Though work and economy have benefits such as providing the goods and services we need and offering meaning and purpose in our lives, they also give rise to many kinds of problems that affect millions of Americans. This section examines some of these problems, starting with employment discrimination then shifting to a variety of other problems such as those related to wages, unemployment, and workplace violence.
Employment Discrimination
Employment discrimination occurs in a variety of ways, including in hiring (e.g., not hiring people of color), wages (e.g., paying women less than men), promotions (e.g., promoting white men faster than others), and more (e.g., making sexist remarks in the workplace). Here we will discuss a few examples of workplace discrimination related to different areas of social location – gender, race, and age – though people experience employment discrimination for other areas as well such as sexuality, disability, and nationality or immigrant status. It's also important to keep in mind an intersectional perspective: Some people experience double discrimination such as women of color who may experience the intersection of racism and sexism in the workplace.
Gender Discrimination
As we saw on the Overview page, over the last half century women have entered the workplace in increasing numbers (particularly white women, as many women of color were already working to sustain their working-class families). This was partly out of economic necessity as men's pay could no longer sustain a family and partly out of desire for the sense of self-worth and other fulfillment that comes with work. Women’s labor force participation continues to lag behind men’s, however, largely due to gendered expectations of domestic responsibilities. Despite the workplace gains that women have made, problems persist.
One problem is the gender pay gap. Women have earned less money than men ever since records started being kept (Reskin & Padavic 2002). In the US in the early 1800s, full-time women workers in agriculture and manufacturing earned less than 38% of what men earned. By 1885, they were earning about 50% of what men earned in manufacturing jobs. As the 1980s began, full-time women workers’ median weekly earnings were about 65% of men’s.
The gender gap in earnings has narrowed since: Women's earnings in 2024 were 84% percent of men’s, on average, for full-time and part-time workers (Fry & Aragão 2025). This means that for every $10,000 men earn, women earn only about $8,400. This gap amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime of working. Additionally, though the gap narrowed over the twentieth century, there has been less movement over the twenty-first century. In fact, the gap for full-time year-round workers increased for two consecutive years for the first time in history, falling from 82.7% in 2023 to 80.9% in 2024 (Census 2025).
The chart on the left shows that the gender pay gap had narrowed from the 1980s to the 2000s, but largely leveled off after 2003. The chart on the right points out that the pay gap is smallest among younger workers, aged 25-34, with women workers in that age group earning 95% of what men earned.
Source: Fry & Aragão 2025, Pew Research Center
What accounts for the gender gap in earnings? One reason is gendered occupational segregation, the sorting of women and men into different jobs. Gender expectations and socialization influence occupational segregation, as women are expected to take and socialized to be interested in lower-paying jobs such as those in childcare or domestic work, whereas men become interested in higher-paying jobs such as in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math). Additionally, employers may either consciously or subconsciously refuse to hire someone who is the 'wrong' gender for the job or have job requirements (e.g., height requirements among police officers) and workplace rules (e.g., nighttime work when women are expected to care for children) that make it more difficult for women to qualify for certain jobs. Although such practices and requirements are now illegal, they continue.
Moreover, occupations dominated by women tend to have lower wages and salaries, and because women are concentrated in low-paying jobs, their earnings on average are lower than men’s (Reskin & Padavic 2002). This fact raises an important question: Why do jobs dominated by women pay less than those dominated by men? Is it because "women's jobs" are not important and require few skills? Evidence indicates otherwise: Women’s work is devalued precisely because it is "women’s work," and occupations dominated by women thus pay less than those dominated by men (Magnusson 2009).
Women have earned less money than men ever since records started being kept. Women now earn about 84% of what men earn on average overall, or 84 cents for every dollar men earn. Occupational segregation accounts for some of the pay disparity, but the disparity remains when examining pay within the same occupations.
© Thinkstock
Occupational segregation is important in explaining gender pay gap, but it does not explain it away, so what else explains the gap? Human capital theory argues that capital accrued such as education and labor-market experience may explain the gap, particularly how women have less overall experience due to expectations that they engage in more unpaid family labor, yet research indicates that this explains little of the gender wage gap today. Another research finding is that there is a motherhood penalty for women with children whose average pay decreases with the birth of a child, in contrast to the marriage premium that boosts men's pay. The remaining gap suggests that employment discrimination is at play. As researchers Blau and Kahn (2017: 854) explain, "The persistence of an unexplained gender wage gap suggests, though it does not prove, that labor-market discrimination continues to contribute to the gender wage gap." In other words, it is likely that the gap is explained in part by sexist discrimination.
