Industry Studies and Other Labor Market Research
Finding ways to support good jobs means that we need to understand industries - their economics, their employers and their workers. We partner with allies to conduct in-depth research on industries such as restaurants, hotels, retail, grocery stores, construction, taxis, and others.
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Winning Construction Jobs for Local Residents: A User's Guide for Community Organizing Campaigns lays out a step-by-step strategy for creating and keeping high-quality construction jobs for local residents, especially women and people of color.
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Behind the Kitchen Door: Pervasive Inequality in New York's Thriving Restaurant Industry, a study conducted by the Restaurant Opportunity Center of New York (ROC-NY) in collaboration with NELP and other research organizations. We also contributed to a follow-up report: Dining Out, Dining Healthy: The Link Between Public Health and Working Conditions in New York City's Restaurant Industry.
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Is Your Gourmet Grocery a Sweatshop? A Report on Working Conditions at Upscale Groceries in New York City, a report analyzing working conditions in New York City's gourmet groceries, conducted in collaboration with New York Jobs with Justice and Queens College Labor Resource Center.
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What Do We Know About Wal-Mart?, a report collating research on the company's wages, benefits, compliance with workplace laws, cost to the taxpayer, and impact on local economies.
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Chart Book on Wages, Operating Costs, and Cost of Living for Taxicab Drivers in New York City, an analysis of wages and fare increase proposals in New York City's yellow cab industry, prepared for the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
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Moving Hotels to the High Road: Strategies That Help Workers and Firms Succeed, a report on innovative practices in the hotel industry, prepared jointly with the Center on Wisconsin Strategy. For an analysis of the role that unions play in the hotel industry, see The Coffee Pot Wars: Unions and Firm Restructuring in the Hotel Industry.
Other Labor Market Research:
We also focus on analyzing long-term trends in the U.S. labor market; our research has examined topics such as firm restructuring and changes in the organization of work, trends in job security and upward mobility, and factors driving the growth of low-wage service jobs. Recent examples include:
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When Work Doesn't Pay: The Public Cost of Low-Wage Jobs in New York State, a study that highlights the true cost of low-road employment practices and short-sighted economic development strategies. (This study replicates public cost reports for California, Illinois and Wisconsin.)
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In addition to policy reports, our research is disseminated through conference presentations and academic articles and books, including The Gloves-Off Economy:Workplace Standards at the Bottom of America's Labor Market, Low-Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace, and Divergent Paths: Economic Mobility in the New American Labor Market, co-authored/co-edited by NELP's policy co-director, Annette Bernhardt.
For more information on our work in this area, please contact Annette Bernhardt, abernhardt@nelp.org.
Other key resources:
Organizations providing national research on low-wage labor markets include:
State groups interested in collaborating on policy research can be found by searching the Economic Analysis Research Network (EARN)
In New York City, organizations providing applied labor market research include:
