Interagency Coordination on Labor Regulation (original) (raw)
Related papers
2004
Implementation of workplace policies--whether through enforcement of laws or administration of programs--raises the question of the interaction between institutions created to carry out laws and the activities of workplace based agents that directly (e.g. unions) or indirectly (e.g. insurance companies) represent the interests of workers. This paper argues that there are two distinctive roles required for agents in the implementation of workplace policies. First, the agent must somehow help solve the public goods problem inherent in workplace regulation. Second, the agent must be able to reduce the marginal cost of exercising rights conferred to workers that are an important feature of most regulatory programs. This article examines these issues in regard to implementing workplace policies in the U.S. and analyzes the comparative effectiveness of different workplace agents-from labor unions to alternative dispute resolution systems-in fulfilling these roles.
Journal of Industrial Relations, 2018
Low-wage work in the US and many other places continues to be characterized by precarious and dangerous conditions, vulnerable immigrant workforces, and problems of misclassification and wage theft. Several recent initiatives are seeking to demonstrate that conditions can be greatly improved even when governments lack the capacity to broadly enforce the law on the books. In co-enforcement approaches, for instance, municipal governments are enlisting worker and community organizations to improve enforcement of wage and hour laws. Similarly, some private regulatory initiatives are taking ‘worker-driven’ approaches that favor enforcement by locally trusted organizations rather than unreliable ‘checklist auditing’. In this article, we examine one exemplary case of each approach in the US – namely, the Seattle Office of Labor Standards and the Fair Food Program in Florida. Comparing these initiatives reveals a convergence on civil society linkages, locally grounded monitoring capacities,...
Politics & Society, 2017
Over the last decade, cities, counties, and states across the United States have enacted higher minimum wages, paid sick leave and family leave, domestic worker protections, wage theft laws, “Ban the Box” removal of questions about conviction history from job applications, and fair scheduling laws. Nevertheless, vulnerable workers still do not trust government to come forward and report labor law violations. The article argues that while increasing the size of the labor inspectorate and engaging in strategic enforcement are necessary, they are not sufficient. It argues that co-enforcement, in which government partners with organizations that have industry expertise and relationships with vulnerable workers, has the potential to manage the shifting and decentralized structures of twenty-first-century production, which were explicitly designed to evade twentieth-century laws and enforcement capabilities. The article aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the role of organiza...
The Disunited States of America: Employment Relations Systems in Conflict
The disunited states of America : employment relations systems in conflict : introduction / David Jacobs -- The persistent effects of slavery in the United States : culture, legal policy, and the decline of American labor unions / Raymond L. Hogler -- Labor in the world of cynical conservative federalism / Nathan Newman -- Worker centers as an inflection point? : an introduction and an interview with Kimi Lee / Peggy Kahn and Kimi Lee -- Beyond the Family and Medical Leave Act : the pluralization of leave rights from below / Peggy Kahn -- Labor and class in a neo-mercantile context : a view from the U.S. Midwest / Roland Zullo -- Differences in the "inclusiveness" of state labor market institutions / John Schmitt -- Health insurance coverage of low-income workers in the Untied States / Sara R. Collins and Tracy Garber -- Conclusions : reconstituting laborist capitalism / David Jacobs.
2021
President Biden’s recent Executive Order on Promoting Competition brought much-needed attention to labor market concentration, employer collusion, and abusive employment contracts that suppress wages and diminish labor’s share of national income. But while the Order recognized the necessity of a “whole-of-government” approach to employers’ monopsony power over workers, it could go further to more fully tackle the sources of that power and mobilize the collective resources of government to combat them
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
The crises of wage theft and industrial accidents in low-wage America reflect erosion of the social contract but they also reflect a crisis in labour standards enforcement. This article draws upon archival material, case studies, and interviews to make the case for tripartism-an enforcement regime that partners workers' organizations with government inspectors to patrol workers' industries and labour markets for unfair competition. It extends to the federal level previous work in which Jennifer Gordon and i have documented dynamic contemporary examples of tripartism at the state and local levels. The article explores historical precedents for tripartist collaboration on the federal level at the Department of Labor (DOL) in the Wage and Hour Division and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It then considers several tripartist initiatives at the DOL under the Obama administration, the legal obstacles that purportedly stand in the way of more robust approaches, and some potential solutions. The article concludes with an explanation of why formalizing partnerships matters.
Working in America: Blueprint for the New Labor Market
The Journal of Socio-Economics, 2004
This book is the product of an interdisciplinary collaboration by four well-regarded scholars with joint interests in labor markets and employment policy. Their purpose is to examine the performance of American labor markets in the 1990s, identify problem areas, and recommend policy initiatives and institutional solutions to these problems. Prior to putting ink on paper, the authors formed a joint task force composed of numerous academics, business people, union leaders, and government officials. Together, they spent three years assembling facts, experiences, and recommendations through a grounded, inductive approach to research. The conclusion of the authors is that the 1990s was a period of good news/bad news for American workers. Overall, the decade was one of prosperity, marked by record job creation, rising real wages, and steady fall in the unemployment rate. But under the surface were several troubling developments that have not, the authors claim, received adequate public recognition, and policy attention. Chief among these are the rise in earnings inequality, longer work hours, greater job insecurity, work-family conflicts, and lack of employee voice in the workplace. Most adversely affected are workers at the bottom of the labor market, although many millions of others on all rungs of the job ladder suffer from one or more of these problems. The first, second, and third chapters of the book examine these trends and diagnose their causes and consequences. The central conclusion (p. 5) is that the American labor market is suffering from "a basic mismatch between the institutional structure and the reality of today's world of work." One source of the mismatch is the changing nature of the employment relationship. The old employment relationship, characterized in the core sector by long-tenure jobs, extensive internal labor markets, union representation, and a male breadwinner, has given way to a model featuring more market sensitive employment conditions, greater movement of workers among employers, a marked decline in union representation, and far more demographically diverse workforce. The other source of the mismatch is that the present institutional structure of the American labor market-such as protective labor and social insurance laws, legislation governing union organizing and collective bargaining, and the employer-centered benefits system-is largely inherited from the New Deal of the 1930s and has changed only incrementally in the intervening six decades.
The Great Recession and Economic Security: Democratizing the Workplace
2014
AbstractThis article is an introduction to this symposium. How does a great nation avoid another Great Recession or worse? In today's macroeconomic heated debate, conducted in a hyper political context, the answer is either a pure capitalist system with minimal government or a market system with strong government that intervenes with large programs and regulations of capitalist markets. This introduction sets-up the case for the latter.Introduction"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind" (Smith 1776, p. 448). Even the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, understood the dangers of greed and its potential to destroy peoples lives (Rae, 1895). This is why Smith, and the progressive social policies that he supported, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and The Wealth of Nations (1776), must be understood within the context of his economic theories. In fact, Smith'...