Welfare Capitalism on the Cheap? Employee Hardship Funds, Worker Attachment, and Union Avoidance

The Institute for Research on Poverty hosts seminars on the UW-Madison campus most Thursdays during the academic year. These presentations are free and open to the public. Room 8417.

media release: Lecture by John Ahlquist, associate dean and professor, director, Pacific Leadership Fellows Program, School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California, San Diego

Hundreds of U.S. employers have created “employee hardship funds” (EHFs). EHFs pool money donations from a firm’s workers in order to offer cash grants to the firm’s employees in unforeseen emergencies. As such, these programs represent a post-industrial mash-up of worker-run mutual aid funds (precursors to labor unions) and employer “welfare capitalism” (designed in part to prevent unionization). Do these programs have any impact on workers’ financial well-being or attachment to their jobs? Can they be deployed for union avoidance? Ahlquist discusses first-of-its-kind data designed to answer these questions, shedding light on the evolving moral economy between workers and employers in today’s low-wage labor market.