CEO Library

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 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 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 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 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.

For many Americans, the recession that began in 2007 led not only to job loss, but also to losing health insurance for themselves and their families. Three-quarters of nonelderly Americans who have health insurance receive coverage through an employer. In most cases, the employer pays for a relatively large portion of the cost of the coverage. Given the predominance of health insurance that is sponsored and subsidized by employers, the loss of a job is often accompanied by the loss of health care coverage.

In 2015, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and funded Summit Consulting LLC to conduct the Federal Agency Targeting Inspection (FEDTARG) Program Study under the Administrative Data Research and Analysis portfolio of studies. The outcome evaluation aims to better understand activities, outputs, and outcomes of the FEDTARG program from fiscal year (FY) 2008 through FY 2013.

The report summarizes the results of Eastern Research Group, Inc. (ERG)’s project to estimate the social and economic effects of minimum wage violations in California and New York. This project represented an exploratory effort to determine the appropriate approach and data to use to estimate the impacts of state and federal minimum wage and overtime pay violations; however, data limitations related to overtime pay violations required a focus only on minimum wage violations.

Abstract of the Social and Economic Effects of Wage Violations: Estimates for California and New York Final Report.

The report provides an overview of the Site Specific Targeting Program (SST11) and a random assignment evaluation design implemented by Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to assess the short-term impacts of the program.

Family leave provides an employee with a period of time off work to care for a newborn or a sick child, spouse, or parent. The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires that employers provide 12 weeks of family leave to qualifying workers with a newborn or a sick child, spouse, or parent, but that leave is unpaid.

The paper describes the New Mexico Pay Equity Initiative, which was instituted by Governor Bill Richardson’s administration over a two year period (2009-2011). The Initiative built on recommendations from an Equal Pay Task Force created by the New Mexico State legislature in 2003, and a subsequent task force created by the governor in 2008.

The minimum wage is one of the most researched areas in labor economics with a vast body of literature that dates back nearly seventy years (Brown 1999). Research proliferated as variation in state minimum wage policies gained steam over the last several decades. However, research, debate and policy has largely ignored the lesser known subminimum wage received by tipped workers (also referred to as the tipped or cash wage). That there are two federal wage floors is unknown to many and the existence of the federal subminimum wage—at $2.13 since 1991—often comes as a bit of a surprise.

In the paper, the researcher leverages variation in response to a statewide full-day kindergarten policy to explore the effects of full-day kindergarten expansions on student academic performance—as measured by school-level standardized test scores—in first and third grade and on women’s labor force participation, measured by county-level employment statistics.

The underreporting of occupational injuries and illnesses to worker protection agencies has become a topic of great concern to researchers and policymakers. Although numerous studies have quantified the prevalence of the phenomenon, which specific types of injuries and establishments are most susceptible to underreporting is poorly understood. As a consequence, regulators have very little capacity to “red flag” employers that are likely to underreport the most injuries. The paper begins to fill this gap in existing literature in four interrelated ways.

The empirical literature on union effects on occupational safety and health within firms struggles with two primary obstacles to credibly estimating the effect of unionization on workplace safety. First, unionized employees may be more likely to report occupational risks to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), inducing greater rates of inspection and citation of unionized firms for violations than occurs in otherwise similar nonunion firms. This is a kind of measurement error in commonly-used workplace safety outcomes that is positively correlated with unionization.

In the paper, researchers describe how they test for early labor market effects in terms of eased job-lock from the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion of January 2014 that targeted non-elderly low-income adults. An expansion of health insurance options not tied to employment could increase job turnover among newly eligible low-income populations, enabling them to move to preferred jobs (measured here as higher wage jobs).

The U.S.

The brief presents high-level findings from the Survey of Public Opinion of the U.S. Population Working Rights Final Report.

National section of the Survey of Public Opinion of the U.S. Population Working Rights Final Report.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) section of the Survey of the Public Opinion of the U.S. Population Working Rights Final Report.

Wage and Hour Division (WHD) section of the Survey of Public Opinion of the U.S. Population Working Rights Final Report.

Working Women section of the Survey of Public Opinion of the U.S. Population Working Rights Final Report.

Non-Response Report of the Survey of Public Opinion of the U.S. Population Working Rights Final Report.

Appendices to the Survey of Public Opinion of the U.S. Population Working Rights Final Report: Appendix A: Methodology, Appendix B: Survey Instrument, and Appendix C: Standard Error Estimates.