EXPRESS: Spillover Benefits of Workplace Fairness on Manufacturing Waste

A growing body of work has examined how workplace policies promoting fair treatment influence workplace culture and the work environment. Much less is known about whether such policies spill over to facility-level environmental outcomes in manufacturing. In this study, we exploit the staggered adoption of Employment Non-Discrimination Acts (ENDAs) across different states in the United States to examine whether ENDAs reduce process waste generated at manufacturing facilities. Our results show that manufacturing facilities that come under the purview of ENDAs exhibit significant reductions in process waste. This effect operates through two distinct pathways: an operational pathway based on the state where the manufacturing facility is located and a management pathway based on the state where the parent firm of the manufacturing facility is headquartered. Our findings indicate that workplace fairness protections can generate measurable environmental improvements in manufacturing by enabling prevention-oriented changes that reduce process waste.