One form of gender discrimination in employment is the glass ceiling, in which women encounter an invisible (glass) ceiling beyond which they cannot get promoted. In the largest US corporations in the 2010s, women constituted only about 16% of top executives, and women executives were paid much less than their male counterparts (Jenner & Ferguson 2009). For more recent figures, women held only 10.4% of leadership positions at Fortune 500 companies in 2023, and only 35% of senior leadership positions in 2022 (Lindahl 2024). Although these disparities stem partly from the fact that women joined the corporate ranks more recently than men, they also reflect a glass ceiling in the corporate world that prevents qualified women from rising up above a certain level (Hymowitz 2009). Men on the other hand often ride a glass escalator to the top, particularly in occupations dominated by women. An example is seen in elementary school teaching, where men principals typically rise from the ranks of teachers. Although men have constituted only about 16% of all public elementary school teachers, they have accounted for about 41% of all elementary school principals (Aud et al. 2011).
Women constitute a fraction of the top executives in the largest US corporations. This disparity reflects a glass ceiling that limits women’s opportunities for promotion.
© Thinkstock
To return to the intersectional perspective we mention above, women of color in the workplace may experience double discrimination for being both a woman and a person of color. More specifically, the gender pay gap widens substantially when examining pay for Latina, Native American, and Black women compared to white men. The Institute for Women's Policy Research (2024: 1) notes, "In 2023, for every dollar earned by a White man, a typical Latina woman working full-time year-round earned 57.8 cents per dollar, adding up to $32,070 less per year." Moreover, less than 1% of CEOs at Fortune 500 corporations are women of color (Lindahl 2024).
Race Discrimination
Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned racial discrimination in employment, including hiring, wages, and firing. However, Black, Latino, and Native American workers still have lower earnings than white workers. Several factors explain this disparity, including the various structural obstacles discussed in our prior chapter on poverty. Despite Title VII, however, an additional reason is that people of color continue to face discrimination in hiring and promotion (Hirsh & Cha 2008). It is again difficult to determine whether such discrimination stems from conscious or implicit prejudice on the part of potential employers, but it is racial discrimination nonetheless and occurs in patterned ways, meaning that it is institutionalized discrimination in the institution of work.
A classic field experiment documented such discrimination. Sociologist Devah Pager (2003) had young white and Black men apply independently in person for entry-level jobs. They dressed the same and reported similar levels of education and other qualifications. Some applicants also admitted having a criminal record, while other applicants reported no such record. As might be expected, applicants with a criminal record were hired at lower rates than those without a record. However, in striking evidence of racial discrimination in hiring, Black applicants without a criminal record were less likely to be hired as white applicants with a criminal record.
Another classic study also found evidence of institutionalized racial discrimination in employment. Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) posed the question: "Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal?" The answer was yes. To conduct this field experiment, they sent out resumes to hiring employers that had white-sounding names and Black-sounding names, but were otherwise similar in terms of education, work experience, and so on. The researchers found that white-sounding names received 50% more callbacks for interviews than Black-sounding names, and the disparity was consistent across occupations and industries.
A 2023 Pew survey found that a large proportion of Black workers report having experienced racial discrimination in the workplace. They explain, "41% of Black workers say that at some point they have experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly by an employer in hiring, pay or promotions because of their race or ethnicity (though not necessarily by their current employer). This compares with 8% of White workers, 20% of Hispanic workers and 25% of Asian workers" (Horowitz & Parker 2023).
Age Discrimination
Some elders may wish to work but are retired or unemployed because several obstacles make it difficult for them to find jobs. First, many workplaces do not permit the part-time working arrangements that many seniors favor or require. Second, the rise in high-tech jobs means that older workers would need to be retrained for many of today’s jobs, and few retraining programs exist. Third, although federal law prohibits age discrimination in employment, it exists anyway, as employers do not think older people are 'up to the job,' even though the evidence indicates they are good, productive workers (Berger, 2009; Roscigno 2010). Finally, earnings above a certain level reduce Social Security benefits before full retirement age, leading some older people to avoid working at all or to at least limit their hours. All these obstacles lead some seniors to drop out of the labor force or to remain unemployed (Gallo, Brand, Teng, Leo-Summers, & Byers 2009).
