Rights at Work? Examining Individual and Collective Workplace Rights in the US

• In Event: Making Workers’ Rights Real: Labor Policy, Power, and Politics

Abstract

A long line of political science research has considered the extent to which individuals possess knowledge about, and exercise, their rights to speech and political participation in public government. But we know far less about what workers think about rights within what Elizabeth Anderson has called private government: the workplace (cf. Freeman and Rogers 2006; Kim 1997, 1999).

Using an original nationally representative survey of American workers, I consider what employees know about their rights on the job—and their willingness to exercise those rights, including their rights associated with labor and employment law (Galvin 2019). This paper assesses how knowledge about workplace rights varies across different social and economic groups and additionally considers how it intersects with workers’ desires for collective action on the job (cf. Kochan et al. 2019).

I also examine how workers think about how they have benefited—or not—from such laws, finding broad variation across workers in how much they perceive themselves as beneficiaries of minimum wage, anti-discrimination, health and safety, union rights, and family and medical leave statutes. Like with the U.S. welfare state (e.g. Mettler 2011), I find that many workers do not perceive the role that the government plays in underwriting their working standards and conditions.

My overarching conclusion is a paradox: it tends to be workers with the most job security and bargaining power who recognize the role that the government plays in their working lives and possess the most knowledge about how to exercise those rights. As a result, workers with less job security and bargaining power are doubly disadvantaged: not only are such workers more dependent on government policies for their working standards (Galvin 2016, 2019) but they are less well equipped to ensure that government can continue to play that role in their lives.

Author

• Alexander Warren Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia University