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There is ongoing policy debate about employee classification; that is, who the law says should be classified as an employee and who should be classified as self-employed. But do workers themselves understand their current status? To explore whether workers understand their current status, a recent Abt Associates survey asked 8,503 workers for their (1) work status (employee or self-employed) and (2) what earnings documentation for tax purposes they received from their main job (W-2 or 1099-MISC). Earnings documentation alone is not definitive as to classification.

Drawing on data from site visits to seven Linking to Employment Activities Pre-Release (LEAP) sites, the brief explores their approach to staffing jail-based American Job Centers (AJCs), including the varying staffing configurations, key staff qualifications, hiring and onboarding processes, and strategies to expedite hiring based on lessons

The document provides information related to the public use files (PUFs) of the Worker Classification Knowledge Survey. (Beyond what is contained in the technical report (Daley et al. 2016); no information from the semi-structured interviews is being released.) The survey instruments are included as Appendix A of the Methodology Report, and are also included in this document as Appendix B. The balance of this document proceeds as follows. Section 2 discusses steps to prevent disclosure. Section 3 provides sample code for analyzing the data using SAS.

The Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program (HVRP) is intended to provide services to assist in reintegrating homeless veterans into meaningful employment. In May 2014, U.S. Department of Labor's (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) contracted with Avar Consulting, Inc. to conduct a formative evaluation of the HVRP program.

The Unemployment Insurance (UI) program was designed to reduce financial hardships for unemployed workers, assist with reemployment, and ameliorate the negative effects of unemployment on the economy as a whole. The loss of a job poses major hardships for many workers and their families. They often need to begin a potentially challenging search for new employment and also adjust their spending patterns and seek other sources of income. For qualified unemployed workers, UI benefits can help reduce the urgency for such adjustments.

The report details a study that uses the introductions of California’s Paid Family Care Leave Act (CA-FLI) and New Jersey’s Family Leave Insurance (NJ-FLI) to examine the effects of paid-leave laws on labor market outcomes for individuals who are likely to provide care to an elderly parent. A 2012 survey of employees in the United States showed that work leaves related to the health of a family member (parent, spouse, or child) were almost as common as leaves related to caring for a newborn child (Klerman, Daley, and Pozniak, 2014).

To provide context for the discussions with individuals likely to use paid family leave benefits, researchers summarize some of the paid family leave literature. First, they provide an overview of the existing federal and state policies that support leave-taking. Second, they discuss utilization trends associated with state-based paid leave laws. And finally, they delve into barriers to use of these paid leave benefits.

The U.S. Army and the U.S.

Assuring that all workers in the United States have safe and healthful working conditions is the mission of the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The Site-Specific Targeting (SST) program, a planned inspection program managed by OSHA, aims to improve health and safety of workplaces under OSHA's jurisdiction by targeting enforcement actions on establishments with historically high injury and illness rates.

Appendix J to the The Effect of Marketing on Demand for Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) On-site Consultation Program Final Report: Brochures and Emails.

Workplace injuries have negative consequences for individuals, families, organizations, and society as a whole. In the paper, the researchers expand upon the job demands-resources (JD-R) model to include family demands and resources, as well as individual resources, and test longitudinally both between- and within-person antecedents of workplace injuries. They use nine waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and follow the same individuals over a 12-year period.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) runs a voluntary program that provides free and confidential advice to small and medium-sized establishments on approaches to avoiding workplace injuries and illnesses. This effort, known as the On-site Consultation Program (OSC), operates in addition to—but totally separate from—OSHA’s enforcement activities. Nationwide, OSC performs approximately 27,000 consultation visits per year at establishments that collectively employ more than 1.25 million workers.

The paper examines changes in patterns of work, poverty, and the relationship between work and poverty between 2005 and 2013. It also explores the implications of heterogeneous work-poverty dynamics for the distribution of poverty risk across race and sex groups. The researchers' analyses address three specific objectives. First, they track changes in work and poverty status among householders during the 2005 to 2013 period.