However, older people are increasingly working, including in full-time positions. The employment of older workers (defined as age 65 and older) grew by 117% over a 20-year period. One cause of this increase is called population aging, which refers to the increasing proportion of older people in the nation, particularly as 'Baby Boomers' age (CDC 2024a).
Survey evidence suggests that more than half of older workers have experienced or observed age discrimination in the workplace, and more than 80% of older workers have experienced or observed jokes, disrespect, or other prejudicial comments about old age (Roscigno 2010). Workplace ageism receives little news media attention and has also been neglected by social scientists. This is so despite the related facts that ageism in the workplace is common and that the older people who experience this discrimination suffer financial loss and emotional problems. Roscigno (2010: 17) wrote after interviewing several victims of age discrimination:
"Many conveyed fear of defaulting on mortgages or being unable to pay for their children’s college after being pushed out of their jobs. Others expressed anger and insecurity over the loss of affordable health insurance or pension benefits… Just as prevalent and somewhat surprising to me in these discussions were the less-tangible, yet deeper social-psychological and emotional costs that social science research has established for racial discrimination or sexual harassment, for instance, but are only now being considered in relation to older workers."
One of the people Roscigno interviewed was a maintenance worker who was laid off after more than two decades of working for his employer. This worker was both hurt and angry. “They now don’t want to pay me my pension,” he said. “I was a good worker for them and always did everything they asked. I went out of my way to help train people and make everything run smoothly, so everybody was happy and it was a good place to work. And now this is what I get, like I never really mattered to them. It’s just not right” (2010: 17). The loss of a pension is deep, as it it intended to sustain older people in retirement.
Returning once again to intersectionality, ageism in the workplace can intersect with other systems of oppression such as sexism or racism, or both. For instance, research indicates that older women are far more likely to experience age employment discrimination than older men (Neumark et al. 2016). Moreover, one study found that age discrimination is highest among Black older women (Drydakis, Paraskevopoulou, & Bozani 2023), who experience triple discrimination.
Job Sectors, Wages, and Unions
Certain ominous trends in the US economy have been evident for many decades. These trends involved a general loss of jobs in many sectors of the American economy and stagnating wages. They partly reflected the fact that the US has joined other industrial nations in moving into a postindustrial economy. In a postindustrial economy, information technology and service jobs replace the machines and manufacturing jobs that are hallmarks of an industrial economy. If physical prowess and skill with one’s hands were prerequisites for many industrial jobs, mental prowess and communication and technology skills are prerequisites for postindustrial jobs.
This move to a postindustrial economy has been a mixed blessing for many Americans. The information age has benefits of course, but there has also been a cost to the many workers whom postindustrialization and the globalization of the economy have left behind. Since the 1980s, many manufacturing companies moved their plants from US cities to sites in the "developing" world in Asia and elsewhere, which is called offshoring but sometimes referred to as capital flight when the focus is on the shifting of money and resources out of one country into another. These trends helped fuel a loss of 5.5 million manufacturing jobs from the US economy in the 2010s (Hall 2011).
A related problem is outsourcing, in which US companies hire workers overseas for customer relations, billing services, and other jobs that Americans used to do. China, India, and the Philippines, which have skilled workforces relatively fluent in English, are the primary nations to which US companies outsource their work. Many call centers have employed workers in India, you might very well talk with a worker there when calling customer service.
This image portrays a job ad for a call center in India. Many US jobs have been lost because of outsourcing to other countries.
Paul Keller – wanted – CC BY 2.0
All these concerns reflect a more general shift in the US from goods-producing jobs to service jobs. Although some of these service jobs are high paying, such as many in the financial and computer industries, many are low-wage occupations, such as restaurant and clerical work, that pay less than the goods-producing jobs they replaced. Partly as a result, the average hourly wage for US workers (excluding managers and supervisors) rose by only one dollar from $17.46 to $18.63 in the 30-year period from 1979 to 2009 (in 2009 dollars). This change represented an increase of just 0.2% per year during that three-decade span, as workers’ wages essentially stagnated (Economic Policy Institute 2012).
