We asked our WorkingNation Advisory Board to share their thoughts on the most important issues and challenges facing the workforce and the labor market in 2024.

Paul Irving is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, previously serving as the Institute’s president and founding chair of its Center for the Future of Aging.

Here are his thoughts on The Future of Work 2024.

“I continue to look forward to the work that I do to promote the interests of older workers and the potential of intergenerational workforces. But I don’t want to forget where we’ve come from and particularly the residual impact of the pandemic.

“One of the things that we learned during the pandemic was the incredible importance value of essential workers. I feel in some ways that the conversation about their importance has been lost in the months past and I hope that we can reinvigorate that conversation, particularly as we talk about the possibility of more advanced, more enlightened immigration policies in the United States.

“We know that we need immigrants in America to take care of older adults of need, to serve us in so many ways. If we forget that, we should remember the things that those people did for us as we were suffering during the pandemic. We owe our immigrant population our thanks, we owe them our support, and we owe them advanced and enlightened immigration policies.

“Rosalynn Carter, who was a great leader and advocate in the caregiving community, has just passed. When I think about her contribution, one of the things I think about is her recognition of the importance of not just the family caregivers, but of direct care workers. Direct care workers in the United States are dominantly immigrant women, often immigrant women of color.

“With the shifting demography in the U.S., with what we know is coming in terms of care needs in the decades ahead, we should be embracing and encouraging and enabling and supporting and compensating and elevating the women who will care for, not just our parents, but for all of us in the years and decades ahead.

“Our failure to do that, ultimately, is not just unjust, but creates risk for all of us and for the health of our country.”

The failure to support our caregiving workforce puts the health of our country at risk

We asked our WorkingNation Advisory Board to share their thoughts on the most important issues and challenges facing the workforce and the labor market in the coming year. Paul Irving is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, previously serving as the Institute’s president and founding chair of its Center for the Future of Aging.

Read more from our WorkingNation Advisory Board members on The Future of Work 2024.