are concerned about turnover once their work performance data is made accessible to their competitors by way of their employees’ data.
Prior to 1970, the same was true in the credit markets. There were several credit bureaus that operated locally and independently, and their systems were intentionally incompatible with each other and rife with inconsistencies and bias. Because the consequences of inefficiency were too grave as the national and global credit markets grew, Congress passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) that requires lenders to report to credit bureaus, while also requiring credit bureaus to make those reports accessible to credit holders, leading to the consolidation of the industry down to the “Big 3” of TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian, and the standardization of credit scoring like FICO.
Open Work may need its own FCRA to see widespread adoption, but before that, its advocates would need to have evidence-based responses to legitimate concerns that this would cause more harm than good to employers and employees, especially with the uncertainty of the impact of AI and robotics on labor markets.
As of today, my belief is that Open Work over the long term would lead to more opportunity for employees, less turnover for employers, and less unemployment for cities, and that those benefits are worth having the smartest minds come together to tackle the challenges mentioned above.
Data and Signal
When pursuing an opportunity in the knowledge economy, we use data (a quantitative measure) like grades, exams, and credentials so someone who doesn’t know us can have a sense of our past performance as a qualifier and an indicator of potential future performance.
When that data isn’t available or fully comprehensive, we signal (a qualitative measure) through things like where we went to school, where we’ve worked, what titles we’ve had, who we know, how we communicate, how we dress, and what our online presence is like.
People who work in the physical labor economy don’t have access to these types of data or signals.
Because of society’s inelastic demand for essential labor, opportunity is driven more by bias than meritocracy, and we all pay the price for it.
Knowledge workers already have justifiable anxiety about AI impacting their professional opportunities moving forward. What if, on top of that, they had to find a way to make a living and build a career without relying on GPAs, SAT scores, advanced degrees, cover letters, or LinkedIn?
Open Work is a powerful way to give employees access to an asset they’ve already earned, and workers in the physical labor economy need it now more than ever.
Work is Everything
The nature of work, how reliable it is, how safe it is, how healthy it is, how much it pays, and the way it pays are the most important factors for quality of life. It influences if and how people show up at home for their spouses, kids, relatives, and friends. It determines where and how they live, how they take care of their health, and how much their kids are able to focus in school.
It’s the elephant in every room for everything we care about the most.
When people talk about economic growth and competitiveness, they’re talking about work. When people talk about unaffordability and inequity in housing, education, and healthcare, they’re talking about work.
The most important company in someone’s life will never be the one who creates a product they buy, regardless of how cheap or magical the experience is. It will always be the employer who makes it possible for them to survive, and hopefully, thrive.
What is a more worthy cause for a country where this is a consensual concern about the standing of everyday people than to innovate on the nature of work in 2025 and beyond?
Open Work is about more than the creation of a new type of technology company.
It is both philosophical and moral. It is very political and inherently bipartisan. It has global and local implications. At its core, it is deeply American.
I believe that --- independent of what you do for work, how much you get paid to do that work, whether you have a path over time to doing better or more fulfilling work, whether you can one day make significantly more money from that work, or even whether you can trust that the nature of that work will always exist amidst globalization and technology --- a frontline worker can and should have the same level of dignity as a C-suite executive.
If you’d like to join a group of economists, engineers, executives, and elected officials exploring what Open Work could mean for economic opportunity in the U.S. and abroad, send me a note on LinkedIn and I’ll invite you to our group.