Wage changes also depend on what social class someone is in, with those at the top of the hierarchy seeing more gains in income. While the average compensation of chief executive officers (CEOs) of large corporations grew by 167% from 1989 to 2007, the average compensation of the typical worker grew by only 10% (Mishel, Bernstein, & Shierholz 2009). Another way of understanding this disparity is perhaps more striking. In 1965, the average compensation of CEOs was 24 times greater than that of the typical worker; however, in 2009, their compensation was 185 times greater than that of the typical worker (Economic Policy Institute 2012), and reached 281 times in 2024 (Gould, Bivens, & Kandra 2025).
This graph from the Economic Policy Institute displays the CEO-to-average-worker ratio, which reached a high of 380:1 in the year 2000 and was 281:1 in 2024.
Source: Gould, Bivens, & Kandra 2025, Economic Policy Institute
These figures reflect growing economic inequality in the US that we discussed in the Poverty and Economic Inequality chapter. We covered some causes of increasing economic inequality in that chapter, and will elaborate on another contributing factor here: Deunionization, the weakening of labor unions.
One of the most important developments accompanying industrialization in the nineteenth century was the rise of labor unions and their negotiation with management over wages and working conditions (Dubofsky & Dulles 2010). Beforehand, the pay that workers received was quite low, and the conditions in which they worked were often miserable. The typical employee worked at least ten hours a day for six or seven days a week, with almost no overtime pay and no paid vacations or holidays. To improve wages and working conditions, many labor unions were founded after the Civil War, only to meet determined opposition from companies, the government, and the courts. Companies told each other which workers were suspected of being union members, and these workers were then prevented from getting jobs. Strikers were often arrested for violating laws prohibiting strikes. When juries began finding them not guilty, employers turned to asking judges for injunctions that prohibited strikes. Workers who then went on strike were held in contempt of court by the judge as juries were kept out of the process.
From the 1870s through the 1930s, labor unions fought companies over issues such as low wages and substandard working conditions.
DonkeyHotey – together We Bargain – CC BY 2.0
Labor strife also marked the Great Depression, when masses of people blamed business leaders for their economic plight. Huge sit-ins and other labor protests occurred at auto plants in Detroit, Michigan. In response, the Congress passed several laws that gave workers a minimum wage, the right to join unions, a maximum-hour workweek, and other rights that US workers may now take for granted.
Despite these significant wins for workers, today labor unions have lost some of their influence, especially as postindustrialization has supplanted the industrial economy and as the US has lost much of its manufacturing base. Half a century ago, about one-fourth of all private-sector nonagricultural workers belonged to labor unions. By 1985 this figure had dropped to 14.6%, and it stands for lower today (Hirsch & Macpherson 2011). In response, labor unions have intensified their efforts to increase their membership, only to find that US labor laws are filled with loopholes that allow companies to prevent their workers from forming a union. For example, after a company’s workers vote to join a union, companies can appeal the vote, and it can take several years for courts to order the company to recognize the union. In the meantime, the low wages, substandard working conditions, and other concerns are allowed to continue.
Just as the growth of unions during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries helped to raise workers’ wages, the decline of unions has lowered wages. Two reasons explain this decline. First, union workers earn about 14% more than nonunion workers (controlling for experience, education, occupation, and other factors), a phenomenon known as the union wage premium. Because fewer workers are now in unions, they are less likely to benefit from this premium. Second, as unions have declined, there has been less pressure on nonunion employers to raise their wages to match union wages (Mishel et al. 2009).
Because the union wage premium is greater for Black and Latino workers than for white workers, the wage decline caused by the decline of unions has probably been steeper for those two groups than for white workers. It is also true that union workers are more likely than nonunion workers to be covered by employer-paid health insurance and also to have lower health premiums and deductibles. The decline of unions has thus meant that the average worker today is less likely to have employer-paid health insurance and, if they do, more likely to have higher premiums and deductibles.
Unemployment
Unemployment refers to the state of not currently having a job but looking for a job, which differs from not being in the labor force at all. Unemployment is a fact of life, as there are people who are laid off or fired, who voluntarily quit their jobs, or who just graduated school and are still looking for work. But most unemployed people are involuntarily unemployed, and for them the financial and psychological consequences can be devastating.
