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In 2018, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and funded contractor Eastern Research Group, Inc (ERG) to conduct a study focused on the use of consensus standards for occupational safety and health management systems (Employer Adoption of Voluntary Health and Safety Standards).

The report relates to an effort by the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO), in collaboration with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), to understand how and why employers adopt voluntary consensus standards for occupational health and safety (OHS) management. This final report describes the processes governing the development of standards for occupational safety and health management systems.

The report relates to an effort by the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO), in collaboration with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), to understand how and why employers adopt voluntary consensus standards for occupational health and safety (OHS) management. This report focuses on the institutions, organizations, and processes that have emerged to support the certification of occupational health and safety management systems (OHSMS), both in the U.S. and globally.

The researchers who produced this paper evaluate health outcomes for workers subject to incentivized compensation in an effort to better understand the effects and implications of modern day performance and piece rate pay in the growing gig economy sector. This paper is the first to explore the effects of pay type on worker health outcomes in a large and representative longitudinal and cross-sector panel of the U.S. workforce.

In 2017, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) to fund contractor Mathematica to conduct the Wage and Hour Division’s Compliance Strategies Evaluation. The impact design and outcomes evaluation aim to build evidence on how to assess effective compliance strategies and compliance assistance within WHD, including exploring ways WHD may use external data for ongoing monitoring and evaluation.

The report provides intervention and evaluation designs for two behavioral intervention (BI) trials that, if implemented, would test whether webinar registrations increase when behavioral strategies are applied to emails targeting a given industry. To design the study, researchers followed a six-step process developed by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) for designing and conducting BI studies that has resulted in trials that produce meaningful evidence.

The report examines information from a literature and database review that identified knowledge gaps, discussions with Wage and Hour Division (WHD) about compliance strategies, and discussions with a panel of experts about compliance strategies. The researchers then developed a framework for WHD and other agencies to consider when designing processes for monitoring and evaluating strategies and outcomes.

The report supplements the Wage and Hour Division’s (WHD) Compliance Strategies Evaluation by exploring whether and how data that are housed outside of WHD could be integrated with WHD’s administrative data. The researchers explored how external data can be integrated with WHD’s case management system, the Wage and Hour Investigative Support and Reporting Database (WHISARD), and the limitations of doing so.

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL)’s Chief Evaluation Office (CEO), in partnership with the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) contracted with Mathematica Policy Research to synthesize existing literature and data related to WHD compliance strategies.

The paper studies the short- and long-run effects of each U.S. recession since 1973 on local economic activity. Researchers analyze how economic activity evolves across local areas that are differentially affected by national recessions. For each recession, researchers find that employment, population, employment-to-population ratios, and earnings per capita experience persistently declines for at least a decade after recession’s end.

Researchers used de-identified data from California personal income tax returns to measure the frequency and nature of independent contracting work in California. The researchers identified independent contractors by the presence of a Schedule C on the tax return. They estimate that 16% of California workers aged 18-64 report some Schedule C income; about two-thirds of these do not have traditional jobs generating W2s and get all of their earnings from Schedule C work. There has been little change in the prevalence of Schedule C work since 2012.

It has been a generation since the last systematic examination of Native socio-economic well-being. Since then, several important developments have proliferated across Indian country, including Indian gaming, energy projects, expanded social and health services, new forms of tribal governance, and the advent of tribal colleges.

Alternative Work Arrangements (AWAs) are contract forms commonly associated with less attachment, lower wages, and fewer worker benefits. Even though AWAs are theoretically cheaper for firms, they continue to account for only 10% of employment. The researcher explores why AWAs are not more widely used, given their purported economic benefit for firms. Legal rules suggest that while AWAs have lower fixed costs of employment, they may be less productive than standard employment and likely attract lower-type workers.

The mission of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) is “to enforce, for the benefit of job seekers and wage earners, the contractual promise of affirmative action and equal employment opportunity required of those who do business with the Federal government.” Accordingly, OFCCP is dedicated to promoting diversity and protecting workers, ensuring that workers are treated fairly and equitably in their current jobs and that those seeking employment do not face discrimination in the hiring process.

The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) in the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) serves to “protect workers, promote diversity and enforce the law.” Accordingly, OFCCP is dedicated to ensuring that federal contractors and subcontractors comply with their responsibility to take affirmative action and offer equal employment opportunity to job seekers and wage earners.

Worker moral hazard has been shown in some empirical studies to influence workers’ compensation insurance claims patterns. According to moral hazard theory, temporary help services workers would be expected to file a greater number of spurious claims than traditional, directly-hired employees as a result of greater safety information asymmetry between staffing agencies and the temporary help services workers they place in third party workplaces than between employers and their directly-hired employees.

The nature of the employer-employee relationship is drastically changing in the United States, with lead employers employing fewer workers directly and instead relying on intermediaries and contracting firms for providing labor services. In the paper researchers investigate the incidence and effects of outsourcing labor service jobs in food, cleaning, security and logistics (FCSL) to business service firms. They first provide long time series using Census and ACS data documenting large movements of FCSL jobs to business service firms, with an accelerating trend since the Great Recession.

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.

Workers who meet the legal definition of employees receive statutory protections such as minimum wage, overtime pay, and Unemployment Insurance coverage. Workers defined as self-employed forgo these protections as well as other employer-provided benefits such as health insurance and retirement plans. In order for workers to make informed choices between employment and self-employment, they need to understand how those rights and benefits vary with classification (i.e., employee vs. self-employed).

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 report describes the methods used by Abt Associates in conducting the Worker Classification Knowledge Survey for the Department of Labor. The Worker Classification Knowledge Survey is a dual-frame telephone survey that measures American workers’ knowledge about their current job classification and their knowledge about the rights and benefits associated with their job status. Abt conducted this study in support of the U.S.

Under contract from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), Abt Associates conducted a survey of 8,503 workers on issues related to employee classification; i.e., whether those who by law are employees are being treated as self-employed (and vice versa). In addition, the study conducted 17 semi-structured interviews with employers and employer representatives. The report describes the survey which suggests that workers have an imperfect understanding of the implications of employment status.

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 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.