Employee Hardship Funds as Private Welfare and Mutual Aid

• In Event: (Post-)Pandemic Politics

Abstract

Dozens of major US employers have created "employee hardship funds" (EHFs), programs that pool direct donations from employees with corporate contributions to offer emergency cash grants to workers experience certain hardships. EHFs have received no scholarly attention but two critical features distinguish EHFs from other job-related benefits, making them particularly interesting objects of study. The first is their mutual aid nature. In EHFs, workers donate their own money into a fund, with the goal of assisting fellow employees in need. Firms choose to maintain an administrative and outreach apparatus to solicit and direct charitable contributions towards their own workforce. Second: EHFs are accessible to hourly, part-time, and sometimes contract workers. This sets EHFs apart from other benefits and protections that tend to accrue primarily to salaried and full-time workers. Using an original survey of workers and a novel method of using social media to link workers with one large firm offering one of the oldest and most geneous EHFs, I provide the first systematic evidence of employee awareness of and experience with EHFs. I document the predictors of EHF awareness. Then, under the hypothesis that "private welfare" should reduce workers' feelings of economic precarity and this may crowd out support for other forms of mutual aid (unions) and public social welfare policies, I embed a priming experiment in the survey and examine effects on worker attachment to their co-workers and employers as well as support for unionization, government-provided social insurance, and COVID-19 relief programs. I find high rates of EHF awareness and little evidence that EHF priming affects perceived economic stability or support for unions and social welfare. There is some evidence that EHFs increase attachment to co-workers and improve opinion about the employer. Findings have implications for new forms of labor organization.

Author

• John Stephen Ahlquist, University of California, San Diego