Primary Submission Category: Policy
Structural Racism and Worker Health: The Inequitable Health Effects of Wage Theft Policies
Authors: Kevin Lee Amani Allen Maria-Elena de Trinidad Young Mahasin Mujahid
Presenting Author: Kevin Lee*
Background: Pervasive structural racism in the labor market places immigrants and workers of color at disproportionate risk of exploitative work conditions such as wage theft where employers fail to pay workers. States have enacted wage theft policies to provide legal protections for workers, yet few empirical studies have assessed how these protections impact worker well-being. This study examines the associations between state-level wage theft policies and the health of immigrants and workers of color, and by extension, the effectiveness of policies at dismantling structural racism.
Methods: We used a dataset of 70 state-level wage theft policies enacted between 2005 and 2017 to construct policy scores based on the total number of wage theft policies in each state. We also used the 2019 Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey to examine US workers ages 18 to 64 (N=49,214). We assessed the association between wage theft policy scores and self-rated health (SRH) by race/ethnicity and immigration status. We also examined the relationship between specific categories of wage theft policies and SRH.
Results: For states with more wage theft policies, White (aOR=0.97, 95% CI: 0.94-0.99) and US-born (aOR=0.97, 95% CI: 0.95-1.00) workers were less likely to report poor SRH. Conversely, having more wage theft policies was associated with greater odds of non-citizen workers reporting poor SRH (aOR=1.03, 95% CI: 0.99-1.07). Across distinct policy categories, penalty (aOR=2.02, 95% CI: 1.45-2.81), worker complaint (aOR=1.57, 95% CI: 1.09-2.25), and expanded liability (aOR=1.35, 95% CI: 0.99-1.85) policies were associated with a greater odds of poor SRH among non-citizen workers.
Conclusions: The differential health effects of wage theft policies among immigrants and workers of color demonstrate how these policies fail to protect the workers they are intended to help. Policymakers should be cautious of designing policies that create unintended harm.