The Workforce Economic Inclusion and Mobility project: Building on employment-related research at CSD

Motivated by the emerging field of employee financial wellness programs (EFWPs), the Center for Social Development (CSD) launched a research program focused on the intersection of employment and financial health in 2015. While U.S. households depend primarily on work for their incomes, the rise of EFWPs highlighted the potential for the workplace to serve as a channel for broad financial inclusion efforts by introducing services like financial counseling and employer-sponsored small-dollar loans.

We summarized our work on EFWPs, describing innovative practices yet cautioning that these programs are poor substitutes for low wages and a lack of benefits, such as employer-sponsored health insurance and retirement plans. This work inspired us to launch the Building on Benefits project in partnership with PHI to understand how access to common benefits like health insurance was related to the financial health of frontline health-care workers. After controlling for income and other factors, we found that the number of benefits to which these workers had access was strongly associated with 10 different indicators of financial health.

The results from our Building on Benefits study aligned with our “poor substitutes” idea, suggesting that employers should offer common benefits like paid leave and retirement plans before they turned to EFWPs. For example, earned wage access is a poor substitute for paid sick leave. But we also found that frontline health-care workers who lacked college degrees, identified as Black, and worked in noninstitutional settings like home health had less access to benefits.

Thus, we turned our attention to how different types of low-wage work may affect financial health in U.S. households. Indeed, we found that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, so-called gig workers (e.g., workers for DoorDash and TaskRabbit) experienced greater material hardship (e.g., food insecurity and problems paying for housing) than workers who were self-employed (e.g., contractors and sole proprietors) or who worked for an employer.

Now, with support from JPMorganChase, we are comprehensively examining the financial vulnerability of low-wage workers in the United States through the Workforce Economic Inclusion and Mobility (WEIM) project. We are exploring how employer benefits, public benefits (including benefits cliffs and administrative burdens), conditions of work (e.g., wage theft), changes in employment status, taxes, caregiving responsibilities, student debt, medical debt, financial shocks, and the use of financial services like buy-now-pay-later offerings relate to financial and mental health.

The cornerstone of the WEIM project is a three-wave survey of a nationally representative sample of low-wage workers (with data collection completed in December, 2024), yet we are also studying the impacts of cash transfer programs, doing comparative, policy-oriented research with the Centre on Household Assets and Savings Management (CHASM) at the University of Birmingham, and offering research and evaluation technical assistance to three nonprofit organizations that support low-wage workers: Neighborhood Trust, Undue Medical Debt, and Leap Fund. Through a partnership with the Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program, we are sharing project findings with key decisionmakers.

Though Ronald Reagan once quipped that the best social program is a job, this isn’t the case for many—if not most—low-wage workers. Ironically, the United States supplements low-paying, low-benefit jobs with social programs, but this arrangement leads to many gaps and inadequacies in public and private benefits systems. Those shortcomings put workers’ financial security and economic mobility at risk. Trends like the rise of gig work and on-demand scheduling may increase these risks for many low-wage workers, even if they qualify for social programs.

Through the WEIM project, the Center for Social Development is charting a new way forward by identifying public- and private-sector innovations that will address the financial challenges of low-wage workers in the United States and the barriers to their economic mobility.