There are concerns that Hispanic workers disproportionately under report workplace injuries, perhaps out of fear of reprisal from employers. This type of underreporting would place an especially high burden on Hispanic workers who are employed in riskier industries and occupations and who have among the lowest rates of health insurance.

The paper studies the effects of the prevalence and high returns to working long hours on female labor market outcomes, particularly for highly educated women. The researchers' empirical strategy uses cross-country data from 18 developed countries and exploits time-series and cross-industry variation. The results suggest that an increase in the prevalence of overwork in an industry (defined as working 50+ hours a week) reduces the share of married educated women aged 23 to 42 working in that industry, even after controlling for the industry distribution of single women of the same age.

The literature review reviews what is known about sector-based training strategies to date, and why they have become so popular with policymakers. It also reviews several major challenges to expanding them while trying to maintain their quality. These challenges include the fact that only workers with strong basic skills and employability are likely to benefit from these strategies; the likely tradeoffs between short- and long-term impacts and between general and more specific training; the difficulties of replicating and scaling the best models; and uncertain future labor demand.

The recession that began in late 2007 posed major challenges for the U.S. labor market, including a high unemployment rate and a steep increase in unemployment durations. The federal policy response to the recession and the lingering weak labor market included substantial changes to the unemployment compensation (UC) system, which is administered as a partnership between states and the federal government. Twelve pieces of federal legislation affected the UC system from June 2008 to January 2013, the most comprehensive of which was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

Stagnant wages, growing inequality, and the deterioration of job quality are among the most important challenges facing the U.S. economy today. Although domestic outsourcing – firms’ use of contractors, franchises, and independent contractors – is a potentially important mechanism through which companies reduce compensation and shift economic risk to workers, surprisingly little is known about the extent of this practice and its implications for wages and working conditions.

The employer-based system of providing retirement and health benefits is failing too many Americans, including disproportionate numbers of the poorer and more vulnerable members of society. The largely incremental changes made over the last 30 years have not solved the basic problems of access, coverage and adequacy. Accordingly, the researcher who developed the literature review suggests that it is time for a more radical approach. One approach would be to redefine the terms “employer” and “employee” to capture the realities of the 21st century workplace.

The structure and organization of work are continually changing. Changes may be cyclical, reflecting economic and social conditions, including business cycles and labor market structures. Other changes, often resulting from new technologies, may be unidirectional. Whether or not the changes are temporary or permanent, employment arrangements affect worker exposures to workplace hazards and their ability to address them.

The report examines expansions to the unemployment compensation system that followed the onset of the Great Recession. Before the recession, eligible workers losing a job could collect up to 26 weeks of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits in most states. Near the end of 2009, up to 99 weeks were available in high-unemployment states through the UI program, the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Act of 2008 (EUC08) program, and the Extended Benefits (EB) program. The researchers' main analysis used administrative and survey data on 2,122 recipients in 12 states.

The report profiles the demographic and employment characteristics of women veterans and compares these characteristics to those of male veterans, women non-veterans, and male non-veterans.

In 2016, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) to fund contractors Westat and MDRC to conduct an implementation study and randomized controlled trial (RCT) impact study of the H-1B-funded TechHire Partnership Grants (TechHire) and the Strengthening Working Families Initiative (SWFI). The Department of Labor awarded funds for both of these programs in September 2016.

The report provides quasi-experimental evidence on the impact of paid leave legislation on fathers’ leavetaking, as well as on the division of leave between mothers and fathers in dual-earner households. Using difference-in-difference and difference-in-difference-in-difference designs, researchers study California’s Paid Family Leave (CA-PFL) program, which is the first source of government-provided paid parental leave available to fathers in the United States.

The report presents the findings of the United Services Military Apprenticeship Program (USMAP) Implementation Study and Feasibility of an Impact Study as conducted by L&M Policy Research and the Urban Institute. In undertaking the analysis, the L&M-Urban team interviewed key staff members involved with USMAP operations. In addition, the team conducted 11 focus groups at two Navy and two Marine Corps bases with USMAP apprentices, USMAP completers, and USMAP supervisors.