How can state and local governments empower workers? An interview with Dr. Daniel Schneider

The Economic Mobility Catalog’s Strategy Guide on Protecting Worker Well-being provides best practices for implementing living wage laws, creating effective health and safety enforcement, and designing policies that protect worker health.

This Strategy guide was created in partnership with experts and practitioners in the labor and economics fields, including Dr. Daniel Schneider, the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Co-Director of The Shift Project. In this role, he leads research on labor trends and worker well-being in the service sector.

In this edited Q&A, Dr. Schneider offers insights on emerging trends in worker safety and explains how state and local governments can improve the well-being and financial security of hourly workers and their families.

How are governments protecting worker well-being, and where does this approach fall short?

All levels of government are involved in worker well-being, but we’re seeing the innovation come at the state and local levels where policymakers are more responsive to advocacy efforts. Job quality is an important social determinant of health – higher wages, more stable scheduling, and meaningful access to paid leave can improve worker wellbeing by increasing economic security and reducing stress and work-life conflict. Three key policy levers then are: raising the minimum wage to a livable wage, mandating secure schedules so lower-wage workers have stability, and guaranteeing paid sick leave for workers. These policies are especially important for hourly workers and the benefits extend to their children and families. The benefits of these policies also extend more generally. For instance, paid sick leave reduces sickness presenteeism and so improves public health. Higher wages lead to improvements in patient outcomes in the healthcare sector.

But, it’s not enough for policymakers to simply enact these workplace protections. Real progress for working people comes when there is effective compliance and enforcement that ensures workers actually get access to these rights. This can be challenging because in the U.S. we have complaint-based enforcement. When employers fall short of complying with these labor standards, to achieve meaningful redress, workers need to know their rights and feel empowered to come forward without fearing retaliation. This can lead to the uneven implementation of policies designed to protect workers’ rights and improve their well-being. You can pass laws for minimum wage, paid sick leave, or stable scheduling, but if they aren't enforced, their full potential goes unrealized. We don't have enough inspectors to conduct ongoing, universal inspections. Therefore, agencies need to get creative with ways they can engage workers and empower them.

Unions also play a huge role in protecting workers through collective bargaining and legal advocacy. However, we’ve seen a dismantling of unions on the Federal level and with state “right to work” laws and contemporary attacks on unions in the current administration. Increasing union power and organizing ability isn’t something in the quiver of state and local policy makers. The Federal Government preempts policy that shapes workers’ ability to organize, meaning states and localities can’t pass laws that might make it easier to unionize.

What are some innovative enforcement models that are working at the state or local level?

Ideally, agencies would have sufficient resources for proactive, periodic workplace investigations. However, due to budget constraints, federal, state, and local regulators primarily rely on a complaint-based approach, investigating only when workers come forward. The drawback to this approach is that such complaints are rare relative to the rate of violations and may also be biased, where workers who are most exposed to violations may be least empowered and equipped to come forward. In a new paper with my colleagues, we draw on original survey data to show exactly this. We estimate that just 1% of workers who experience FLSA violations at work come forward with complaints to government regulators.

One alternative is strategic enforcement. Enforcement agencies from the Department of Labor down to states and localities have developed data-based tools to try to proactively identify industries where violations may be occurring, but are under-reported in complaints data. Strategic enforcement aims to address the persistent issue that workers who experience the most severe violations are least likely to come forward (based on fears of retaliation or because of their immigration status). By prioritizing sectors or specific establishments we can independently identify as likely to be the sites of violations, agencies maximize the impact of limited enforcement resources. I’m working with David Weil and Goncalo Costa now on a new project that teams up with labor enforcement agencies to develop new data-driven tools to enhance strategic enforcement.

There are also approaches like co-enforcement which basically has government agencies working with trusted nonprofits and worker advocates to educate workers, which can lead to workers raising more complaints. This helps expand the reach of enforcement agencies, and if the enforcement agency is strategic with their partnerships, they can make inroads with workers who the public sector typically struggle to reach. For example, certain nonprofits might be more trusted in an immigrant community than government inspectors.

We’ve also seen some innovative policy and administrative practice with private rights of action. In California, they passed the Private Attorney General's Act (PAGA) to give workers the ability to use private attorneys to pursue their complaints against employers instead of relying on the state. The benefit of private rights of action is that it introduces flexibility into enforcement, because ultimately these laws should serve the workers they’re intended to protect.

How can protecting worker well-being reduce disparities in the labor market?

Occupational segregation in the labor market means the groups that are most disadvantaged, such as women, workers of color, or immigrant workers, are concentrated in the sectors least likely to voluntarily provide core benefits. For example, mandating paid sick leave doesn't really affect software engineers – they already have that benefit and are more likely to be able to work from home in any case. But paid sick leave matters a lot to fast-food workers, who are more likely to be women of color.

We often talk about these policies as floor-raising, but because of who is concentrated in those low-wage jobs, when we raise standards for paid sick leave or other benefits, we are also effectively narrowing gaps by gender, race, ethnicity, and class. We have research showing that paid sick leave laws have narrowed gender gaps in access to paid leave within the service sector.

Who are some key stakeholders for creating policies that support worker well-being?

Workers play a key role in being able to articulate what it is they want and what would make a difference in their lives. Worker voice is heard both individually, but also through collective organizations, which can often advocate more effectively. But, in many of the sectors we’re worried about (like the service industry) union density is quite low.

That said, unions definitely are important. Some, like SEIU, have worked to advance broader policy making that shapes the landscape of labor protections in addition to bargaining around working conditions in covered workplaces. Increasingly we’re seeing state- or community-based alternative labor groups playing a large role in formulating or implementing labor standards, particularly around secure scheduling and minimum wage. These groups take a more grassroots approach. Fight for 15 is a great example in the minimum wage space. In Seattle, Working Washington was a really important constituency group for the secure scheduling law.

Advocacy groups, research organizations, or nonprofits who are focused on things that impact children and families play an important role as a voice for paid sick leave policy or even secure scheduling policy.

Employer groups or local Chambers of Commerce are generally not supportive of these new labor standards. Restaurant groups have also generally been opposed, but there are examples of business oriented groups that are more favorable.

How do you measure success for worker well-being policies?

After a new policy is passed, we often default to tracking basic jobs numbers to see if the policy impacted the sector’s growth, or we look at the effect on consumers, measuring if prices have gone up. However, to really measure if these policies are successful, we need to examine whether the standards are actually affecting what they're supposed to. Start by asking, "Did the jobs get better? Are worker health outcomes improving?” To make sure the policies are having their desired impact, survey workers to find out if their working conditions have improved: Are their schedules more stable? Are they actually taking paid sick leave?

For health outcomes, policymakers and researchers should look at things like mental health, stress, and sleep quality. Another set of related outcomes are around family well-being. We might observe improvements in children's school attendance outcomes as a result of paid sick leave or scheduling laws. Generally, improved health outcomes also coincide with increased household economic security, meaning people are better able to make ends meet.

What are some emerging worker well-being issues you think policymakers should pay more attention to?

Policymakers need to realize the increasing health and economic risks for workers associated with climate change and extreme weather. We have paid sick days, but what about when it’s too hot or the air quality is too hazardous to work? I can imagine a future where we have paid time off due to climate conditions. A lot of manual labor or service jobs don’t provide those benefits, so if you have uninterrupted days with deadly heat or poor air quality due to forest fires, either workers are exposed to hazardous conditions or are working without pay, both of which have serious negative consequences. That’s something where intervention from policymakers is necessary, but I think we’re just starting to develop the evidence around it.