I'm the head instructor for 15.662,
How to Secure the American Dream for the Next Generation
Workforce.
I'd like to take a little time to tell
you a little bit about myself and why
I'm offering this course.
I've been studying, and teaching,
and working on issues about the nature
of work for the last 40 years.
I've never been more concerned about the future of work
than I am right now.
I'm concerned about the need for more jobs, better jobs,
for you and for all people in the next generation.
And so I think we can work together in this course
to explore how you can address these issues
and secure your future as well.
So let me tell you a little bit about my background
so you can understand where I'm coming from.
I grew up on a small family farm in Wisconsin.
We learned at a very early age the importance
of working together, the value of hard work,
and the satisfaction that comes from doing a job very well.
My father only had an eighth grade education,
but he told all of us, my brother and my sisters,
get as much education as you can so that you
can get an occupation and a career that is better than what
farming will be in the future.
That was clearly the best advice I could have ever gotten,
and it worked.
Here I am, many years later, an MIT professor,
thanks to a good education from the schools in Wisconsin
and from the University of Wisconsin.
So in my professional life I've been
fortunate to work with a wide variety of business,
and labor, and government organizations over the years,
and I've been a constant advocate
for improving relations at the workplace,
for getting people to work together,
to think about how the workforce is changing,
and how they need to change to meet
the conditions of the economy, and the society,
and the workforce that we find ourselves in.
And so that's what I want to do in this course:
to engage you, the next generation workers, and those
of us in the baby boom generation who still care
about these issues and want to make
a contribution to a discussion of how
we can improve the workplace.
And I want to especially learn and listen from you.
I'm engaged in writing a book on this topic,
and I want to get your ideas so you help shape
how we're going to change, how we're going to adapt,
and how we're going to create the workplace of the future.
I'm Barbara Dyer, president and CEO of the Hitachi Foundation
and senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management.
The Hitachi Foundation focuses on the role
of business in society, with a particular emphasis
on how businesses create social and economic value
in the pursuit of profits.
We'll be talking about start up companies and their motivation
to create a real benefit for society,
and we'll be talking some about traditional businesses,
more long term businesses, and the ways in which they create
social value and environmental value,
and the lessons that can be learned across the spectrum,
from early stage businesses to later stage businesses.
I'm Zeynep Ton.
I'm an adjunct associate professor
at MIT Sloan in the Operations Management group.
I will tell you about how we can create companies
that deliver great value to their investors,
good jobs for their employees, and great value
to their customers all at the same time.
I'm Christine Riordan, a Ph.D. Student at MIT's Institute
for Work and Employment Research.
I am going to be talking to you about how labor unions are
reinventing themselves, and how new forms of worker advocacy
can help support your aspirations for work.
I'm Francesca Cicileo, an undergraduate at MIT.
I'm going to tell you more about what
our generation, the so-called millennials,
say are their goals and aspirations for work,
and their version of the American dream.
Hello, my name's John McCarthy.
I'm a postdoctoral fellow here at MIT's Institute for Work
and Employment Research.
I'm going to be talking to you about freelancing
work, including new technology-mediated work
arrangements that are springing up across the economy.
We're going to look at some of the positive and negative
aspects of these work arrangements,
and also talk about how work institutions might emerge
to ameliorate some of the negative aspects of these work
arrangements.
So I hope we will learn together, and then
let's take our lessons and our message to the broader
audiences, to future leaders, in this country
and around the world.