Will markets provide humane jobs?

Legislation regulates the key amenities of our jobs—paid sick leave and holidays, working hours, safe working conditions, and workers’ compensation—and social movements have been essential to their adoption. Why do laws, rather than markets, secure these amenities? This paper studies one answer: adverse selection on productivity. When workers who value an amenity more are, on average, less productive, employers offering it attract a lower-productivity workforce. The resulting compensating wage differential exceeds the direct cost, leading to underprovision—even when the amenity is costless. I formalize this mechanism using a new notion of stochastic dependence, the correlation in expectation , which captures the severity of adverse selection. In a competitive screening equilibrium with heterogeneous jobs, underprovision intensifies with the strength of this correlation and, in extreme cases, the market unravels entirely. A universal mandate is optimal when the correlation is strong; when it is moderate, policies leveraging observable heterogeneity—such as flexibility rights for parents—outperform both the mandate and laissez-faire. The paper contrasts this productivity-based selection with the traditional cost-based selection studied in prior work and discusses the distinct empirical tests each implies.