Injury Underreporting and Barriers to Workers' Compensation among Workers in the Low-Wage Labor Market

Background and Objectives: Work-related injuries among low-wage workers often go unreported and untreated by workers’ compensation, but the “invisibility” of low-wage work often makes it difficult to study the experiences of injured workers, their interactions with employers following injury, and their challenges in navigating the workers’ comp system. This paper relies on data from an innovative study of labor law violations among low-wage workers to identify the main contributors to injury underreporting and denial of workers’ comp.

Methods:The 2008 Unregulated Work Survey gathered data from 4,387 workers employed in low-wage occupations in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. We specifically analyze responses from 607 survey participants who had experienced serious work-related injuries in the past three years.

Results: Among respondents reporting a work-related injury, about 12% indicated they did not report their injuries to employers for reasons including fear of job loss, unwillingness to miss work, or concern about employer retaliation. Of those whose employers learned of the injury, nearly 50% indicated employers responded in ways that constituted explicit violations of workers’ comp law, while an additional 24% experienced other forms of employer reprisal; only 12% indicated their employers responded in a positive way. We will present additional analyses that estimate the relative contributions of worker fears and employer reprisals in injury underreporting and denial of workers’ comp.

Conclusions: The findings will better our understanding of the precariousness of low-wage work and offer insights into the injury experiences of a worker population that is often difficult to reach.