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The Project for Middle Class Renewal (PMCR), based at the University of Illinois’ Labor Education Program, is dedicated to improving conditions for the working class. Our mission is to enhance public understanding of economic and worker issues through research, analysis, and education. We aim to develop policies that tackle poverty, ensure fair representation for all workers, combat discrimination based on gender, gender identity, sexuality, ability status, and race, to create stable employment opportunities, and promote middle-class wages. Each year, we release important research studies and host educational forums on labor and workplace issues.
While Illinois is better positioned to withstand a recession than at any point over the past two decades, federal funding cuts and freezes since the beginning of 2025 pose imminent threats to Illinois’ $1.2 trillion economy. Policy changes in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” budget reconciliation law, targeted freezes during the federal government shutdown from October to November 2025, and cuts and recissions in the name of “government efficiency” will make healthcare less affordable, take food assistance away from families, eliminate infrastructure projects, undermine the State’s ability to research new technologies and prevent infectious disease outbreaks, and cause unemployment to rise.
Support for labor unions remains high and bipartisan—with 70 percent of Americans approving unions, three-fifths saying they strengthen the economy, and record numbers reporting that they want unions to have more influence in the United States. Surveys show that at least 35 percent of nonunion employees are interested in joining unions, and as many as 48 percent would unionize their workplaces if they could.
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Pre-apprenticeship programs, or apprenticeship readiness programs, have emerged as key pathways into skilled trade careers. By increasing the number of qualified workers eligible for registered apprenticeship programs, pre-apprenticeships combat skilled labor shortages in the construction industry. In Illinois, the two largest pre-apprenticeship programs are the Highway Construction Careers Training Program and the Illinois Works Pre-Apprenticeship Program.
Despite progress in workforce participation, a persistent gender gap in employment quality (EQ) continues to shape women’s economic and occupational experiences (Fana et al., 2023; Fuller & Kim, 2024; Kamerāde & Richardson, 2018; Pech et al, 2021; Stier & Yaish, 2014). This policy brief examines gender differences in perceived overall employment quality and other components of employment quality, including work schedules, employer support, promotion, and advancement opportunities.
Illinois is facing a housing shortage that has fueled increases in home prices and rental rates and negatively affected the economy. With home prices rising by 9 percent and asking rents increasing by as much as 10 percent across Illinois in 2024, this report explores the severity of the housing shortage and housing affordability issue in Illinois relative to other states—detailing the multitude of economic, regulatory, and demographic factors driving these trends while offering a range of options for policymakers and industry stakeholders to consider to stabilize the state’s housing market.
This report from the Project for Middle Class Renewal presents the first analysis of Illinois’s Workshare program using cross-sectional actual claimant data from the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES), covering the period from late 2020 to April 2024. It assesses the potential impact of Workshare participation on job retention, using national data from the Current Population Survey (CPS). Specifically, the analysis explores whether full-time workers are more likely to transition into part-time roles with their current employer—rather than face unemployment—when supported by Workshare benefits.
Registered apprenticeships are career training programs in which participants “earn while they learn” with tuition costs covered by employers or joint labor-management organizations, who gain access to domestic supply pools of skilled workers. Apprenticeship training is vital to the success of the construction industry, which accounts for 70 percent of apprenticeships in Wisconsin. While across Wisconsin, the number of active apprentices grew substantially over the past decade, this growth lagged neighboring states that maintained public policies that have been linked with strong apprenticeship systems.
In this report, researchers at the University of Illinois’ Project for Middle Class Renewal examine differences in access to quality jobs in Illinois by gender, education, and ethnicity. Using our Employment Quality in Illinois 2.0 (EQ-IL 2.0) survey data of over 5,000 workers across Illinois, we created a measure of job quality that utilizes 30 job quality components from our ten core dimensions of employment quality we defined in our EQ-IL 2.0 report. We aggregated the data by occupation and assigned a score for each component by quintile. We grouped occupations by composite scores into five groupings ranging from high-quality, to medium-high, medium, medium-low to low-quality jobs.
Our researchers at the University of Illinois Project for Middle Class Renewal (PMCR) have developed a comprehensive approach to identify the factors that determine Employment Quality in Illinois (EQ-IL 2.0). It develops ten dimensions, each with sub-components, including both subjective and objective measures.
Following up on EQ-Il 1.0, we use a large survey collected in 2023 of 5,600 employed in Illinois to identify the contribution of a vast array of worker-reported working conditions toward explaining workers’ own ratings of the quality of their employment.
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