Unemployment rates rise and fall with the economy. Unemployment was relatively low at 4.1% at the end of 2024, amounting to 6.9 million people (BLS 2025e). In contrast, it was as high as 10.2% in fall 2009 amid the Great Recession (BLS 2012) and hit a high of 13% in the second quarter of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic (BLS 2021). Whether unemployment is high or low, it always varies by race, with Native American, Black, and Latino unemployment rates higher than the white and Asian rates. In 2023 when the overall employment rate was 3.6%, the highest rate was for American Indian and Alaska Native at 6.6% and lowest for Asian at 3.0%.
This chart displays unemployment rates in 2023 by race. The rate was highest for American Indian and Alaska Native at 6.6%, followed by Black at 5.5%, Latino at 4.6%, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander at 4.1%, White at 3.3%, and Asian at 3.0%. People of two or more races also had a high rate at 5.4%.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) 2024
Unemployment figures are misleading in an important respect, as they do not include people who are underemployed. Underemployment includes those who are working part-time but who want to work full-time – the so-called marginally attached, those who are working jobs that they are far overqualified for and don't match their skill set, and those who have stopped looking for work because they have not been able to find a job. Many economists think that underemployment provides a more accurate measure than unemployment of the number of people with employment problems.
For example, when the unemployment rate was 8.5% and 13 million people were officially unemployed in 2011, the underemployment rate was 15.2%, equal to 23.8 million people (Shierholz 2012). These figures are almost twice as high as the official unemployment figures. Considering the racial disparity in unemployment, 24.4% of Black workers and 22.3% of Latino workers were underemployed, compared to only 12.5% of white workers. Reflecting on the great amount of underemployment during the Great Recession, one economist commented, “When you combine the long-term unemployed with those who are dropping out and those who are working part time because they can’t find anything else, it is just far beyond anything we’ve seen in the job market since the 1930s” (Herbert 2010).
We have seen that unemployment rises when the economy falters and that race affects the probability of being unemployed. These two facts support the importance of the sociological imagination. As C. Wright Mills (1959) emphasized in his original discussion of this concept, unemployment is best viewed more as a public issue than as a personal trouble. When so many people are unemployed and when there is such striking evidence of higher unemployment rates among the groups of color who face the most obstacles to education and job training needed to obtain and keep a job, it is evident that high unemployment rates reflect a public issue, or a social problem.
Applying Social Research
Race and Employment
People of color are typically more likely than white people to be unemployed or underemployed, with the exception of Asian people. While structural obstacles to education help explain these higher rates for people of color, other kinds of problems are also apparent.
One problem is racial discrimination on the part of employers, regardless of how conscious employers are of their discriminatory behavior. We recounted a study by sociologist Devah Pager (2003), who had young white and Black men apply independently in person for various jobs in Milwaukee. These men wore the same type of clothing and reported similar levels of education and other qualifications. Some said they had a criminal record, while others said they had not committed any crimes. In striking evidence of racial discrimination in hiring, Black applicants without a criminal record were hired at the same low rate as white applicants with a criminal record.
Pager and sociologists Bruce Western and Bart Bonikowski also investigated racial discrimination in another field experiment in New York City (Pager, Bonikowski, & Western 2009). They had white, Black, and Latino 'testers,' all of them "well-spoken, clean-cut young men," apply in person to low-level service jobs (e.g., retail sales and delivery drivers) requiring no more than a high school education. All the testers had similar (hypothetical) qualifications. Almost one-third (31%) of white testers received a call back or job offer, compared to only 25.2% of Latino testers and 15.2% of Black testers. The researchers concluded that their findings "add to a large research program demonstrating the continuing contribution of discrimination to racial inequality in the post-civil rights era" (2009: 794).
Racial differences in access to the informal networks that are often so important in finding a job also contribute to the racial disparity in employment. In a study using data from a nationwide survey of a random sample of Americans, sociologist Steve McDonald and colleagues (2009) found that people of color and women are less likely than white men to receive informal word of vacant, high-level supervisory positions.
As these and other studies indicate, research by sociologists and other social scientists reveals that race and ethnicity continue to make a difference in employment prospects for Americans. This body of research reveals clear evidence of discrimination, conscious or unconscious, in hiring and also of racial differences in access to the informal networks that are often so important for hiring. By uncovering this evidence, these studies underscore the need to address discrimination, access to informal networks, and other factors that contribute to racial and ethnic disparities in employment.
