| dc.description.abstract | Wage theft, the failure to pay workers what they are legally owed, is prevalent and harmful, totaling billions of dollars in lost wages and benefits each year. State and federal governments seek to prevent wage theft to protect workers, replenish funding for social safety programs, and promote fairer competition between businesses that do comply with labor and employment laws. This dissertation empirically analyzes policies designed to limit wage theft and surveys workers on their perceptions of wage and hour rights.
Chapter 1 analyzes three state laws that criminalized wage theft by tying the penalties for intentional wage theft to the penalties already on the books for other forms of theft. I find these laws were associated with 35-50% declines in minimum wage violations, with the clearest effects in Minnesota, the state that concurrently increased enforcement in addition to penalties.
Chapter 2 surveys over 3,000 workers and uses experimental vignettes to measure public perceptions of wage and hour rights. This chapter presents evidence that workers are both highly knowledgeable of rights in basic scenarios, and systematically misinformed about rights in other scenarios. Many respondents mistakenly believe salaried workers can never earn overtime, and only 16% could name the federal minimum wage.
Chapter 3 studies the ABC test, an increasingly popular legal test to classify workers as either employees or independent contractors. Advocates of the ABC test suggest the test limits misclassification, another form of wage theft. This chapter evaluates adoptions of the ABC test alongside greater enforcement in New York’s construction and trucking industries, finding that the laws were associated with smaller workforces after implementation. | |
