Summary

This report summarizes findings from analysis of the 2008 Unregulated Work Survey of workers in the low-wage labor market and their experiences with work-related injuries. The survey was conducted with 4,387 adult workers employed in low-wage jobs in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago and originally sought to estimate the prevalence of employment and labor law violations across the three cities. The current analysis focuses on data from a subset of 613 respondents who indicated they had experienced one or more serious injuries on the job in the three years prior to the survey. The data were used to identify patterns of work-related injury and common injury experiences of workers in the low-wage labor market, including barriers to workers’ compensation. We also sought to identify similarities and differences between the experiences of injured low-wage workers in Los Angeles versus the other two study cities.