The Workplace Exploitation Scale (Wex-5)

The scientific process involved in the development of the scale has been published as an article in the Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health (Taylor and Francis), a Web of Science and Scopus indexed journal. This scale has been developed using both EFA and CFA and is both valid and reliable. Relevance of the scale- Today, the reality of the exploitation of workers has gained significant attention in mainstream media as well as on social media. We hear stories of victims at times committing suicide due to the psychological trauma caused due to workplace exploitation. In this regard, one of the existing gaps that caught my attention was the paucity of a scientifically developed and validated tool to measure this construct which would enable other researchers to carry out studies on this issue. This motivated me and my co-authors to work on developing this scale using advanced statistical procedures. The scale (Wex-5) is publicly available for free and can be used by researchers across multiple disciplines. You can find it under the data availability statement. No permissions are required to use the scale for research. We hope that this scale will motivate researchers to examine the issue of workplace exploitation closely, conduct studies using this tool, and help bring out policy changes for the betterment of workers globally. Please cite the scale as : Krishnan, S. R. G., Gupta, S., Pereira, N. G., Sethuramalingam, V., Potter, A., Butola, S., Das, N. J., & Sathia, S. (2025). A scale to measure workplace exploitation (Wex-5). Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, 0(0), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/15555240.2025.2539155