CEO Library

Analyses show that providing paid sick days under any alternative model policy increases the amount of paid time workers are able to take for medical and family needs, as intended, at reasonable costs to employers, ranging from 0.10 percent to 0.29 percent of payroll according to the generosity of the model. Employers of different sizes and in different industries would experience a range of costs under each model.

The brief explores the distributional impact of three alternative policy models for providing paid sick days taken from actual policies in the states and a federal proposal selected to show a range of generosity of provision. San Francisco was the first U.S. locality to pass paid sick days in 2006. Their Paid Sick Leave Ordinance (PSLO) covers nearly all workers in San Francisco and provides up to five days per year for workers employed in small businesses (under ten employees) and up to nine days per year for workers employed in larger businesses.

Workers who are 55 years old and over are projected to remain the fastest growing segment of working adults in the U.S. through 2022. Health, longevity, education, and attitude are some of the reasons for their continued labor force attachment. In recent years, older workers have also either delayed retirement or re-entered the workforce due to financial losses in the Great Recession. Older workers face different challenges and responsibilities than their younger counterparts.

Welcoming a new child commonly requires working parents to face challenging decisions related to balancing their career obligations with the extensive caregiving responsibilities of a new child. The brief explores the association between paid leave use and the employment stability of a specific group of parents, first-time mothers, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation’s (SIPP) Fertility History Module.

The participation rate of mothers in the labor force has increased significantly over the last four decades with an estimated 71% participating in 2014 compared to 47% in 1975. Similarly, the share of households with mothers of children under the age of 18 as the sole or primary income earner has grown substantially, increasing from 11% in 1960 to 40% in 2011.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) enables employees to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave. However, while FMLA has increased leave-taking among eligible workers, overall effects have been modest, perhaps because much of the workforce is ineligible for FMLA, and many who are eligible are unaware of the law’s benefits and eligibility requirements.

The report compares MSHA Part 50 program data to mining-related claims filed with the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission (IWCC). Illinois was chosen because it is an important mining state which collects substantial data on workers’ compensation claims. The research group at the University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Public Health has full access to this data set and obtained access to Illinois MSHA Part 50 data in order to perform this analysis.

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).

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.

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 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.

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 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.

As thousands of military veterans return from Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom and seek to enter the civilian labor market, providing effective employment and training services to veterans is becoming increasingly important.

The report of a study first to examine the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA’s) Federal Agency Targeting (FEDTARG) inspection program. Under the FEDTARG program, OSHA targets Federal worksites that have high lost time case (LTC) counts. The goal of the program is to reduce hazards, injuries and illnesses, and the costs associated with injuries and illnesses in Federal worksites.

The report describes the use of administrative data to describe the characteristics, services received, and short-term labor market outcomes of adult Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, Indian and Native American, and migrant and seasonal farmworker customers leaving four workforce investment programs in 2011.

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 report describes an exploratory investigation that contrasts the experiences of Jobs for Veterans State Grants (JVSG) veterans, non-JVSG veterans, and non-veterans who participated in federally-funded employment services. It examines employment rates, earnings, duration in employment services, and how quickly customers receive staff-assisted services. Comparisons were also made across gender, age, and military separation status.

The Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) works with other Department of Labor (DOL) agencies to conduct Administrative Data Research and Analysis (ADRA) studies. The various studies aim to examine administrative data sets from agencies within DOL and other federal agencies to provide timely responses to changing strategic agency priorities. Completed studies are listed below. New and ongoing studies will occur regularly.

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 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.