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Primary Submission Category: Structural factors
Shifting Labor Share and the Social Distribution of Health
Authors: Megan Reynolds, Jerzy Eisenberg-Guyot, Tom VanHeuvelen,
Presenting Author: Megan Reynolds*
The power of workers relative to employers has been theorized as a crucial determinant of population health and health inequities. However, the relationship has seldom been directly studied, in part because quantitative measures of such power relations are scarce. The labor share of income, or the amount of economic output paid as workers’ compensation (versus employers’ profits), has been used in sociologic and economic research as an indicator of working-class power. However, it has seldom been used in public-health research. Thus, we linked state-level labor-share data from Stansbury (defined as state-level labor compensation over state-level gross domestic product) to 1982-2016 Panel Study of Income Dynamics data on respondents ages 25-64. Our outcomes included incident psychological distress (K6>5), poor/fair self-rated health, and all-cause mortality. Confounders included sociodemographic variables measured at baseline and time-varying individual- and state-level employment-related variables measured throughout follow-up. Using g-computation to address time-varying exposure-confounder feedback, we contrasted the effects on cumulative incidence of the outcomes of a high labor-share scenario, in which labor share in each year of follow-up was set to the maximum observed state-level value, with the effects of a low labor-share scenario, in which labor share in each year of follow-up was set to the minimum observed state-level value. Next, we estimated how the scenarios’ effects varied by respondents’ baseline social class, proxied by respondents’ self-employment and occupational status. Finally, we estimated how social-class inequities in health would have narrowed if labor share had remained at baseline levels over follow-up. Forthcoming findings will support emerging research connecting worker power to population health and health inequities.