Consequences of Unemployment
Sociologists, psychologists, and other scholars have documented the social and emotional consequences of unemployment. The effects of unemployment go far beyond the loss of money. Survey data provide harsh evidence of the social and psychological effects of being unemployed. The Pew Research Center issued a report based on a survey of 810 adults who were currently unemployed or had been unemployed during the Great Recession and 1,093 people who had never been unemployed during the recession (Morin & Kochhar 2010). The report’s title, Lost Income, Lost Friends—and Loss of Self-Respect, summarized its major findings.
Long-term unemployment often causes various social and psychological difficulties.
Image courtesy of Michael Raphael at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, www.photolibrary.fema.gov/photolibrary/photo_details.do?id=29783
Of those who had been unemployed for at least six months (long-term unemployment), 44% said that the recession had caused “major changes” in their lives, versus only 20% of those who had never been unemployed. More than half of the long-term unemployed said their family income had declined, and more than 40% said that their family relations had been strained and that they had lost contact with close friends. In another finding, 38% said they had “lost some self-respect” from being unemployed.
One-third said that they were finding it difficult to pay their rent or mortgage, compared to only 16% of those who had never been unemployed during the recession. Half had borrowed money from family or friends to pay bills, versus only 18% of the never unemployed. Of all the people who had been unemployed, almost half had experienced sleep difficulties, and 5% had experienced drug or alcohol problems. All these numbers paint a distressing picture of the social and psychological impact of unemployment.
Unemployment also has a significant impact on children with unemployed parents. The box below discusses this impact.
Children and Our Future
The Hidden Casualties of Unemployment
As unemployment soared in the wake of the Great Recession that began in 2007, many more children lived in a household where a parent had become unemployed. By early 2010, 11% of American children, or 8.1 million children overall, had an unemployed parent. Just slightly more than two years earlier, this number had been much smaller, 4.8 million. In just over two years, then, the number of children with an unemployed parent grew by two-thirds.
After their parents became unemployed, these children began to suffer various psychological effects. One news report summarized this psychological impact as follows: “For many families across the country, the greatest damage inflicted by this recession has not necessarily been financial, but emotional and psychological. Children, especially, have become hidden casualties, often absorbing more than their parents are fully aware of. Several academic studies have linked parental job loss—especially that of fathers—to adverse impacts in areas like school performance and self-esteem.”
The emotional and psychological effects for children occur for at least two reasons. First, unemployed parents tend to experience extra stress and to become withdrawn. Second, married parents and unmarried partners often experience interpersonal conflict when one of them becomes unemployed. Both of these consequences of unemployment in turn affect children in a household where at least one parent is unemployed.
Children have suffered in other ways from the rise in unemployment. More children have become homeless as their households fell into poverty. In addition, children of an unemployed parent are more likely to repeat a grade or, if they are adolescents, to drop out of school. Child abuse has probably also increased in families where a parent became unemployed.
In view of all these consequences for the children of the unemployed, the United States should do everything possible to put parents and other adults back to work and to help the children of unemployed parents deal with the devastating effects of the Great Recession.
Sources: Lovell & Isaacs 2010; Luo 2009
Crime, Violence, and Injury in the Workplace
An unfortunate fact about work in the US is that it involves crime, violence, and injury, which are the last problems of work and economy that we will examine. We will discuss a few examples of these, though we have already discussed some in the Crime chapter such as white-collar crime and violent crime.
Employee Theft
Employee theft takes two forms: Pilferage and embezzlement. Pilferage involves the stealing of goods, while embezzlement involves the stealing of money in its various dimensions (cash, electronic transactions, etc). Whichever form it takes, employee theft is so common that is has been called a “widespread, pervasive, and costly form of crime” (Langton, Piquero, & Hollinger 2006: 539). It is estimated that about 75% of employees steal at least once from their employers (National Retail Federation 2007) and that the cost of employee theft is $18 billion annually (Purdy 2021).
