The United States ranks near-bottom globally on worker-protection regulation.

Evidence

The United States stands today as one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world. The richest 1 percent of Americans owns 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (those eighteen to sixty-five) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD, an international consortium of democratic countries with market-based economies, scores nations along a number of economic indicators, such as how countries regulate temporary work arrangements and how easy it is to terminate employees. Scores in these categories run from 5 (“very strict”) to 1 (“very loose”). When it comes to regulations on temporary workers, Brazil scores 4.1 and Thailand 3.7, signaling that in those countries, workers enjoy a range of toothy protections; farther down the list are Norway (3.4), India (2.5), and Japan (1.3). The United States scores 0.3, tied for second-to-last place with Malaysia. What about how easy it is to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of seventy-one nations, with a score of 0.5. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 531

Categorization

• QUESTION: The OECD indicators are part of the specific contested empirical claims the reader wants to track — how do historians and critics treat cross-national OECD scores as evidence?