Navigating the Compliance Landscape to Advance Good Jobs: Resources for Small Businesses

Description

Job quality and the work of ensuring that all jobs are good jobs is intertwined with a complex landscape of laws and regulations – rules operating at the local, state, and federal levels that set important standards, establish protocols, and stand up safeguards that help workers have safe, fair, and equitable workplaces.

Compliance is an essential component of advancing good jobs practices and systems across the U.S. and, as our team at the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program (EOP) has conducted site visits and interviews, a topic that we are hearing prioritized among both business owners and workers.

We have heard from business owners across diverse industries an interest in accessing timely, sound legal guidance and tools as they seek to create high-quality jobs. We have also heard through our engagement with workers the importance of working in firms that are ensuring, at a minimum, a legally compliant workplace. Yet, through our work with practitioners and key intermediaries across the U.S., including a cohort of 11 community development financial institutions (CDFIs) engaging with small business owners on strategies to advance good jobs, we have consistently heard that small businesses are facing ongoing hurdles navigating and staying up to date on relevant compliance requirements.

In fall 2023, at our Shared Success annual learning meeting, we prepared a resource guide to help point our CDFI grantees to support in this area. Although initially provided for the Shared Success cohort, the grantees found the guide so useful that we decided to revise it and share it more broadly. This resource guide is intended to help spur ideas for how small businesses can overcome compliance hurdles and navigate quickly evolving regulatory landscapes. The guide is also designed to help advisors or entities working with small business owners, such as CDFIs, facilitate access to potential partners to help their clients effectively address these matters in a more timely, high-quality, and consistent manner. This document is not meant to be legal advice or an exhaustive list of organizations, but rather a snapshot of potential regional and national resources where organizations could seek guidance and further partnership or support.