Abstract

Worker misclassification is one of the most pervasive and harmful civil justice problems in the U.S. The inaccurate and illegal categorization of workers as independent contractors costs U.S. workers billions of dollars annually in overtime pay and health benefits—a problem that has become even more pervasive with the expansion of the gig economy.

Yet, worker misclassification is only one dimension of the broader “access to justice crisis” in the United States—the unsolved legal problems and unmet legal needs that touch most people’s lives and livelihoods at many points, but especially impact low-income people and people of color. These legal issues range from consumer overbilling and insurance disputes to unsafe housing conditions and benefits denials. And just like worker misclassification, the onus for redress of these problems usually falls to the people experiencing them. For decades, legal scholars assumed that the main cause of the access to justice crisis was a deficit of affordable lawyers. In more recent years, that hypothesis has been disproven, and a chief barrier turns out to be the simple fact that people do not think about most common legal problems as “legal” in nature. The next step, then, can seem obvious: raise legal awareness. Indeed, “know-your-rights” campaigns and legal self-help tools are predicated on the assumption that knowledge leads to power. But is legal knowledge enough to spur legal action?

To test this crucial question, we leverage an original, nationally representative dataset of over three thousand people living in the U.S. We use the context of worker misclassification to experimentally test how legal knowledge shapes the actions that people say they would take to solve a problem. We find that although legal knowledge increases legal action, its effects are limited: Even when they knew they had been treated illegally, only one in four respondents would consider pursuing legal help.

Yet legal knowledge also catalyzes problem-solving in an unexpected way: It empowers people to consider more varied solutions to their own misclassification. Specifically, legal knowledge reduces two key cognitive and affective barriers to action: self-blame and futility. We explain these findings’ implications for ending worker misclassification and helping solve the access to justice crisis.

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