Kaitlyn Henderson is a senior researcher and staff elected board member at Oxfam America. Dr. Henderson’s work focuses on labor policies and workers’ rights within the United States. She is the lead researcher and author of Oxfam’s Best States to Work Index, a look at how states treat workers and working families in the US. This index captures 27 policies across three themes – wages, worker protections, and rights to organize – and includes all 50 states plus Washington, DC and Puerto Rico. There were special editions of the index released in 2020 focused on COVID and starting in 2021 a supplemental index focused on working women. Dr. Henderson has led research on low wage workers, including a 2024 report and interactive map providing a demographic picture of low wage earners in the US, as well as a global index comparing US labor policies to economic peer nations. Beyond labor, her work focuses on building a care economy and ways to tackle widening economic inequality. Dr. Henderson writes regularly for Oxfam America’s Politics of Poverty Blog.