Session: Employer Benefits and the Financial Wellbeing of Workers during COVID-19 (Society for Social Work and Research 27th Annual Conference - Social Work Science and Complex Problems: Battling Inequities + Building Solutions)

Employer benefits comprise 31% of total employee compensation and play an important, albeit largely unexamined, role in promoting the financial wellbeing of workers and their families. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the "Great Resignation" has seen record numbers of workers leave their jobs and employers scrambling to figure out how to retain workers. In healthcare alone, nearly a fifth of workers have left their jobs. The vulnerability of essential workers and the need to improve benefits such as making paid leave mandatory has come to light during the pandemic. We examine access to benefits and workers' financial wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first paper, Paid Leave Policy and Shocks to Financial Strains during COVID-19 uses longitudinal data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. households (N=5,500) to examine the effects of health, employment, and caregiving disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic on financial strain as moderated by access to paid sick and/or family leave employer benefits. Families experiencing one or more disruptions early in the pandemic had greater financial strain several months later, yet access to paid leave decreased this risk dramatically.

The second paper, COVID-19 Related Job Loss and Early Withdrawals from Retirement Accounts: Mediation by Financial Hardships and Subjective Financial Well-being found that propensity score-adjusted pandemic job loss among a nationally representative sample of U.S. households (N=4,765) predicted retirement plan withdrawals as partially mediated by financial hardships and subjective financial well-being. However, financial literacy did not moderate these relationships.

The third paper, Financial Help for Hotel Workers during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Timing is Everything describes a pandemic emergency financial assistance program for hotel workers in New Orleans. Workers' food insecurity and problems paying bills dropped significantly after receiving assistance. Despite having similar jobs, Black workers had significantly higher pre-assistance food insecurity and bill problems and experienced significantly greater post-assistance reductions in these difficulties.

The fourth paper, Benefits and Financial Wellbeing Among Frontline Healthcare Workers, examines access to and use of an array of workplace benefits among a sample of 2,321 frontline healthcare workers and how benefits relate to workers' financial wellbeing. The study finds that workers in facility-based settings like hospitals and those with a college degree had much greater access to benefits compared to workers in home health and private duty settings and workers without a college degree. Benefits access is important as it predicts lower rates of several types of financial hardship.

Together, these four papers illustrate just how important workplace benefits are to the financial wellbeing of workers and their families as a matter of economic justice and racial equity - a topic largely unexplored in prior research. Generating evidence about the importance of workplace benefits is critical for influencing policy discourse around improving pay, benefits, and work conditions - particularly among Black workers, addressing workforce shortages such as in healthcare, and considering an expanded public social safety net to fulfill needs left unmet by the labor market.