Protecting worker well-being

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure it addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute and Mathematica have developed indicator frameworks to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in high-quality interventions. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

• Access to jobs paying a living wage: Employment-to-population ratio for adults ages 25 to 54. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the Bureau of Labor and Statistics’ Local Area Unemployment Statistics.

• Opportunities for income: Household income at 20th, 50th, and 80th percentiles. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

• Employment opportunities: Ratio of pay on an average job to the cost of living. These data are available from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

• Financial security: Share of households with debt in collections. These data are available from the Urban Institute’s Debt in America website.

• Access to healthcare: Ratio of residents to primary care physicians. These data are available from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Area Health Resource File.

• Securing vocal champions among government leaders: Vocal champions at the highest levels of local government, such as executives and legislators, are instrumental in enacting new protections for workers. Champions can help promote stronger, more robust legislation, increase budget allocations for enforcement, build awareness of new laws among workers, and increase compliance among businesses.
• Conduct direct outreach to raise awareness among workers: Many worker protection laws are complaint-driven rather than proactively enforced. Therefore, it is crucial to engage with as many workers as possible to inform them of their rights and what to do if an employer violates them. Outreach should be conducted in multiple languages and can include public information sessions, visits to businesses, advertising and social media campaigns, and more.
• Invest in enforcement capacity: Even with the complaint-driven nature of most interventions, adequate enforcement capacity to respond to worker complaints is a crucial component of implementation. Formal investigations require significant resources, especially staff time. Funding multiple positions—including investigating attorneys and even data scientists—can help increase the likelihood that workers receive restitution and incentivize compliance among employers.
• Engage with businesses during policy design period: To maximize compliance, solicit input prior to implementation from business owners. Doing so can help policymakers identify allies in the business community, who can be powerful messengers in building public support, and eliminate unnecessary pain points, costs, or administrative burdens associated with compliance (i.e. ensuring that rules are compatible with common scheduling software).

• Simple and broad: Workforce wellbeing regulations are most effective when they are simple, broad, and easy to enforce. Flexible scheduling, paid sick leave and paid family leave have higher impact when they have an extensive coverage of workers, with little, if any, opportunity for opt-outs and clear guidance around implementation. For instance, there has been a standardization of best practice around predictable work schedules, where a two-week advanced notice has found to be most effective.
• Effectively enforced: Labor standards only matter if they are actually enforced in the workplace. Enforcement should be strategic rather than purely complaints-driven, with proactive investigations of sectors and firms based on data. Working with advocacy groups and nonprofits focused on worker rights can help localities understand where standards need to be raised and enforced. A major challenge around enforcement is the capacity and funding of responsible agencies– agencies need sufficient resources to carry out their enforcement mandate. Leaders should also ensure that the fines for health and safety violations are a meaningful deterrent for large firms.
• Providing flexibility in the workplace: A common theme across many worker wellbeing initiatives is that they increase flexibility–for instance through predictable working hours or flexible scheduling–for workers facing challenges beyond the workplace. Flexible work practices can facilitate child care arrangements for parents and caregivers, support individuals juggling multiple jobs, increase employee access to mental health services, and make the workplace more inclusive of workers with disabilities.
• Improving worker agency: A range of tools improve worker wellbeing by increasing worker agency. Functional unemployment insurance systems give workers a viable exit from jobs that are negatively affecting their wellbeing. Evidence also demonstrates associations between union membership and worker wellbeing. There have also been recent instances of states taking a quasi-sectoral bargaining approach, such as the Fast Food Council in California, that point to useful techniques for increasing worker voice and wellbeing.

