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Abstract
This dissertation investigates how identity and status processes shape perceptions of fair wages among employees and employers in the United States. The first study examines how work identity verification in everyday workplace interaction shapes perceptions of distributive justice. Using original survey data from 530 employees, I find that symbolic workplace rewards—such as praise and recognition—elevate workers’ reward expectations rather than compensating for low pay. This challenges the widely held but untested assumption that passion-driven workers accept lower wages in exchange for high symbolic rewards. The second study uses these same data to explore whether the meaningfulness workers derive from their labor influences their responses to underpayment. The results reveal that meaningful labor (conceptualized as work identity prominence) serves as a psychological resource, buffering against the stress of underpayment and encouraging proactive responses to underpayment. In contrast, workers with less prominent work identities often feel the stress of underpayment more acutely and lack the resources and motivation to address unfair compensation. This study offers insights into the longstanding sociological inquiries about labor alienation and false consciousness by integrating core concepts of identity theory into the distributive justice framework. The third study shifts the focus to the employer side of perceptions and examines how their valuation of employees’ labor is influenced by status characteristics such as parenthood, gender, and leave-taking behavior. Using a conjoint experimental framework, I presented 870 real-life managers with fictitious employee profiles and analyzed their allocation of resources under different pay allocation rules. I find that employees who took leave in the past year are allocated raises approximately five percentage points lower than those who did not. Male managers were more likely than female managers to penalize leave-takers, and this penalty was intensified under the equity-based allocation rule, which links rewards to employee contributions. These findings highlight how practices framed as “fair” can perpetuate wage inequalities in social contexts where caregiving responsibilities are seen as individual issues.