COVID-19 and the Health and Wellbeing of Vulnerable Service Sector Workers across the Life Course - ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated intermingled health and economic shocks, which were felt deeply in the service-sector. The service-sector workforce is large, with nearly 20% of the U.S. workforce employed in retail, grocery, food service and related sectors, and is predominantly low-income and disproportionately women and people of color. These underserved workers bore the brunt of the pandemic’s unemployment shocks, with potentially dire consequences for health disparities across the life course. However, the economic crisis was met by a safety net expansion that could have buffered these negative health consequences. For those who remained employed, many found themselves on the frontlines of the pandemic, staffing grocery stores, pharmacies, and fulfillment centers. Adherence to coronavirus mitigation practices, including masking and staying home when sick, shaped the further course of the pandemic as workplaces such as grocery stores and pharmacies, remained essential, but risky, locations for the public, especially older community dwelling adults. Community-dwelling older service workers’ risks depended on both their own adherence to mitigation strategies as well as that of their younger co-workers and their customers. Yet, there are gaps in knowledge about how the safety net response buffered any negative health consequences of unemployment for these underserved workers and about how both public and company masking and paid sick leave policies shaped adherence to coronavirus mitigation practices in service sector establishments. To fill these gaps, we propose to draw on novel employer- employee linked data we collected as PIs of The Shift Project from 153,175 service-sector workers surveyed via 12 repeated cross-sections 2017-2023 and 42,734 person-interview observations in three longitudinal panel surveys 2019-2023. We propose to use these data to accomplish three key aims. First, we match the Shift Project micro-data with contextual data at multiple levels to construct time-place varying measures of safety net generosity, workplace risk environments, and company policies. We will prepare a harmonized and integrated data file that meets FAIR standards to encourage discovery and use of the data. Second, we use quasi- experimental methods to estimate the degree to which the safety net buffered negative effects of unemployment on the health of underserved workers. Third, we examine the effects of both public and company paid sick and masking policies on adherence to coronavirus mitigation practices and how these effects varied by age. In sum, we propose to harmonize, link, and disseminate innovative and timely large-scale data for a population subgroup that is underserved and vulnerable to COVID-19 shocks and in a setting of considerable relevance for public health, and to generate rigorous evidence on the buffering effect of the safety net on unemployment’s negative health effects and provide a novel view into the role of both public and company policies on adherence to mitigation practices in the workplace across the life course.