• Respond to occupational segregation: Many marginalized and racial groups are overrepresented in the sectors that are least likely to provide the sorts of benefits that protect worker wellbeing. For instance, recent research found that 30% of Black workers and 25% of Hispanic workers would benefit from a federal increase in the minimum wage. These pre-existing inequities should inform the targeting and implementation of worker wellbeing policies. Outreach to design and roll out new policies should be in multiple languages, and local leaders should work closely with community organizations to ensure new worker protections are understood and adhered to. Occupational segregation also speaks to the potential impact of broad improvements in work standards: raising the floor on job quality often helps narrow racial gaps in employment outcomes.
• Recognize the gender disparities that result from an absence of worker wellbeing policies: Women are far more likely to take on caregiver roles and therefore are more likely to be impacted by policies around flexible scheduling, child care, or paid family leave. A 2012 study found that the positive impact of paid family leave in California was felt most keenly by mothers with lower levels of education and mothers who are Black or Hispanic. Pre-existing gender disparities in the labor market (such as the pay gap and labor force participation) can also inform the prioritization of worker wellbeing initiatives.
• Address the unequal impacts of climate change: There will be a range of new equity challenges to consider presented by climate change, particularly for jobs including manual labor, which are disproportionately filled by low-income people of color. For instance, local leaders will need to recognize the importance of mandating water breaks if staff are working in heat over 90 degrees, or mandating time that is spent working indoors. Agricultural and construction sectors also disproportionately consist of immigrant and undocumented workers, many of whom will not have the same access to legal protections. Creating opportunities for worker voice and collaborating with environmental justice and labor organizations will be vital to mitigating the impacts of climate change on worker wellbeing.

• Workers: Workers are the most important stakeholder to engage in policy design around workforce protections and supports. Local leaders should consider creating governance structures, such as advisory boards, to support workers in articulating their perspectives. It will be important to represent the diversity of needs across the workforce– from students to caregivers to immigrant workers.
• Worker organizations: Organizations representing the interests of labor are an important conduit for worker voice, both in terms of highlighting violations of workplace standards and shaping policy. Unions can play this role, particularly those that engage in wider policy making discussions, as well as other labor groups that advocate across unionized and non-unionized labor.
• State and local government leaders: Improving worker wellbeing through policies like paid sick leave, paid medical leave or predictable scheduling requires legislation, usually passed by state governments. Similarly, state legislators and agencies will lead on questions around minimum wage, overturning Right to Work, and enforcing workplace standards. State and city leaders also consider the role of government procurement in driving up good practice: making the awarding of contracts contingent on best practice measures around worker wellbeing.
• Stakeholders focused on children and families: Organizations that work to support women, children and families are often powerful advocates of worker policies like paid family leave and paid sick leave given the positive impacts these policies have on parental health and child development.
• Business: Although there are occasionally challenges around business support for worker wellbeing measures, employers are still important actors to engage over the design and rollout of successful worker support initiatives. Making the positive business case for worker support–emphasizing the likelihood of lower turnover, less retraining and lower staffing costs–will be an important aspect of building a political coalition for worker wellbeing policies.

• Worker outcomes: In the immediate term, it will be important to track how many residents are affected by new worker wellbeing initiatives. This might include the number of workers eligible or covered by new regulations; the number of workers who see their wages rise; or the average number of days of paid family leave offered to and taken by caregivers.
• Enforcement: Local leaders will need to measure whether coverage leads to positive outcomes for residents, such as the proportion of workers receiving pay while sick or the proportion of workers with more stable schedules. Given challenges around enforcement, working with research partners to conduct formal evaluations of new workforce wellbeing policies is an effective method to understand compliance in practice.
• Health and safety outcomes: A range of health and safety outcomes will give an indication of impact. Over time, local leaders should hope to be able to see lower injury rates at the workplace. It will also be helpful for local leaders to understand the overall number of days of absence due to sickness. Recent evidence suggests that paid sick leave increases the number of hours worked due to reduced contagion.
• Job satisfaction: A key leading indicator for worker wellbeing will be the proportion of residents who are satisfied with their job, as reported through population surveys. Retention and staff turnover are also useful proxies for this measure.
• Mental health outcomes: Local leaders should make efforts to measure mental health outcomes of the workforce, including psychological distress, positive and negative affect, sleep quality and life satisfaction. These outcomes can be derived from population-level surveys or formal evaluations of new programs. Longer-term health outcomes include diabetes, heart disease, substance use, suicide and liver sclerosis.