Enforcing Labor Standards in Partnership with Civil Society: Can Co-enforcement Succeed Where the State Alone Has Failed?

Abstract

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 organizations in enforcement and the circumstances in which their effectiveness can be maximized. It sets forth a set of scope conditions and mechanisms and examines empirical cases of co-enforcement in Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The main findings are that co-enforcement is most enduring when (1) government agencies and worker organizations recognize each other’s unique capacities, rather than attempt to substitute for one another (2); the effort focuses on a specific industry; and (3) the collaboration receives strong political support. Sustaining the impacts of co-enforcement is found to require greater formalization of the partnership and funding streams.

Organizing the Precariat: The Fight to Build and Sustain Fast Food Worker Power

“…In response to this crisis in the labor movement many unions have begun to invest heavily in union revitalization strategies. Labor scholars have thoroughly analyzed these new strategies including new forms of social movement unionism (Adler et al, 2014;Levi, 2003), corporate campaigns (Turner and Cornfield, 2007), transnational unionism (Turner and Cornfield, 2007), and expanded community partnerships (Fine, 2006(Fine, , 2017Milkman, 2006;Milkman and Ott, 2014). Despite these innovations, however, private sector unionism has continued to decline.…”

“…In the social sciences, a vibrant literature has developed over the last 20 years to explore the growth of union revitalization efforts by UFCW, SEIU, and other unions aimed at organizing lowwage service sector workers employed in increasingly fissured workplaces (Bronfenbrenner, 1998;Fine, 2017;Levi, 2003;McAlevey, 2016;Milkman, 2006;Turner and Cornfield, 2007). This work has made important contributions to our understanding of how workers and worker justice organizations are striving to build and sustain collective power under intense opposition from state and employer actors.…”

The evolving nature of labour inspection, enforcement of employment rights and the regulatory reach of the state in Britain

“…The decollectivisation of industrial relations and weakened unions has, to varying extents, led to a greater emphasis on individual rights at work (Howell, 2005). Such developments are clearly visible in Australia, parts of the US and Canada, and Britain, but typically state resources devoted to enforcing such legal rights are inadequate (Clibborn and Wright, 2018; Dickens, 2014; Fine, 2017; Vosko et al., 2017). This article focuses on the changing nature of state enforcement of employment regulation in the context of Britain, a neoliberal, deregulatory, but in some ways increasingly interventionist, marketising political economy (see Clark, 2000; Gamble, 1988; Smith, 2009), particularly in terms of migrant groups, policing and social policy.…”

Uneven Development, Uneven Response: The Relentless Search for Meaningful Regulation of GVCs

“…To this point in the debate, our observations suggest that standards of equal treatment and fair wages and bargaining institutions that were once established in so‐called mature industrialized settings can no longer be taken for granted. Fine (2017: 359) gets to the crux of the matter when she says that the ‘decentralised structures of twenty‐first century production … [are] … explicitly designed to evade twentieth‐century laws and enforcement capabilities ’ (emphasis added). Thus in so‐called mature economies decades of ‘informalizing’, ‘modernizing’, ‘liberalizing’ and ‘flexibilising’ work has fissured employment relationships and dismantled labour's limited gains (Standing 2011; Weil 2014), while in the newly industrializing regions that dominate today's sites of production, formal employment relationships were rarely the norm.…”