Employee theft occurs for many reasons, but a common reason is worker dissatisfaction with various aspects of their job. They may feel that their wages or salaries are too low (and they very well may be), they may feel they have been treated unfairly by their employer, and so forth. As the estimates of the amount of employee theft suggest, this form of theft is not condemned by many people, and, indeed, many workplaces have informal norms that approve of certain forms of theft – for example, it is okay to steal inexpensive objects (depending on the workplace) such as utensils, food, pencils and pens, or toilet paper. Not surprisingly, embezzlement is often more costly to an employer than pilferage; although it can involve just a few dollars from a cash register, it can also involve hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars acquired through more sophisticated means.
When we think of employee theft, we probably usually think of theft by blue-collar or lower white-collar employees. However, physicians, attorneys, and other professionals also steal from their patients/clients or from the government, even if their form of theft is often much more complex and sophisticated than what the term “employee theft” may usually imply. Attorneys may bill their clients for work that was never done, and physicians may bill Medicare or private insurance for patients they never saw or for procedures that were never performed. We call this form of employee theft professional fraud. Fraud by physicians and other health-care professionals (including nursing homes and medical testing laboratories) is thought to amount to $100 billion every year (Rosoff et al. 2010), a figure that far exceeds the $18 billion in conventional employee theft.
Workplace Violence and Injury
Violence and injury in the workplace are also concerns. In January 2012, a lumber company employee in North Carolina entered the company’s warehouse armed with a twelve-gauge shotgun. He shot and killed three coworkers and critically wounded another coworker. He then returned home, shot himself in the head, and later died at a hospital. A news report described the gunman as a “disgruntled” employee (Muskal 2012).
Many people die or are injured by acts of violence at their workplaces every year in the United States. In 2008, 517 people were slain at their workplaces, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. As disturbing as this number was, it represented a sharp drop from the numbers that prevailed a decade earlier, when 1,080 workplace homicides occurred in 1994. From 2003 through 2008, an average of 497 workplace homicides occurred every year (Needleman 2010). More recently, 392 US workers died from workplace homicide in 2020, and 20,050 workers in private industries experienced trauma from nonfatal workplace violence that year (CDC 2024b).
In terms of who is involved and the reasons for their involvement, three kinds of workplace homicides are the most common. The first and by far the most common type is homicide as the result of robbery. This category includes the many store clerks, gas station attendants, taxi drivers, and other employees who are slain during a robbery, as well as police who are killed as they try to stop a robbery or apprehend the offender. The second category is homicide committed as an act of domestic violence; in this type, the offender (almost always a man), seeks out his women partner or ex-partner at her workplace and kills her. The third category involves disgruntled workers, such as the North Carolina lumber employee just discussed, who kill one or more people at their workplace whom they blame for problems the killers have been having. Although this type of homicide is the type that the phrase “workplace violence” or “workplace killings” usually brings to mind, it is actually the least common of the three types listed here (Fox 2010).
Additionally, there were 2,569,000 nonfatal injuries and illnesses in private industry in 2023, and 5,283 fatal work-related injuries in all sectors (BLS n.d.). Though all workers could experience workplace injury, older workers are more likely to have the injury result in death. Although older workers face fewer injuries overall than younger workers, the injuries they do experience are far more likely to be fatal.
This chart from the CDC displays how older workers are more likely to be victims of fatal workplace injuries despite being less likely to experience workplace injuries overall.
Source: CDC 2024a
Certain types of work such as sweatshop labor, which is characterized by unsafe working conditions, long hours, low wages, and few protections, have a high risk of nonfatal and fatal injury. Injuries from this form of labor include being maimed by heavy machinery in factories or on agricultural farms. In fact, children working in factories have been severely injured from operating or cleaning machinery (Dreier 2023). When children perform labor such as this that disrupts their cognitive or physical development or educational trajectory, it is called child labor. Sweatshop labor involves other health concerns such as exposure to toxic chemicals or extreme heat.
Finally, workplace accidents may result in large-scale injury and fatalities, numbering casualties in the dozens or hundreds. Though they haven't updated the list since 2011, the program American Experience of PBS published a list of the deadliest workplace accidents, dating back to 1860.
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Social problems of work and economy are many, and we cannot cover them all here. Rather, the problems discussed above related to employment discrimination; jobs, wages, and unions; unemployment; and workplace crime, violence, and injury are examples of problems related to work and economy. The good news is that many of these problems may be addressed with stronger laws or policies, better employer and government decisions, and the continuation of individual agency and collective action particulalry in the form of social movements such as the labor movement. We turn to examples of these strategies next.
