Financial wellness is a trend that redefines financial status as a form of health that can be improved by healthier habits, choices, and psychology. The popularity of financial wellness reflects the medicalization of inequity, which conceptualizes disparities in power, capital, and status as individual or community health issues to be addressed by insights and practices appropriated from public health and medicine.

Building on a broader push for employers to play an increasing role in public health, workplaces have become targets of financial wellness initiatives. While these programs are touted as supporting employee well-being and addressing economic inequality, treating financial status as a health issue can pose significant risks to workers and society. Drawing from 50 interviews with individuals working in financial reform, labor organizing, law, and public health, Tamara K. Nopper’s report Medicalizing Inequity: The Risks of Financial Wellness for Workers focuses on how such programs encourage workers to monitor their financial wellness while subjecting them to vast amounts of data collection.

Nopper explores how financial wellness is shaping employee benefits and how workers are increasingly offered more financial services, money management tools, and payment options as part of workplace wellness — and how, in the process, they are targeted for financial health surveillance, which applies the logic of public health surveillance to economic behaviors and money. This report details how workers may become indebted to bosses, have more of their financial lives and other personal information known and documented by employers, and potentially have financial wellness data used against them. Examining the risks that financial wellness may pose to workers and society, this report asks: Who ultimately benefits from framing financial status as a matter of health?